Your Membership

YourMembership (YM) has been used by one of our clients for nearly 15 years because of price point. To be transparent, we are currently looking at other options, as YM is very limited at the pricing the client pays. Our client is using it for membership, website, revenue (dues and events), meeting management, email campaigns, and reporting. There are other functions they're not currently using as well, so there's a wide variety of potential functionality within YM. However, our issue is that none of the functions are done very well - the capabilities are basic, creating reports requires knowledge of Access-like language, websites look as if they were built in 1995, etc. You get what you pay for in this case. 

If you're truly looking for an extremely basic AMS, YM might work for you. If you've used other more robust platforms previously (SalesForce, Abila, etc.), you'll be sorely disappointed.

We have been using YM for more than 7 years. We spend alot of time manually doing things that should be automated but that YM doesn't automate. We dislike little -  but important things especially around customization.  For example, being able to customize and store confirmation emails or making messages sent by YM look more branded and less generic/ugly. Support is very unreliable. We have support tickets that have been open for months and even years.

YourMembership is expensive, reports are clunky and difficult, but by far the worst aspect of YM is the customer service. We notified them in early February that we were cancelling the service, and they've been running us around in circles ever since - it's now late June. We had left many messages, sent many emails, and usually did not receive any response. We finally did get someone on the phone who said she'd fix it, yet the late notices persist.

YourMembership was so unweildy that we moved to a different AMS after only a few years. We cancelled in February, yet they kept charging us. We've contacted them numerous times yet they send us around in one circle after another. We've been promised a resolution, yet keep getting emails periodically saying the support ticket is in pending mode and they'll close it if we don't respond. Now it's late June, and they still haven't resolved the problem as far as we can tell (haven't seen a refund for the charges that were made in error). Even if the system were awesome and amazing the lack of professional customer service should make anyone think twice about signing up with YM. 

A lot of people have issues with YM support, but I have not had that experience. I've always found them helpful and mostly easy to work with. There are many options for support, which I think many people don't take advantage of.  There is the daily live Q&A, submit ticket via email, phone in, and the new chat function which I've used quite a bit and like because the response is immediate. All that said, the email tools and stats are pretty basic, at best. 

YM was an upgrade for us when we moved over to it, and was a big step up from our previous AMS (Avectra/NetForum.) But it's very clunky to use, very limited in analytics and usage data, difficult for our members to use as they have to log in every time they visit, and just feels old-fashioned and hobbled together. Also, Community Brands wants to sell you their add-on career center, email software, engagement, etc. so all those modules within the core AMS are inadequate and clunky to use. Their customer service used to be great, but has become very non-responsive, and too often the answer is "there's no way to do what you want to do." 

YourMembership has been a great AMS for small scale Association companies. The APIs are great to integrate with 3rd party applications. Support/Service speed needs to improve. YM is not flexible with customization which can improve. Overall it is a keeper untl an association grows exponentially.

This is a good option for those small associations that are just really getting up and running. The longer you use their system and the more data it retains, the more difficult it is to use the platform. Also, their support staff seem to be just as blind to its complexities as the rest of us.

While it is fairly easy to pick up on the basics, anything beyond that can turn into a time-suck project. While you are able to pull reports, the accuracy of these reports always was differing. 

In termes of reliability, it was down for almost 2 weeks between October and November. After speaking with other associations, this apears to be a trend that they have had over the years. 

My review is that this is good for a few years as you try to grow your base and focus, but would not recomend for long term endeavors. 

I've used a few AMSes over the years and none is perfect.  If you have an organizational member structure with individuals "belonging" to a parent organization, the system works especially well.  Community Brands has grown quite a bit in the past few years and I don't necessarily feel that their support staff has kept pace.  They hire support staff but they seem more limited in their knowledge, often regurgitating things from the help articles that I already tried before reaching out.   Website and email functionality and appearance is average.  Reporting is not intuitive and continues to confuse new staff, especially those without a tech background.  YM may work best if  you have a dedicated person responsible for data entry, data upkeep, data cleanliness, and reporting. Unfortunately, like many associations, these responsibilities are spread out across many staff here and all staff know "a little"    YM will do what you need it to, but there may be other options that will do it easier/faster/cleaner.

