Top Notch Association Management Software

Pros

We conducted an in-depth search and review to evaluate and select an Association Management Software (AMS) for our medium sized Association. There are a variety of reasons as to why we selected Fonteva, but to summarize here are our main reasons for selecting this product. 1. User Experience - The SF Lightning and Fonteva user experience for our end users is clean, simple, and easy to learn. The flexibility it offers is clear and concise to staff and will make their day to day work much more efficient. The system is highly configurable. 2. Community Groups - For a chapter based association like ours there will be many benefits to having this feature enabled. Chapters will have a variety of accessible features that our current AMS doesn't easily offer. 3. Integration - We use a wide variety of other software to run our organization. Salesforce and Fonteva's ability to connect with and integrate is simple and cost efficient. I highly recommend this a solution for your Association.

Cons

No negatives have been found yet. Of course, you'd love for it to be cheaper. Keep an eye on the size of your environment.

This is one of the best cloud based CRM out there for Membership Management.

The product is the best out there and has lot of options to customize. The staff is very supportive.

Pros

Software is easy to use and has lot of flexibility to tailor it as per the association needs.

Cons

The software has some room to improve. We have soem issues with Join process and renewal proceeses which can be improved. We also think finance side of Fonteva can be made better by improving schedule payment and lockbox functionality.

Fails to deliver on many promises. Lots sacrificed with little payoff.

Pros

I like that it's built on Saleforce CRM.

Cons

Implementation took much longer than anticipated and cost much more than forecasted. Elements of each part of the software fail to meet expectations. Core competencies such as invoicing, events set-up and managment, reporting, renewals, and eCommerce have been faulty. Support does not include support for the whole system. Their business model changed to using 3rd-party companies for setup, configuration, and advanced support. Upgrades are not free, and fees are not controlled and predictable. eCommerce engine fails to meet standards for SEO and basic eCommerce structure. Emails and integration with platforms either don't work or require excessive labor. Renewal and invoice automations can fail.

Six months in and loving it

Platform user - we use Fonteva for membership, events and e-commerce. We had a great planning and implementation process. The Fonteva team is honest, transparent, good partners (they tell you when you are trying to do something that doesn’t make sense in the system), and highly responsive.

Pros

Users can adapt functions in meaningful ways to fit their business needs without a lot of admin or other support

Cons

Reporting is not always intuitive and does often require admin support to do higher level reporting

Awesome Product!

Fonteva is a fabulous company but the Fontevans are are absolutely the greatest group of folks to work with!

Pros

Ease of use. We needed a product that would work with our business model which is unlike regular membership processes.

Cons

I think its a great product so far. I have no cons at this time!

A solid Salesforce based AMS

I would highly recommend this to any organization that is looking for an AMS. The ecosystem I mentioned above is the reason that will sure your organization is in the good hand and win in the long run.

Pros

The first and major reason is MemberNation by Fonteva is based on Salesforce, no chance it will be bought out or merged by another company. Second reason is Fonteva provides the bridge that makes it easy for nonprofit organization to use Salesforce to handles its membership, events, community and other functions of a modern organization. Third reason is Salesforce, like Apple, has its own AppExchange market (think it as Apple's App store), if there is any need not covered by Salesforce and Fonteva, there is probably an app for it in the AppExchange market. It is like you have three vendors working on you. This ecosystem is what makes Apple successful, and it will make Salesforce and your AMS successful. It will always be up to date. Last reason is there are a lot of vendors supporting integration with Salesforce/Fonteva.

Cons

Because AMS by its nature is one size fits all, so some more or less customization might be required. Fonteva has its own Join Process, it is flexible enough to match 95% of our existing membership process, we have deal with that 5% by changing our business process.

Great Team and a Platform With Endless Possibilities

We are a newer Fonteva customer and recently completed implementation. The team at Fonteva has kept us a priority throughout the whole process and has worked hard to find solutions for all of our business needs. Whenever I need their assistance, I know I can count on them. Now that we have gone live, we are looking forward to further enhancing our business with the many tools Fonteva Membership and Events has to offer.

