Naylor Association Solutions

Before I begin let me start with the good. Naylor purchased Timberlake mid way through last year and so there has been a lot of new leadership and management that is trying very hard to repair the broken systems and staffing issues that came with Timberlake. The leadership of Naylor is able to to communicate effectively and are reasonable to work with -- and provided our organization almost a complete refund as our installation, integration, and ongoing use were all a complete disaster. We started in January and were forced to stay on the system until December after researching and securing another more reliable vendor. Naylor leadership were helpful and friendly, and saw the legitimacy of my serious issues with the failed customer service, failed systems, and failed installation of our non-profit organization's website through Timberlake.

Also for the good, after a terrible start with our project manager, another one took over as our primary point of contact for our project after the first representative provided such poor performance during the first two weeks of our installation. This person, I will refer to as PM was kind, helpful, polite, intelligent, and effective. She was the ONLY staff person at Timberlake that knew how to speak to a customer. The rest of the Timberlake team are horrible at communication and were a complete nightmare to deal with.

The Bad:

IMO We were sold a lemon by the founder / former ceo of Timberlake, whom I will refer to as FCEO.

We had read reviews of Timberlake (on reviewmyams.com) that suggested the company had problems with communication. When I asked  during the sales process about these problems, he ASSURED me it was because several many websites were abruptly transferred to Timberlake from another company that went out of business -- which caused a temporary challenge for their team. Having spent 9 months dealing with FCEO and his team (again outside of PM who was awesome and an outlier for this company) -- I can guarantee you that the customer service issues with Timberlake were a direct result of Timberlake's mis-guided priorities. FCEO himself, on multiple occasions, always seemed to want to point the blame on us as the customer. Promises were made and never kept. Scheduled meetings with us went unattended by Timberlake staff. Blame was shift ed from their fault to everyone and everything else possible.

Its not that Timberlake didnt have the systems we wanted - its that it took FOREVER for them to actually start working, and even then, half the time they would break again. It was seriously MONTHS before simple things like the front page looked the way they were supposed to and CONTINUED not to break weekly.

We were very specific with our launch dates and promised Timberlake leadership we would move quickly on our side to provide necessary approvals, content, data etc. Timberlake leadership told us they would also work quickly and could match our aggressive pace (again FCEO). This was the FARTHEST THING FROM THE TRUTH.

The level of incompetence started almost instantly as our primary rep FORGOT to schedule himself for our weekly meetings twice in a row, and did not READ the emails we sent with answers to questions he continued to ask us. So I complained and we got PM - who was great - but she was an account representative and could not force the development team to actually do their jobs. So what would happen is she would tell us something was reported as fixed. I would go, and check, and it was still broken. Then she would have to go back and find herself as well that what was "Tested and confirmed working" was not working at all. This happened FREQUENTLY. I had to ask PM - I know its not your job to beta test new features or fixes but please do before you contact me as its eating up so much of my time.

I refused to just give up on a system that we had been sold, which was not functioning, and continued to hound FCEO (and later Naylor leadership) to get even minimal results. FCEO's rudeness and inability to OWN his mistakes was ridiculous.

On one occasion on a phone call with 3 staff people from Timberlake, we were going over for like the 5th time about a bio field in the user profile that was broken.

Issue was that the bio field text suggested 500 character limit. But when anyone TYPED into the bio field this 500 character limited countdown reset itself to 1000 characters. While the system would allow more than 500 characters in the bio profile field, the new user's account would not complete because there was this error (unknown to the user) that they had entered too many characters. I bring this issue to FCEO's attention. FCEO tells me my users are "Doing something they are not supposed to do". Consider that for a moment. The system is showing people they can enter in 1000 characters. The system ALLOWS them to enter in more than 500 characters. But to FCEO, this is my user's fault for not seeing the initial 500 character limit indicator (which again, was BROKEN) and unknowingly put more characters than 500 in there.