We settled on YM based on their wide variety of AMS features and functionality.  It appeared to be able to do pretty much all we needed to do, with just minimal customization.  We had a terrible implementation manager who dropped the ball several times, and our customer services woes started there.  Once we were up and running, the customer service issues just got worse. YM got bought out by Community Brand right after we signed up with them, and it appears that with that buy over, the demand for YM went up, and their customer service deparment just couldn't keep up with the increased demand.  When we would call in for help, we left messages that would be returned sometimes 48-72 hours later!  If we sent in a ticket for help, often times the response was just to watch this video or that.  The item we needed help with was often just a 2-3 minute Q, and they would send us to these long videos to get the answers.  I have moved on from the organization where we used YM, but checked in with the Executive Director there, and she tells me customer service continues to be an issue. They had a huge issue with their e-mail in 2019, and that forced the association to have to turn to Constant Contact to communicate with it's members.  This level of pathetic customer service is just unacceptable in my opinion, and now that I'm searching for a AMS for the association that I'm now working with, YM will certainly not be a consideration based on my previous bad experiences, as well as continued negative reviews on ASAE community threads, etc.  

We're a small NP trade association. Techinically, YM was an upgrade when we joined 4 years ago. First, it does not work well for our members on the front end. Not optimized for mobile. Hard for them to renew membership, access accounts, and register for events. Internally, it's a total PITA when it comes to pulling basic membership records and assorted data. Email has slightly improved as they finally added a drag/drop email editor, but it has limits leading us to go back to Constant Contact. Tough to get good analytics on our digital marketing efforts. Purchased the extra QuickBooks plug-in, only to find out weeks later that it's not compatible with Q/B. Customer service has been a disappointment. Punitave experience everytime that we try to submit a service ticket, address the Q/B issue. Sent us to collection for our annual contract renewal last year because they failed to update our account to reflect the change in contact provided to them. Surely, they've gone through some transitions via the Community Brands mergers, but this relationship just gets more painful. We've no doubt that they probably serve some associations quite well. Just sharing our experience.

The new email templates and writing are an improvement and as a whole, does what it needs to.  Except when it doesn't.  A week prior to our largest conference, it was erroring out literally every 2 clicks on us.  A month after we purchased a financial integration piece, it was no longer avaiable and we didn't see any refunds, during a nation wide pandeic when we needed to communicate to our membership that is highly effected...it would error out, not allow email drafting/communication or even let us sign in.  You can expect that on a daily basis, you will have issues and that is the most reliable thing about it.

We bought a 2-year contract with YourMembership in 2017, and have been using it to manage memberships, handle event registrations, track contacts, and send email campaigns. We quickly realize that we wish we'd had a chance to do a trial account, or at least a monthly contract, before signing up. 

Four big takeaways from using YourMembership (YM)

First, our membership structure is at an organizational level. YM supports this... sort of. It's great that you can have a master and sub-accounts (staff), but the flexibility is very limited and not well implemented. It's obvious their primary market is individual memberships. For example, there's currently no way to merge the organization's name into membership dues reminder emails. And there's no way to differentiate contact roles within an org (e.g. "billing contact" versus "executive contact")

Second, YM attempts to be an all-in-one solution... so you're stuck with their tools. You have to use their event system, email system, etc. There's little to no easy integration with the outside world (like a MailChimp or Eventbrite), apart from some other platforms -- some of which are owned by Community Brands (parent company) but have sizeable price tags. They have an API, but functionality is limited. Event registration is functional and better than some other options, but the user interface (graphic design) has led to a lot of confusion from our members.  

They also have a "social media" piece, where members can log in and access the site. But this is a bit underdeveloped and not very intuitive compared to other options.

Third, YM has a very defined and somewhat confusing data structure. Their reports tool seems robust but requires a lot of trial-and-error to get good information. Also, you can add custom fields but this is somewhat cumbersome to manage. 