Pros

Customizing and adapting the tools Fonteva has to offer gives us endless possibilities to streamline our business practices. More often than not, there is more than one way to meet our needs and it is just a matter of choosing the solution that works for us. I highly enjoyed working with the Fonteva team throughout our whole implementation process.

Cons

Nothing that we have found yet. We are a newer customer and so far every obstacle we have run into, Fonteva has assisted us in resolving.

Out of the Box Customer/Membership Management Works Fantastically

Pros

As a developer / technical consultant, when a customer is mentioning use cases involving "customer engagement" or "organize our member base" the first product that comes to mind is Fonteva. This product easily saves me months of development for a product that I couldn't even compete with. Just like you don't want to build your own cloud based CRM product, why build your own customer engagement Salesforce functionality, when someone already did it cheaper, better, less buggy, and with a technical support team. Choosing Fonteva's software is often a no-brainer for my team and my customers. As a bonus it fills in the (many) gaps left behind by the Service Cloud that Salesforce hasn't built yet. And it saves me on the budget for when customers have big ideas.

Cons

Custom development on top of Fonteva's platform can be difficult because in addition to the usual Salesforce quirks you have to take into account, you also need to learn and understand how Fonteva's platform is built.

The best Association Software

Fonteva help us making easier the reports of accounting through their Dashboard and Reports tool, with this module we can saw how we are spending our money and in which direction we have the put the organization for the best future of it.

Pros

With a big set of modules which can perform virtually everything you need to manage in the right way the customer support and the relationship with clients and costumers. Fonteva for Associations present a big range of features: members, events management, communities, estores, committees, accounting, online fundraising, mobile, education, collaboration, dashboard and reports. All these features allows you to perfom and set your bussines in the best possible way and get the most of every inversion or event you do.

Cons

Like happen with other Fonteva tools like Fonteva Events, with this tool you have to know every detail of you want to with your organzation and in which way do you want to improve, if you do not know what really you want you cannot tak advantange of this great tool for your organization.

Great Ease of Use and Configurable

We have worked with some great staff at Fonteva who have made my experience good so far.

Pros

The product is very user-friendly and easy to navigate. On top of free Salesforce Training, Fonteva has their own training which is great for Admins or average users. With that training it becomes easier to build and expand your environment.

Cons

Your Fonteva environment does require a lot of maintennce. So plan to have dedicated staff to take care of those weekly, monthly, or quarterly tasks.

Fonteva's latest platform provides major enhancements for association management

The most impressive thing about the MemberNation Platform is that it does an exceptional job of thinking through the business cases you'll encounter as an Association, and then streamlining those processes for you. Once you've completed the initial configuration working with the Fonteva team (special thanks in our case to Dagmar and Sundeep for their work) everything just works. There's a good amount of flexibility in terms of being able to customize and adapt a lot of features right out of the box, which makes our lives so much easier! They also have a great documentation center and training videos already created, which makes it easy for staff to get up to speed on the platform. There's really not much to dislike. The only thing that I'd recommend for folks, is to take advantage of the training they provide, and to make sure there is a member of your team truly taking responsibility for owning the project. As with anything, if there's no one from your team really invested in making sure the platform will be a success, it won't matter what software solution you use. There are several benefits for us in moving to Fonteva's product. From a member management perspective, we now have out of the box (and easy) auto renewal options, helping us to hopefully improve on what has historically been an aggressive churn rate on our membership base. It also has a ton of great features to help us enable our members to get access to our members only information easily, to manage their profiles, to purchase subscriptions and items in an easy store-like setup, and all in a platform that we can trust will work with our Salesforce setup without issue. You can evaluate a ton of member management platforms, but at the end of the day, I think Fonteva is doing an excellent job of making a robust platform, that continues to improve, and is really taking key member management issues into consideration as they develop their user-friendly platforms.