I explain to him "Look, fix YOUR website system to show 500 character limit countdown not 1000 and fix YOUR system to not accept more than 500 characters and then MY users won't be able to break the profile field." Totally lost on this guy -- its like he would rather blame me than take responsibility for HIS system.

Some examples of Emails with FCEO:

FCEO - I have received no communication that from you that our (you and me) daily 8AM phone calls ended. Not sure why I am finding this out Monday 8:30AM after two days scheduled for this call. If you were unavailable, like Thursday, that is fine. But why as your "Top Priority", am I being left in the dark here?

Poor proactive communication from you is wasting my time and extremely frustrating. I've suggested on multiple occasions that additional communication is critical, especially with the long list of broken issues that still remain unfixed (ie landing page is design is still a mess), an previous poor communication practices.

Yes I am back and forth with Deb and PM, but remember we were meeting daily so you could remain aware of these issues.

Until the website is functioning as you sold it to us I would appreciate to continue these morning calls with you, albeit a half an push to 11:30/8:30 would be better.

I am in a meeting until noon my time so I will schedule afterwords.

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FCEO,

There remains a lot to be accomplished today for our website from Timberlake's side. I feel as if we have done everything we could to communicate that we would be moving at an aggressive speed to have the website launched no later than March 1st.

Things not finished or working:

Main page blog

Main page sponsor ads

Event registration (has critical display failures)

Additional events cannot be entered in fully (entering price causes failure)

Content pages

Member account creation (tried to create an account to pay and subscribe to simghosts.org as an individual subscriber -- and got an unexpected activity error message).

Mobile version of website not performing properly

Directory malfunctioning and not displaying all results

Bullet points don't display properly on content pages

PM has been excellent at communicating between myself and the development / design team considering the speed of our installation.

However I do not believe she has the authority you do to focus the team to complete the work required on our project including the TESTING required to confirm key components are functioning as they imagine them to be.

At this point I wish we had not launched the website over the weekend as I have not heard back from you with an explanation that the work your team needs to accomplish to complete this build properly will be taking place today.

From the very get go we announced our plan to launch this website at the latest March 1st and while we have been diligently working to accomplish that goal I am feeling that Timberlake has let us down with matching the effort. If this was not something possible from your side it should have been communicated to us during the sales pitch in November, and the project management phase starting January. As it was it was explained that if we could move that fast, so could Timberlake. Has this not been the case?

What is the plan to get this website working today?

We are supposed to launch australia registrations today. This is a critical factor for our finances and our organization's mission. Every day we cannot is threatening the very life blood of our non profit.

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Their new "Event registration system" never worked for us we had to buy Cvent for all our events in 2015 (some of which Naylor themselves decided to pay for because they knew Timberlake was broken).

In conclusion, I feel bad for anyone currently using Timberlake. I feel worse for Naylor who acquired Timberlake. I have a feeling they were sold on false pretenses as much as I was -- by a CEO who in my opinion, was probably one of the most unprofessional people I have ever communicated with.

Naylor MAY be able to transform Timberlake --- but I don't think that will happen properly until FCEO Choate no longer works for the company. Yes -- its that bad. So-- give them a call and ask if FCEO still works there -- if he does -- save yourself the endless frustration and hang up.

Thank goodness for Naylor leadership -- they are the saving grace to this sad story.

If Timberlake worked properly, it would be a pretty darned good value! CMS The CMS is easy to use, but often the page you are working on just goes blank and you lose it completely. You can at least go to the most previous versions, but you can't publish it...you have to copy and paste it into the most current/blank page. And often you get error messages when editing a page, so you have to change the page name. You also cannot create a page or version of a page and publish it at a future date. Career Manager Timberlake's job board has no reporting capabilities. The "statistics" report is a list of every job ever posted, but no way to pull by criteria or at minimum, sort the fields/columns. And you cannot see the individual who posted - the financial info/who paid for the posting is on and individuals record. Merge/Purge There is no merge purge process to purge and/or purge duplicate records. There is a du-plicate record check when and individual is joining, but not when non-members are creating a profile, for posting jobs, for example. Membership I have not worked in the membership module a lot, but find it odd that not everyone expires on either the first or last of the month for statistical/reporting and communication purposes. But the set up of membership types is quite easy/intuitive to do. Misc Notes are just a text box - not even what user created the note and a date when it was created. Bad email address field would be nice. Automatic emails just don't work (we use an outside system), so we lose efficiency in this area. Would be nice to see email/contact history on individual's record. The report builder could be improved quite a bit. Customer service people are great!

