SilkStart MultiChapter

Starting with the website, we found the available templates yielded clean and contemporary page designs that helped communicate professionalism to members.
Integration of a dynamic member directory into the website gives small members an opportunity to showcase themselves and realize a mini website as part of the perks of joining the organization. With SilkStart, this was easy to do - even for people with limited experience on website publishing.
SilkStart also streamlined the membership acquisition process by making it faster and easier for new members to join and for the organization to receive payment. A process that used to take days was reduced to minutes.
Collecting member fees is usually a headache for organizations and can require significant resources to follow up with members to collect payment. With SilkStart, members receive reminders of their renewal and, if they do not pay on time, SilkStart can continue to send reminders and serve as a virtual collection agency.
Many organizations hold events - either as their primary raison d'etre or as fundraisers. With SilkStart, we were easily able to set up events, ticket pricing tiers and create and send messages to promote them.
For my client, integration with their QuickBooks system was important. SilkStart delivered.

It would have been nice to have a dashboard for administrators, to give them a quick overview of the organizations member status and activities.

A member acquisition funnel (like a sales funnel) would be helpful, but is not currently available.

Modules cover all the aspects of the business we need. The lay-out of the back-end is very clear and it is easy to understand how to navigation among the modules. When we had a problem with communications, they understood and developed a comprehensive group email program that is light years ahead of what it was when launched. They are good at explaining timelines, sprints and priorities.

Communications module still needs a lot of work. The templates are very glitchy, image library is difficult to use and cannot manage the images in any order. There's no easy way to send an event notice without creating it in group email module and building from scratch. The bandwidth of the developers, while improved, still seems limited and I'm not really sure where their priorities lie relative to our business functions and requirements.

Ease of use, many tutorials and FAQ to help problem solve, easy access to support with quick response time.

The cost was a little higher than that of others we compared.

Cost effective, fresh templates. various design options with the use of the many widgets available.

Not really a con, but the SilkStart is targeting a segment of the not-for-profit market.