Fourth, we have been generally disappointed by their tech support. It's gotten better, but we had a support ticket open for over a year. It was a technical question about their previous email system, but there was little follow-through on their part to understand or address what the problem was. 

Bottom line: YourMembership is okay, but know what you're getting into. Do a trial account if you can. It's obvious the software is a bit dated and lacks a more "modern" feel. They are making improvements, but it's a slow process. I'm not sure how much effort they are putting into adding new features and making improvements -- the promised overhaul of the email system came almost a year after they initially said. That said, it's a good system for the cost -- but for our structure and needs was rather limiting.

This AMS is good for small assocations with a standard membership structure. YM is the base model under Community Brands selection of AMS systems. As with any AMS system, it should meet 80% of your priorities at a minimum. For the most part, it's a decent AMS in an all-around aspect. My organization does not have a traditional membership model and that in itself is a challenge to manage in YM. However, the good things are that the interface is fairly easy to use, finding some things has taken repetitive questions to my colleagues. They are working towards improvements with email marketing module; however, the interface still seems a bit clunky. If you have a more advanced use of email marketing, you will more than likely stick with what you have. One thing is clear overall with YM that the content management is not as good as other systems out there (you might be better off with a separate website in most cases). 

Integrations with other Community Brands products seems better than those NOT under their umbrella, which has caused some headaches for us and requires us to look within CB for better solutions. So there's that. Depending on how you look at it, you may want all your eggs in one basket...or not. 

YourMembership is a good stable platform, with an easy-to-use interface. It's fairly strong in report/query writing and general data look up. The support is good, but not outstanding. Overall, it's a reliable system. ONe downside is the website templates tend to be "cookie-cutter."

Frankly, This is a negative review.   Overall my big complaint is that YM seems to be living in an internet world of at least 10 years ago.  If you are an organization that simply has a lot of members and does not care about growth, has very little entrepeneurial spirit, it might be fine for you.   But if you are interested in growth, selling trainings, this is not the AMS for you.    In all fairness, I really don't know what else is out there.  But there simply has to be AMS that can do better than YM

Lets begin at the beginning.   I actually was using affiniscape when they were aquired by YM a number of years ago.   The implementation of the new system was a nightmare.   When my staff and I talk about it, we still shudder.  IN fact it was the trauma of this move, that has probably kept me using this company, since it is the devil I know.  The idea of going through another implementation nightmare is just too much to bare.   

When we first started, I was told that website redesigns would be included in the fee.   We started to look at a website redesign and found out that it would be very expensive.  What works.  Well it keeps track of our members. we can charge them their dues.  It has auto renew.    It has a certain amount of automation about sending emails for people who have not paid their dues, but it is fairly limited.  The reporting system is not very user friendly for us.    Given that YM has over 1000 clients, you would think they would come up with a host of basic reports would be easy to use, but they don't. If they do, I don;t know about it.  Which is another problem. Ther is virtually no communication from them to member about new things.    

We do use their conference module.  That works fairly well.   It allows for member pricing and non member pricing.  The only problem is that the actual webpages that you would want to send people to tell then about the conference are ugly or very difficult to make attractive.   So we have to use another website and then send them into YM only for the payment part.

Their E-mail module is horrible and has not been updated in years.  Very little in the way of metrics, open rates etc.  We actually don;t use it and pay for awebber, because we have a lot of customers that are not members, or people who are just on our mailing list.  It is almost impossible to categorize them in YM

YM has really weird ideas about things.  For instance, everyone in the data base is considered a member.  They might be considered a non dues paying member.   But they are considered a member.  This does weird things to their reporting.   

YM has a lot of bells and whistles that we don't find useful, and does not have things that we think would be super helpful.  For instance, we would love to have an affilate system integrated so that we could do affiliate marketing for our conference or our programs.  

Here is another issue tht just happened late in 2019.  We wanted to update our privacy settings to be more in compliance with GDPR.   I consulted with YM about various things on how to do this.  I was given wrong information several times, that I only caught because I know to double and triple check everything.  Most importantly,  I wanted people to be abe to set their own privacy settings.  My understanding GDPR requires that a person makes an affirmative choice for things that are more public.  Ufortuantely YM does not allow this.  Members are required to accept more public options and then elect to make them more private.  This is the opposite of what I believe GDPR requires.     