We are using Timberlake Enterprise. It was suppose to be the top of their line. It took over 8 months to implement when we had a 3 month time frame. We were never told they were in the process of selling so that played a factor. All the little things like inserting the words member and nonmember that they told us could be done were not possible so we were stuck with the work affiliate. The log-in page never worked and changing passwords from the user side was all but impossible. When you cancel a registration it completely goes away and there is no trace of it but the money is sitting there in the load. Customer service is nonexistence. The main response is I'll summit a ticket.

We are using the latest version of the Pro edition of Timberlake software. We implemented in 2012 at a time when Timberlake was taking on many new clients and it quickly became apparent that they did not have the capacity to handle the needs of so many new clients. We've had some issues with the design of our website (styles not working properly, etc.), but the most positive aspect of Timberlake, and the reason I "recommended with reservations" instead of giving it a thumbs down, is the website part of the package really is fairly easy to use and makes it convenient to give multiple staff the ability to update and manage website content. The main issues we have had with Timberlake include: - Unreliable financial reporting for conferences -- the conference reports are not directly linked to the financial information. So any change made after the initial registrations (e.g., a discount given after the fact, or adding a guest registration after the fact), is not reflected on the conference financial reports. - Excruciatingly slow response time to many requests (this has improved since Timberlake was acquired by Naylor). - The customer service is spotty -- at times, I feel like the person trying to help me does not take time really understand the problem. As a result, resolution often takes longer than it should. - No way to track customer requests and if they have been completed or not. They do not currently have a ticket tracking system or any way to check on the status of issues reported. This can be especially confusing when you have several issues being worked on simultaneously and when response times are slow. - When "upgrades" occur, they often break things that were previously working on our site. So I feel the need to be constantly double checking -- we can't just use the software, we are in continual trouble-shooting mode. - The training, especially on running reports, was not very helpful.

We migrated to Timberlake with great expectations after some impressive demos. The implementation process went pretty well and we launched as expected. As with any new software, it takes some time to get used to a new system and tweak the features to meet your organizational needs. The support system was not as needed. Support tickets would sit in the que for weeks / months before being resolved, or just ignored. Even requested customization that we were willing to pay for was never quoted or would take months and months to be implemented.

We are a fairly small organization and our membership is not very complex. We have individual members and just a handful of organizational memberships. However, we find the system very difficult to use. Event setup and tracking is cumbersome, the accounting structure doesnÕt work with how our systems work (even though we were promised this would be fixed and it never has) and customer support is very poor. HereÕs one example of the poor service: Timberlake switched over to a new events module without informing us during the end of our early-bird registration for our annual meeting, we lost a weekendÕs worth of registrations and had lots of angry phone calls waiting for us when we opened on Monday. TimberlakeÕs response was, we run updates all the time and we canÕt always keep track of which clients are currently using the current/old modules. Timberlake was bought by a company called Naylor. They seem to be trying to improve customer service but we havenÕt noticed a difference.

We launched with Timberlake last year. I thought I had done quite a bit of due diligence, talking with users about Timberlake and other AMS'. But we've still had some surprises. Super disappointed in customer service. Unresponsive at times (and other times they are great). I hope with Naylor's purchase of Timberlake, we will see this improve and we can begin to rely on and trust that they will address our issues in a timely way without us having to raise heck... We love the database and the web site integration. The CMS is good, too. These things are a near perfect fit for our small association. The Registration module was horrendous but a new version was recently released and it is MUCH better. But yet it has issues and we have a conference coming up with registration opening in four weeks...and we can't get answers about whether our issues will be resolved. VERY frustrating. I'm going to leave "yes" below because the things that are good about this platform are very good and we do see potential for improvement with the things that are bad...