Pros

The most impressive thing about the MemberNation Platform is that it does an exceptional job of thinking through the business cases you'll encounter as an Association, and then streamlining those processes for you. Once you've completed the initial configuration working with the Fonteva team (special thanks in our case to Dagmar and Sundeep for their work) everything just works. There's a good amount of flexibility in terms of being able to customize and adapt a lot of features right out of the box, which makes our lives so much easier! They also have a great documentation center and training videos already created, which makes it easy for staff to get up to speed on the platform.

Cons

There's really not much to dislike. The only thing that I'd recommend for folks, is to take advantage of the training they provide, and to make sure there is a member of your team truly taking responsibility for owning the project. As with anything, if there's no one from your team really invested in making sure the platform will be a success, it won't matter what software solution you use.

Excellent Product & User-Friendly

Pros

Reporting is very intuitive and easy to use. It is easy to find member information and transactions in the system. We were able to configure the system to record member renewals consistent with our actual renewal process instead of changing the process to fit the system. Looking forward to upgrading to the new release this fall!

Cons

This software can do so much; it takes time to learn all the ways it can improve efficiencies and reporting.

Great for professional associations or societies, but not a good fit for trade associations

Pros

There's some really robust functionality right out of the box and Fonteva support will work with you initially in getting some features customized (there may be a fee). We tried to use this for a trade association using a lot of custom programming. It really just didn't work. It's really designed for individual membership and does not offer the parent child relationship.

Cons

It's really designed for individual membership and does not offer the parent child relationship. There are a number of gooes that provide various functionality, which is always a risk.

Fonteva for Associations that want to use Salesforce

Using an AMS based on SFDC allows us to integration much more easily with other vendors and systems. A huge win for our association

Pros

Our association has been using SFDC for about two years and we tried to integrate our old AMS with limited success. It made sense for us to move to a SFDC based AMS and now our AMS and SFDC data share the same database so no integration necessary! I highly recommend moving to Fonteva

Cons

We now have less control over our AMS as we are at the mercy of SFDC but the advantages outweigh the cons

Easy for a non-IT person to learn

Pros

I've been using Fonteva for about 5 months now. As a membership professional (non-IT person) I've found it fairly easy to pick-up. I love the ability to customize our join process (a luxury we've never had). The online training and customer support is always helpful as I try to learn new things. I'm enjoying all the features of the reports and dashboards to help better utilize our data. This is much better than our previous AMS!

Cons

With any software, I think there is a learning curve and I look forward to continuing to learn and find out how we can be more efficient and utilize all the ins and outs of this software.

Product meets our business needs with out of the box functionality

Great app built on Salesforce. Streamlined manual processes.

Pros

MemberNation (MN) has proven to be an excellent AMS. The product is customizable, which allows Admins to configure the system based on their origination's needs. MN has allowed us to streamline processes that were once done manually. The Fonteva team worked diligently to help us reach our target go-live date. Our Business Analyst was crucial to the project's success, as he used his expertise to understand our business processes and guide our internal team on configuring MN.

Cons

Salesforce does have limitations on editing their managed packages which limits the Admin on certain configurations. However, we have found a work around solution for each of these limitations.

Amazing AMS with expandability due to the Salesforce platfom

A solid platform for associations to manage and improve their processes from.

Pros

Solid well laid out financials to rival the best finance systems Extebsability of all objects - ability to add fields and formulas

Cons

Member portal is not quite as flexible as a full CMS No VAT inclusive pricing Not completely written in lightning yet

Good Experience powerfull software

Pros

Flexibility on creating solutions. The software is very user friendly. Allowed us to setup a portal for our members so that they could login and manage their accounts without calling our membership department. Also like the mobile app. I can login to the software from my phone and check or trouble shoot many problems remotely

Cons

View screens need ability to search in specific object. For example I created a screen for all of our batches. As the object grows it becomes increasingly difficult to locate a batch. The alpha search by letters is cool but all of my batches begin with the same name

Association management out of the box!

10/10 so far!

