Fonteva for Associations

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.

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.

The best thing about Fonteva is that it is on the Salesforce platform. Having the ability to configure the AMS with Salesforce has been a dream come true for us. In regards to Fonteva itself, I really like the flexibility it provides in solving business solutions as well as the amount of time saved with basic management of association management. My staff really loves Salesforce/Fonteva and that wasn't the case for our legacy platform. With staff buy-in, we're able to get a lot done now with our AMS.

Fonteva is not a platform you can learn overnight. Your staff must devote time to learn the structure before any sort of major configuration or custom work. More than likely, a 3rd party resource should be brought to help and assist with any sort of business objectives in order to configure the platform properly. Lastly, avoid custom code as much as possible because the more you learn about the tool, the higher likelihood you'll be able to configure a solution using out of the box tools with Salesforce.

I like that it's built on Saleforce CRM.

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.

We are already establishing a good amount of useful history in the new system that we can draw on. We're a lot more self-sufficient with reporting whereas previously we had to rely on outside sources for reports.

So far there has been no downside. We just went live in September 2021 so we're still building the system to our requirements. We're currently in phase 2. There could be more training in the creating of reports.

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

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.