The sales pitch was definitely more polished than the actual product we received. Many of the features we were told were "coming" have not arrived (18 months after deployment). Tech Support is poor. The tech team is not large enough to provide fast/timely support. We had to wait over a month to have a favicon uploaded to our site. Something that normally takes a couple of minutes. Ticket portal is less responsive than simply emailing a tech member. Even then a request can take a while to be resolved. We had to wait over a month to have issues with our email marketing tool resolved. This was a huge problem because we were unable to communicate with our constituency for a long time. Not good for business. Email marketing is amateur. Free solutions such as MailChimp have much more robust features than what's offered through TMS. Simple features such as viewing scheduled emails are not available (you just have to keep track). Canceling or modifying a scheduled email cannot be done by the end user. You have to call TMS who then has to contact a third party to cancel an email. This is an issue if you realize after business hours that your email needs to be changed/canceled. Saving templates is also too difficult. It's best to just keep the template offline and use a HTML coding software to create your email and then just upload the file. Something you would never have to do with a proper email marketing solution. In our experience, membership dues was not as easy as they made it seem. Granted, we have a complex system for how we charge our members dues, but we were upfront and honest about it and were told that the system could easily accommodate us. Surveys and Custom Forms. Like email marketing, this is handled by an outside module. Thus reporting cannot combined with data from our database. While the forms module indicates that you could connect certain fields (like drop downs) to your database, this is actually not the case. You either have to make that an open text box or you will have to populate your options manually. Member Management Adding members via CSV or some other method for large scale is not an option unless you send it to the tech team, which may take a while to be resolved. Online Store While this is an option, it's not very customizable. It makes the shopping experience unfavorable.

There are many great features of the Timberlake product and price point makes it affordable. But....our implementation process has been a nightmare. Way too much promise and too little delivery. Customization delivery is slow, very slow. So if you plan to purchase don't believe a six month implementation period is reasonable unless you plan to use it right out of the box.

Our organization has been using Timberlake for more than a year and have found it to be a satisfactory solution for small organizations. The combined AMS and CMS on the backend is convenient and relatively flexible but also dated. There is a learning curve for navigating the menu system and locating the correct settings for updates and configuration changes, and often the program managers have to defer to technical staff for assistance. One reason our organization chose Timberlake was for the customer service and customization options. Over the past 6-8 months, Timberlake has failed to provide adequate customer service and tech support has been poor. Our site has also been impacted due to service outages at Timberlake, beyond what we would consider reasonable -- all with little to no updates on the reason for the outage. We have seen some changes recently, possibly due to the acquisition with Naylor, and our hope is they add resources to support their current clients. Overall we feel this is a reasonable low cost AMS and it could become a leading solution (in this price range) if they back their claim and improve client support.

We did not have a prior AMS. We were using various methods to keep track of membership, event registration, listservs for members to communicate, etc. I thought it would be easy to go from no system to an all in one system. It was very challenging to get all our member information in one place to upload to the new system but once we did that, Timberlake helped us every step of the way and once the system went live - it has been smooth sailing ever since!

While our site itself is quite attractive (I believe we were told that the company originally focused on web design), the functionality is limited and the customer service horrendously slow to respond to issues - and we've had many of them.

As with some other AMS companies, our experience with Timberlake started off great as they told us exactly what we wanted to hear. They could provide our small association with most everything we wanted along with customization, flexibility and customer service, at a very affordable price. Implementation went fine but as we added customization things fell apart. Their search functionality is not at acceptable. We site also goes down more than normal and we recently had a long stretch where the site was down for many days during a very busy time. Their customer service also started out great but eventually got to a point where they were not calling us back. Timberlake has good people and owner and I believe they got caught up in a lot of success and were not staffed to handle it. The bottom line is their AMS does not deliver what they promised.

