Fonteva for Associations Reviews

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

They make it easy for membership organizations to tailor community websites to their members without the cost of building a custom website from scratch. They give you options like role-based data access where certain members can only see certain content so there is great personalization.

It allows a lot of customization with the member community site, but further customization for membership dues would be helpful.

We use the membership and event app from Fonteva software. They are easy to use. Very helpful. Configuration is easy for administrators. The software understands the requirement of customer and staff as expected.

It will be nice to have more documentation about different features in Fonteva community and the documentation should be easy to search using more keywords

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.

Range of the solutions it provides for membership management.

Sometimes it's a little bit hard to customize.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

This is a generally easy system to learn and has a lot of functionality however we struggle with having to develop a lot of customizations because it doesn't have functionality that aligns nicely with our needs. This makes upgrades more difficult.

There is no ability to track membership retention. Emailing through the database is flawed as formatting gets screwy. We are exploring using more features and functions such as campaigns but at the surface level, its a little complicated to figure out.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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