MemberNova

Since going live with MemberNova, our organization has definitely seen an increase in traffic, with more members logging in and returning to find information they need. It's been great to create new websites for our chapters that align with the CSTA brand; this can be easily done with the templates MemberNova provides. Within just over a year, 50%+ of our chapters should have made the transition to MemberNova websites. Our chapters find different ways to use the system and are better able to access and analyze their member data. Throughout our project, MemberNova executives were a part of the implementation team, discussing solutions and providing input. The MemberNova team is a great team to work with, and their communication is great through the use of Basecamp and with timely updates.

Out in STEM has a nationwide non-profit membership model with over 1500 active members across 130+ chapters.  In 2017 we embarked on a major project as an organization to modernize our platform from a smattering of disparate cloud systems into one centralized membership management platform.  After a lot of work comparing options, doing market research, and conducting interviews and demos with potential vendors, we found MemberNova to be the best at what they do, with the most features that oSTEM needed, and at a very reasonable price-point.

Our main motivation was to shift from a free membership model that relied on sponsorships and donations to a pay-what-you-can (and perhaps later a minimum-requirement) payment model.  And MemberNova does a great job with this.  It allows us to apportion various types of members, set flexible and variable pricing structures (including zero dollars or a much as members want to donate) and does a great job keeping members notified with automated workflow about their membership status and payment processing.  Additionally it allows us to configure very flexible chapter structures to accomodate both our nationwide footprint across the U.S. and U.K. for our student chapters as well as our new city-based Professional chapters.

As two huge bonuses, MemberNova is also now our de-facto Content Management System and hosts our website, blog platform, and donation modules -- and we are soon moving from our old email delivery system onto the MemberNova email system for our list management and email outreach.  Having all these aspects in the same system and on the same platform has been a huge benefit to centralizing our operations.  They even support Single Sign-On so we didn't have to move our volunteers off their existing Azure logins in order to maintain authentication.

I would only offer two additional small caveats:  we found MemberNova did not meet our need for a Learning Management System, but frankly that was likely out of scope anyway.  We have integrated a separate, third-party platform to handle this (in terms of student coursework and testing..etc)  But this wasn't what MemberNova was designed for in the first place.  Second, customization is sometimes a challenge on the platform.  All of the out-of-the-box items and configuration are fairly straightforward once you get familiar with the set up and structure of the system, but clients aren't given carte-blanche coding access to the platform (for good reason).  So make sure the featuresets are what you need.  But beyond that MemberNova has been amazing to work with in terms of working closely with us to determine what we need in the short term versus what we can have their developers work in to the product roadmap.  We haven't found much yet that we can't overcome working with them closely.

And finally I would add that my day-job is working on Salesforce instances for government and commercial clients and the amount of value I see for the price-point with MemberNova is astounding.  They do an amazing job for very low costs and run circles around the nearest competitors.  If many of their feature sets and the items they do well are what your organization needs, I can't recommend them highly enough!

Rusty P.

Vice President for Innvoation and Technology

Out in STEM