We have been using Timberlake for almost 2 years. It has been challenging to say the least. We had to build custom modules for one of our major programs. The administrative reporting functionality is very poor. We are often forced to resort to very manual processes to get the information we need. Also some of the basic functions are glitchy and unreliable.

Pros: Timberlake can process transactions. The navigation of the admin portal is intuitive. Updating webpages is pretty easy. Cons: -While Timberlake says they can do anything with the system, the customizations are costly, take a long time to implement (plan for twice as long as they quote you) and are often implemented without proper Q&A from the Timberlake team. Some of our implementations have caused major issues in other areas of our site that Timberlake did not prepare for. -Timberlake tests in your live site! They tried to make us pay for a sandbox. Only after they made changes throughout our database with our active members' accounts (such as changing email addresses) and changing our membership directory - all without our knowledge - did we receive a free sandbox. -The worst thing about Timberlake is the support. In the last year, they got rid of their support@ email address (and basically replaced with projects@) and want you to submit issues through their support portal. The problem is, Timberlake does a poor job of updating the tickets. The average time it takes for Timberlake to make initial contact is a week and a half. Their support phone line is answered by very low level techs who take my number and say someone will call back. They're basically receptionists. Maybe they've grown and can't handle the customers they have now. That's a huge problem with AMS's these days. They care more about getting customers through the door rather than keeping the ones they already have. We've spent a lot of time and money on Timberlake and I'm not sure it was worth it.

Review Updated in email sent 8/19: We have the GO version (least expensive) of Timberlake and pay $129/month for the CRM and Store. For a small organization that does not do complicated events, high level analytics, sales force like tracking it performs well. You must learn by using. There is limited training so it takes time to figure things out. The system lacks "helps" if you mouse over and there are Timberlake logic details which need to be learnedÉso you need to use everything and test to be sure you did not accidentally check a box and cause problems. We would prefer to know everything but you just get basic training. You have to discover issues and ask. Support is ok but not very speedy. Everyone is very nice when you reach them. There is a ticket system for problems and you must fill out tickets for everything. You may get scolded if you call and did not fill out a ticket. This can be annoying when there is a system failure. You cannot upload prospect lists in Go although we hear changes are coming so maybe some of our issues will be fixed. It is generally reliable. There isn't a basic join mail list. A prospect must complete a form like someone who wants to be a member. We think this is a real pain for someone who just wants to be on your mail list. All we want is name, address, email, job function and so we had to create a form separately and manually enter those interested into the CRM. Also non-members who attend our programs are not automatically added to the CRM. We have to manually add them. So there is not a link between the CRM and Registration of non-members. You cannot customize emails to member types when a new member joins. Everyone gets the same text in the email. We want to include special offers at times with a registration so we canÕt unless we are giving the offer to all members. So we work around things due to the limitations. In general for what we pay it is good as the registrations come in easily although we don't get enough information on guests. It can't handle more complicated events like golf or our conference. If you need a system to collect your membership data and register attendees for basic events then is works well. We have only had problems (conference registration system) when we tried to push the system beyond its capabilities. The reports are comprehensive. We do not use it for any accounting so I canÕt comment on that.

Don't be fooled by the professional sales process. You'll be promised the world and fall in the love with the slick demo product. Serious issues with data integrity and stability of the product. While the owner and his Sr. consultants are passionate and know their product well their support and development team just can't deliver. Promises are rarely kept, custom work is never completed or you'll wait for months with no communication and then be told the software can't do what was promised. After a year, we've come to the realization that we've been plenty patient, but it will never get better. When you can't report on or find the same number of members month to month would that be a critical issue needing correction immediately? This is just one of the many issues we have with Timberlake. Find another solution and avoid this one.

The accounts receivable portion is extremely limited. They are in the process of revamping the entire system and can hopefully offer a more detailed module

Much easier to work with than Avectra for our small staff and nice to have integrated event registration, online store, and website with the database. However, our system has 'unexpected error' bugs occur randomly, but on a regular basis but without pointing to a particular problem. Problem resolution also fluctuates from same day to several days, sometimes needing a follow-up prompt and sometimes not.