Pros

Fonteva extends an already great product, Salesforce, in ways that make sense to me. Membership management is build in, as well as a store, and very robust event builder. Honestly, Fonteva is my first experience with Salesforce so I can't contrast it with vanilla SF that well. What I CAN compare it to is Dynamics, which is very clunky in my opinion. My role is mostly administration so what concerns me is primarily the user management, which is much easier to get along with on SF/Fonteva. Something I've noticed is a lot of the features we've had to develop in-house for dynamics are already present in Fonteva. I imagine this is going to give us more time to concentrate on our data rather than redeveloping the wheel. Our support from Fonteva has been top notch. I've attended their admin training, which more or less walked us through a simple SF implementation and Fonteva setup. The class was fast paced but very easy to follow. Our instructor was knowledgeable and slowed down when necessary to answer questions thoroughly.

Cons

I can't think of a single detractor. Maybe a year or so after we've fully implemented Fonteva I can update this review.

MemberNation Review

Pros

Fonteva is great for associations using Salesforce, or want to get Salesforce. This integrated system combines all our needs into one place. It also keeps us linked to other vendors, systems, etc, so everything is in touch with one another. For a more fluid process, this is highly recommended.

Cons

It can be a bit limiting in design, as customizations can be a bit tricky to accomplish.

Choosing Fonteva was a very smart decision for my Association

We recently upgraded our AMS, CMS and LMS. We decided on Fonteva for our AMS. From the very first meeting with my Fonteva team I knew that I was in good hands. We worked together, as a team, to develop a system that would work well with our Association. My project manager and she was a joy to work with. I worked closely with rep in both learning MemberNation and in developing the product to suit our needs. I always felt that she had my interest at heart and always knew that she was thinking of ways to resolve my issues in a cost effective, well thought out, way. I completely trust the relationship I have with my Fonteva team. We recently went LIVE and the product is working out great for us. It is so powerful...there is still a lot that I have to learn. They have tons of training available and they encourage you to us the Community to help resolve any issues...thus saving money. I look forward to the new releases and seeing how much this platform can do! A very smart decision when we chose Fonteva!

Pros

As it sits on the SalesForce platform the software is very powerful and adaptable.

Membership

NA

Pros

The user friendly experience... and the ability to explain to our members functionality

Cons

Time to lean capability and bandwidth we have to teach users in our office

So far, so great

As you know, migrating to a new membership database is tough! We were excited about the features and usability of MemberNation but nervous about the switch. Fonteva put two very capable data experts on the job, gave us access to applications, finance and product experts and walked us through a complicated SSO jungle. It was hard work but provided great reward. The training we received helped us to hit the ground running. Our PM followed through with the successful go live he promised. Best part? We got the control, functionality and scalability we wanted built on a best of breed platform. Every configuration is different as are org. needs and member constituency. But I think if you come to the table ready to roll up your sleeves, do the work and make your needs and requests known, you'll be pleased with the outcome. I'm looking forward to many years with the product and the talented folks at Fonteva.

Pros

I like the flexibility and the ability to make changes/ configurations as needed with or without assistance from Fonteva.

Cons

The report writer

Simple!

Pros

Easy to use and very user friendly. Being able to login on any device makes handingly urgent membership issues effortless.

Cons

We are starting to discover things the system can do that we didn't anticipate. Our new member application needs updating and we are unable (currently) to make the updates from the back end.

End to End

When shopping for an end to end solution, Member Nation has you covered. Built first as a robust accounting platform in your Salesforce instance, Fonteva then incorporates a vast majority of what is needed to operate most businesses through their variety of modules. I designed the Streams Ministries web site, which uses every module Fonteva offers, and I am pleased to say that the experience was a great one. I would encourage others to investigate how Fonteva's Member Nation can benefit your organization. Logan Smith, Mortar Free

Pros

End to end solution. Robust Accounting system that works well with all other aspects of the system. Components can be used and re-used throughout your visualforce pages. and much more...

Fonteva for Associations Review

Pros

Ease of use. Flexibilty for users and easy to navigate.

Cons

Contact bugs and custom fields that break during updates.

Great software, needs customization to be truly valuable

We are still in the implementation stage, so I’ve refrained from forming a concrete opinion on the software one way or the other. It holds a lot of promise and we’ve had good customer service overall, but it remains to be seen whether some of our more pie-in-the-sky hopes and wishes will be granted. I’m hopeful!

