Fonteva

I have been using Fonteva for Associations for about 3 years now, and it’s been a game-changer for how we manage memberships across multiple associations. What I like most is how it helps us track member engagement through detailed reports and makes it easy for members to subscribe, renew, and connect with others using the member portals. The platform has given us the tools to be more efficient and offer more value to both our staff and members. If I had to point out an area for improvement, I’d say there’s a bit of a learning curve at first, especially for those who aren’t familiar with Salesforce. That said, the training resources and support from Fonteva have been great, so we were able to get up to speed pretty quickly.

Fonteva is a salesforce-based software for associations and nonprofits, offering robust tool for membership, fundraising and event management. Its key strengths are its salesforce integration, customization and scalability.

Fonteva's robust community-building capabilities are another unique feature. Fonteva facilitates a feeling of community among members through discussion boards, event planning, and member directories—all of which are essential for engagement and retention.

The drawback of Fonteva is that, despite its excellent capabilities, new users may need to go through a slight learning curve, particularly if they are not familiar with Salesforce. Furthermore, the platform is more expensive than some more straightforward membership management platforms, so extremely tiny organizations with tight resources might not find it to be the best choice.

For associations, nonprofits, and member-based groups, Fonteva offers a flexible, Salesforce-based platform that makes it easy to organize events, memberships, and online sales. Its user-friendly features, which include data analytics, member engagement tools, and extensive customization possibilities, let organizations give their members a cohesive experience. Customers value Fonteva's responsive support staff, speedy setup, and ease of use. Fonteva provides an effective, scalable solution for member administration and event planning by utilizing Salesforce's capabilities.

As a Python developer, I appreciate how Fonteva seamlessly integrates with Salesforce, making member data management and analysis more good. The customizable dash are a big plus for tracking key metrics and generating report. However, I feel that the user interface could be more flexible and less complicated to enhance navigation. Fonteva is a reliable option for organizations already using Salesforce, but for teams new to the Salesforce environment, there's definitely a learning curve involved.

The platform’s event management tools are robust and user-friendly. Whether planning small workshops or large conferences, Fonteva simplifies the process with features for registration, ticketing, and event promotion. The integration with payment gateways and real-time analytics adds a layer of convenience and insight.  Fonteva’s interface is designed with usability in mind. Its clean, intuitive design ensures that users can navigate the system effortlessly, reducing the learning curve and increasing productivity.

Being a data analyst, I value Fonteva’s seamless integration with Salesforce, which simplifies member data management and analysis. Customizable dashboards are great for tracking metrics and creating reports. But the user interface needs to be more flexible, with less fuss to improve navigation. Fonteva is a solid choice for organizations using Salesforce, but if your team is new to the Salesforce ecosystem, expect to learn.

My personal favourites are ,

It is an all in one platform tool which allows us to manage everything in it.

It gives an extraodinary options for customization.

Finally this is Built on Salesforce so it gives powerful access for CRM.

Fonteva AMS is one of the best out there in my opinion. It has best in class reliability with number of useful features. Never faced any major concern. Good work.

Fonteva has been a nightmare to work with.  They nickeled and dimed us, things promised at implementation never worked or weren't even possible, and they routinely directed us to 3rd party companies for tech support because they weren't able to handle our caseload. We switched to another AMS a year ago but for some reason Fonteva still allows our members to access it and renew their membership - so members that had a bookmark or the old AMS link saved are renewing through Fonteva.  We can't get a list of who these members are from Fonteva, and they wanted to charge us $25,000 (not a typo) to disconnect this.  It's robbery and I wouldn't want any other unsuspecting nonprofit to find themselves in this situation. 

Fonteva’s products are highly favoured for management on salesforce. They save membership organizations money by facilitating the customization of community websites to their members without requiring them to spend a lot of money on starting from scratch.
 

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.

I've been using Fonteva for 5+ years. We fell in love with Salesforce instantly but needed an AMS package to sit on top of Salesforce. After evaluating all options, we went with Fonteva as our AMS platform. The implementation started out rough because we hired the wrong consultants and that led us to have buyers' remorse with Fonteva. However, after quickly realizing the hired consultants were not suited for this type of implementation, we went back out to market and found a phenomenal team that had the experience and was able to help drive us to go live. From that point on, we knew that in order for us to be successful with Salesforce/Fonteva, we had to invest in education to our staff and outside consultants.

After investing a lot of time in learning Fonteva, we started to reap the benefits! For the first time, we were able to measure our KPIs with reports/dashboards. Also, we were able to integrate other 3rd party software solutions with Salesforce/Fonteva and that removed a lot of administrative time/costs. I'm very happy with the decision we made in selecting Fonteva and would strongly recommend others considering Fonteva. However, you must invest in education with your organization's power users as soon as possible and hire reputable consultants to assist your implementation or business needs.

For those interested, we use Fonteva for membership, events, eCommerce, and more.