Here is one more annoying thing, that speaks to the lack of detail.   YM has an ability to show approximate currency conversions.  Okay that is nice.   But it does not work if you have an early bird price for your event.   So the person is given a totally wrong number.   Yes you can turn the entire thing off.   But, why do things half way?   

We have been using YourMembership for a few years now. Our annual spend on IT has more than doubled since adopting YM as our AMS.

The web site design process (we chose a custom design) was a bit fraught. YM uses a proprietary content management system built on .NET, I believe, and the CMS would appear to be pretty challenged in terms of page template design and flexibility. We were told a number of times that what we wanted to do on various pages could not be done, or not be done easily, so we ended up with a site with fewer design features than we had before (coding html and css ourselves).

The kinds of things we were asking for were not out of the ordinary - essentially a variety of layouts, custom forms, advertising banners, and image sliders. Bear in mind that you will generally have to make many design compromises when working with a combined CMS/AMS, but whatever CMS platform YM has standardized on seems pretty limited. But, in the end, we got a working site that conformed to most of the design requirements at the end of the process and the site did not look like a standard YM site.

Membership management is a strong suit with the software. We have a simple membership structure with organizational members and have been able to relate people to their organizations easily - our prior solution (which was custom built on LAMP was less capable). Membership renewal is pretty straightforward and membership management is easy - which it should be.

My biggest concern with YM is that many of its other features: event management and registration, permission-based email marketing, and credentialling are all either pretty weak or inflexible in their implementation. We have had to change business processes to accommodate the software over and over again instead of the other way around. We knew this sort of thing would happen, but we were surprised how often and in how many different places. Suffice to say, we chose the software based on our requirements list, but found that some of the software's capabilities are so diminished that we really can't use the built in functionality.

We have opted, for mission critical processes, to use other software or services and incur the cost of programming API's that interact with YM. This has worked especially well for our marketing department which completed a sucessful integration with Infusionsoft. Now we can share member information with our marketing platform AND have a capable marketing platform to work with. We will probably do the same with event registration and certification. We also lean heavily on tools like Formstack for collecting information the YM system doesn't and Squarespace creating landing pages or microsites. We can create an event-specific micro site for a few hundred dollars a year, the quote for the same from YM was many thousands of dollars and a very long timeline.

All of this leads me to believe we should have focused on a simpler membership-focused product and selected best-of-breed apps to manage other parts of our association business. We could have spent more of our budget on integration, and gotten better tools to work with, if we had spent less on our "all in one" association management solution. Now we are doing both, which just feels like wasting money.

I have started researching other options, but the integration issues, especially with event management seem potentially difficult. Perhaps I'll look for the ReviewMySystemsIntegrator site next.

In short YM does membership well, it does a lot of things, but it does not do most of them very well.

I'm on the board of an association that uses Your Membership for our chapter.  As with any Membership system it has problems but overall it seems to do the job.  We can use it to keep track of member activities and set up our monthly meetings and special events.  

It can be somewhat cumbersome to use without some level of training, but overall it's an acceptable system for our use

Your Membership is a decent AMS. It's strength lies in the ease of reporting, which is critical to associations. Weaknesses include customization and "cookie cutter" website templates.

Too many steps for the work-around to use this for company memberships with individual users. Adding new people to a company requires you to populate every field, THEN add to sub-account. No member retention or engagement features. Making the website mobile friendly costs extra. The website editing is not intuitive. For the most part, nothing is intuitive.The platform is extremely robust but oftentimes you need to watch a video or call support to learn even where to get started with a task. Creating new custom reports is complicated and you cannot reduce the number of fields that is generated. You can only alter that after the report is downloaded, which is time-consuming. After 6 years, we want to work on how our member records are set up and eliminate fields we don't need. They want to charge us a steep hourly rate to help with that. Otherwise, I believe on a positive note, their support is extremely responsive. Also, we have never had our site go down.