Pros

Integrates well into Salesforce, allows us to work with member data using mobile, desktop, tablet. Provides lots of options to plug in additional apps to improve our member experience and make our working lives easier.

Cons

Reporting is limited by the Salesforce reporting capabilities, which makes the AMS feel quite limited. We’ve had to use extensive customizations to allow our board-approved price rules, integrations, member communications, etc. to thrive. Had some issues moving from UAT to production environment.

Great AMS for Diverse Needs of Nonprofit Staff

Pros

The flexibility and ability for end users to have control of the products and functionality.

Cons

The implementation process should have been handled better. However, we are now working to get where we should be and are pleased.

They are friendly and easy to work with. It feels like part of of the organization working with the

Pros

We have used Fonteva for our membership and marking. The software is easy to use and friendly. They were able to accommodate all our custom logic we have used for a long time. The change over from our last software was so smooth and they have a knowledgeable staff to help out on the change.

Cons

We use fro membership and certain limits on the function, having saying that they accomadate us with what we needed

a good options for the people (students and researchers) and organitazions that must tools quickly

It offers me the possibility of doing activities in several programs, which is very important for me, since I can take advantage of each of the particular skills of each software and generate a better product. all through a cloud of data

Pros

Infinite possibilities of exchanging truthful information at the right time and with the option of choosing the right tool. Is a very flexible application that presents multiple users with tools to manage a group of employees linked through the cloud, skipping distances and thinking. the app allows you to focus on a shared goals. They overcome the rigidity of a software and develop many app that evolve together with the users and their experiences, they honestly guarantee the success. An excellent option for companies that visualize the need to adapt to the digital era

Cons

The registration process, It can be a little common and tedious that´s all. fonteva does not present cons against which to be alarmed. The app depend on an excellent infrastrutura of data and speed of communication, which becomes very difficult for the countries with deficiencies in the web infrastructure

Strategically Sound App

As a Salesforce.com implementation partner I'm often asked to review and recommend apps and often then asked to implement that recommendation. MemberNation's presentation of itself as being able to fulfill XYZ is true, but for someone like me what matters is what is "under the hood." Only after a week long training can I truly appreciate the data architecture running MemberNation. It's complex but it needs to be given all the variables an association requires when it comes to managing memberships, events, pricing, communications with and among members, etc. Like any other strategically sound app, however, you will need someone on staff to manage the system post launch. This person need not be a Certified Salesforce.com Admin (although it helps). This person would, however, needs to understand and appreciate WHY the system is built the way it is and know how to work within its set structure. My in person training also allowed me to meet Fonteva staff responsible for certain functionality/apps within MN. I was thoroughly impressed both with the thoughtful and exited approach they take to advancing MN functionality and how brilliant these folks were of business processes (real day issues we face) and Salesforce.

Comprehensive Association Management System

Pros

Built on the Salesforce platform and ease of customization

Cons

It can be a little slow in processing sometimes

Nonprofit Unicorn Reviews MemberNation

MemberNation will solve a LOT of the issues we're having with our current CRM, NEON. The user experience for our members will be vastly improved (e.g. logging in, renewing memberships, the member portal, registering for events, making donations), which is the most important thing that we care about. That said, the implementation process has been a little ridiculous. We're a nonprofit and this is a HUGE investment for us budget-wise. I feel like Fonteva sometimes forgets that, e.g. they tried to charge us for bringing our new account rep up to speed. I feel like that's the cost of doing business and not our problem. Overall, though, they've been helpful and we've had a good experience. Their FUNcon16 user conference was super fun!

Pros

Improved user experience

Cons

The price!

Events management made easy.

Pros

Integration with Salesforce is flawless and for us the Events Builder App is a killer. The ease in which we can create events with data already in our Salesforce Org is great.

Cons

Additional Apps in Lightening would be great. Less requirements to revert back to Salesforce view would also be useful.

QA Analyst

I have been working with Fonteva for over a year testing Member Nation. I have found the staff at Fonteva great to work with. Member Nation is a great product for hosting and managing an Event.