Fonteva is modern and web-based. It’s just intuitive. The reporting has been phenomenal; I can easily figure out a way to get any information I want and if there isn't a canned report already prepared, I can easily add pieces from different objects to get the report to have what I need. So that's been great and a drastic improvement from our prior SQL based software. Our invoicing and our reporting process have also been effective.

We use full Fonteva so we use it every day to manage events and membership. Such a good tool to use!

My company has used Fonteva for over 6 years. They make it easy for membership organizations to tailor member 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. 

We are a complicated organization with lots of products (events, books, certification, training courses as well as advertising). We had very high hopes for this product - but honestly we have not been able to launch after almost two years and contracting with what we were told was an "award winning" Fonteva partner - FushionSpan. The product, nor the support around it,  are up to the task. Maybe it would work for a small membership only organization with on-staff Salesforce and Fonteva expertise. We have been told repeatedly that certain tasks are doable  including inventory management, product sales, bulk uploads....the list goes on and on; only to be told later - no it can't. This has been prominent from both vendors. DO NOT believe Fonteva as an organization will support you in any way on implementation - they will not and do not seem capable or committed to this. It isn't their business model. Our experience, and I have been dealing directly with an owner for over a year.

The latest challenge has been data conversion. While we have a great vendor, Intellidata, the system speed in this hosted enviroment is painstakingly slow, especially related to uploading bulk data.

Be prepared to spend lots more than they tell you and get much less than you anticipate. Immediately, day one, they demand licenses for all potential users while you have no production use of the system for, in our case years. You will pay excessively other vendors to "gather requirements", make promises and then tell you" It cant be done". We are literally paying full price for a system we haven't processed one single live transaction in - two years later!

I've been in this business for 30+ years and have never had an experience like this. I've been personally involved in half a dozen similiar projects over these years. If you challenge either of these vendors on this point they will tell you that our organization is to blame. I ask who is getting paid, regardless of performance?

I will update this review when and if we launch. My message here is DO NOT just talk to the references given - seek out others. Seek out those that are in the process of configuring the solution and others that have recently left. I understand there are a growing number in this later category. I am happy to share details of our expereince to date with either Fonteva, FushionSpan, Intellidate, HubSpot, LearnUpon, Kentico or HigherLogic.

I will definitely update this after launch, assuming we get there. I know the old saying, no pain no gain, but this has been way too painful.

UPDATE: We have finally launched!

I promised to update after launch, and we have been on the Fonteva platform for about 6-8 months. Here are my impressions:

1. My opinion has not changed about Fonteva - overall. If I had to do it over again, knowing what I know today,  I would not recommend Fonteva for our organization. Why?

a. The platform is not mature enough. Most transactions (sales, membership, invoicing, customer service, etc.) involve more steps and are more complicated than our previous platform. Errors are easier to make and harder to fix - with very little ability to "guide" the processing of transactions or events. Our Customer Service team, after months of training and working on the platform, still feels nervous about making errors. There are too many fields and screens that are required to properly record transactions/adjustments. We have an excellent CS team and I know they are trying their best to work with the platform.

b. Responsiveness to issue directly related to the Fonteva platform remains very poor. Some examples - Years of continuous membership does not calculate correctly. It has taken ISA and our vendor FushionSpan MONTHS to convince Fonteva it is their issue. Even after acknowledgmment the stock answer is "base issue - it will need to be worked into a future update - can't commit to a time frame". We lost our custom message when a customer CC is declined. Reported the issue 5+ months ago. Fought to prove it wasnt working, fought to get it addressed, fought to get the issue resolved/tested, first fix didnt work, then when it was finally "fixed" we can no longer customize the message. The out of the box message is completely inappropriate - from a customer service and user experience perspective - and Fonteva refuses to commit to us ever regaining the prior functionality of a  customized message related to CC declines. The "standard" message appears in the upper left corner with some cryptic error code and is barely recognizable and includes no message about what to do next. I have many other examples.

c. Fonteva has been sold/has new "investors" - and there are few good outcomes when this has occured with other vendors in this market. The standard story - nothing is going to change,  we just plan to get better and better. Next message is, oh, those things we told you were in the works, well all that customer feedback  and prioritizing of the roadmap is out the window. I suspect this is a "what's the cashflow look like and how long until we can get a payback". I have seen no indication of product enhancement, development acceleration or "vision" to get the product where it needs to be.

d. The idea that "configuration" vs customization is a panacea wrt updates and/or additional work has not been our expereince. Each new requirement and or upgrade has just as much likelyhood of breaking something as before. We still must do extensive testing of all new work and any new upgrade to make sure it doesnt break anything that currently works. This is very time consuming - both from staff and vendors - and when something does break, which is often, it starts the finger pointing about is it the "upgrade" or the "configuration" that needs to be adjusted. We, as the customer, are always footing the bill for the testing, research and ultimately the fix - regardless of where the fault lies.