MemberNation Review

The staff has been very knowledgable and guided us well through our implementation.

Pros

The integration of the product with other salesforce applications is fantastic. The easy membership renewal process is a big improvement over past product.

Cons

haven’t experianced a major issue with the system.

New Client

The fonteva staff have been excellent and helpful throughout our implementation.

Pros

Makes Salesforce a useable solution for the non-profit membership based association.

Cons

Still in the implementation process but have not ran into any dealbreakers for our use cases.

User friendly, easily customizable

Pros

Feature and functionality and easy upgrades. Easily customizable, creating screen and fields take a few minutes.

Cons

Report limitation, none discriptive error messages, and user's guide could use a little discription.

Great product

Pros

Amazing software for membership services. Easy to use for staff and pull live member information

Cons

Handling duplicate accounts and catching them early

Membernation is very user friendly!

My experience at first was rough but only because I was making it harder that it was. Once I got the hang of it, it made it so much easier and faster.

Pros

What I love about memebernation is that is was so user friendly. Made business run so much more smooth.

Cons

Nothing I didn’t like. At first it was difficult but only because I was expecting more steps in the the process but this software simplified my life.

All about meeting your needs

Pros

Associations have transactions that differ from traditional corporate ones. Fonteva provides very flexible platform that can support membership subscriptions, event registrations, etc. They have great engineers that are always willing to help with a custom solution for your organization as well.

Cons

A lot of times a custom solution is needed - they won't have everything you want 'out of the box', but they're more than willing to help.

Great Software

New implementation that is refreshing. Has a strong User Experience (on both front and backend) will being easy to use.

Pros

Easy to Use. Looks Good. Great Interface

Great service!

Pros

I really like the flexibility of Fonteva for Associations. We have a lot of ideas to innovate and update our processes and this software does a great job in tailoring to our specific business needs.

Cons

It’s very difficult to make decisions based on the various software updates that occur throughout the year. It’s a challenge to project the future since we won’t know what enhances are coming up in the system.

I have nothing but positive things to say!

member benefits. Event creator. Online forums and communities. easy payments.

Pros

We just transitioned to Fonteva 2 months ago and it has been such a smooth transition. Love the events and ecommerce features. My members love the badge and community features!

Cons

I don't like not being able to delete accounts or contacts. Also with the data merge I have a lot of old accounts and duplicates. Wish there was a better scrub system initially.

System Review by Nikki B.

It's always challenging to switch software systems but once I started getting used to the new system things were much more simplified and streamlined. The capabilities in the technology are great and I am very excited to see what other possibilities are out there for our business.

Pros

the new look and the better technology

Cons

The amount of steps between the Sales Order/Sales Order Lines and Receipts.

MemberNation is simply the best

We recently ditched our decades-old database and adopted MemberNation. This has been one of the smartest moves we've made as an organization. For the first time ever we feel that we can leverage our data and control how we interact with our members. Implementation has been a breeze too.

Pros

It can do almost anything.

Cons

Not much that I don't like. It can be intimidating to folks who are too savvy with technology.

So far so good

Pros

Easy way to find what you are looking for and I like that there is an advanced search feature. I also enjoy creating reports.

Cons

Harder to do more difficult payment processes. We have different memberships that have different payments and sometimes those payments have to be split. It hasn't been the easiest to do all of those.

Makes operations easy

Pros

Even the most technically challenged individual will understand how to use the software. The site is clean, straightforward and customizable for your respective organization.

Cons

Only thing i do wish is the ability to change titles of items like "notes" on internal profiles based on organizational needs.

i have used MemberNation for about five months @ work

Pros

it is web based and intuitive, easy to access and easy to use for back end processes. setting up items, classes, stores, and event products is relatively straightforward

Cons

there are many add-ons required to satisfy our business requirements, additional user licenses are expensive

Totally changed my time management.

Pros

After struggling with different systems and ways of organizing, we tried this program. It was totally easy and freed up time for other pressing projects.

Cons

It was a little difficult to import data but that was mostly due to trying so many different ways and programs prior to this.