e. System performance is unacceptable and ability to improve VERY limited. Salesforce, when used for its core functionality, doesn't seem to have issues. We have 3 instances of salesforce, 2 typically and one with Fonteva. The Fonteva instance has significant issues with integrations and triggers when large data sets are involved. I've heardd all the various reasons why this is the case with daily API limits imposed by SF for hosted apps...blah, blah blah. I've been told how Fonteva and other integrated apps all have to allocate/share these Salesforce imposed limits. We are not a large organization and the fact we can't "turn up" the performance of our system makes me VERY concerned about the long term viability of this solution for ISA. I can't fathom how a larger organiztion could even operate on a hosted Salesforce platform running Fonteva. No solutions have been presented by Fonteva/Salesforce or any of our vendors to these ongoing performance issues.

f. Basic membership organization issues, let's use membership retention reporting (statistics), are VERY difficult to obtain. Yes, you can "configure" just about any membership scenario - but that leaves you completely on your own to report on these from a member count or retention perspective. Another interesting example - we are discussing converting to an annual membership expiration - so all members renew at the same time of the year. Yes, Fonteva can do that - but we would lose our ability to offer multiple year memberships. So with anniversary date expirations we can offer 2 and 3 year memberships but if everyone expired on 31 December we can only offer single year memberships? That makes perfect sense!

I could go on and on.

We do continue to use FushionSpan, and I understand they are growing rapidly. My guess is this has a lot to do with the fact that organizations can not leverage Fonteva effectively without extensive external support. This adds a significant cost to the basic care and feeding of the Fonteva AMS platform. Without FushionSpan this platform would literally be unusable by ISA.

Remain happy to talk directly to anyone interested.

Many AMS platforms built on code require hours of development to complete. Things like custom fields or integrating forms into event registration couldn't be handled in-house unless you employed a developer. Fonteva takes a lot of those tasks and gives staff the tools to accomplish them. Fonteva's ease of use and ample trianing empowers users to get creative and enhance their own environment. Sure, there will definitely be opportunities to customize with paid development, but you have a lot more flexibility to simplify complex tasks and complete them yourself.

We have been using Fonteva for 3 years now and it has helped shaped the way we our moving forward with our multiple associations. Fonteva Membership has helped us manage our memberships, increasing our ability to monitor engagement with reporting. Also utilizing the Lightning Communities has given us the ability to create member portals, allowing our members to subscribe, renew and interact with other members. The platform and technology Fonteva provides has helped change our future and given us the ability to provide more to our staff and members. Also the support they provide along the way gives us the confidence to continue moving forward with no thoughts of slowing down.

Fonteva as an AMS is a series of Apps built upon Salesforce. Within each app are Custom Objects, each with their own set of Fields and Relationships to other Objects within the system. There's no real magic here.

I strongly feel that our move to a Salesforce-based system was a strong move. However, the Fonteva experience has not lived up to the hype.

When you see the reviews on G2Crowd and other software-based systems, understand that these reviews are incentivized during training. Every review posted is rewarded with a gift card. At this point in onboarding, virtually noone is within implementation yet, and everyone is excited at the possibilities. The training makes the system look easy to use, and people are delighted to submit positive reviews.

Fast forward to implementation. Fonteva has changed its business model entirely where they typically no longer do implemeations themselves. They have developed relationships with other external companies to handle all implementations including side-by-side configuration, training, testing, and data transfer. This will incur more costs.

We were not within that model, and their Managed Services team did our implementation. There were several staff changes mid-stream, and, subsequently, we had extra time added to our implemenation for people to get up-to-speed in our process. The newer people did not appear to have the depth of knowledge of some of the previous workers. Many requirements went unfulfilled. Moreover, we have had to conform our business processes to fit within the constraints of their system. Despite being on a "base" system, we experienced many delays, bad data transfers, and misconfigurations.

The eCommerce system is among the most troubling part of the system, particularly as it pertains to the eStore. The inabilities to properly use standard eCommerce data structures, categories to which you can link, rich text editing for descriptions, and general SEO were among the top disappointments of this system. We have had problems too with automations including invoicing. Moreover, we've experienced problems with their Events with lots of documentation on the issues and no movement toward resolving the issues.

One of the biggest concerns is their two "free" upgrades every year. There are patches to fix things distributed frequently, but without notice to the admins. Admins are not trained to perform upgrades during training. We have two in-house admins who have attended all trainings, and neither have been trained in that part of the system. Therefore, you must rely on either Fonteva's Managed Services or a partner program to perform the upgrades. Each upgrade can take 22-100 hours depending on who your service provider is. Hourly rates are between $125-250. Fonteva users including admins and staff are expected to perform all testing themselves. 

Also, be aware that Fonteva will always convince you to conform to their system as previously mentioned. This is for good reason... upgrades may not take any customizations into account, and, therefore, customizations may require to be completely redone adding to the hours spend and, subsequently, to the dollars spent.

Part of what is also leading to our struggles is that -- while we can integrate with Salesforce very well for email marketing, marketing automation, and other systems -- accessing the important membership data within Fontava's custom objects oftentimes results in the need for more complex integrations. For instance, Badges are used to denote what kind of membership (or Subscription) someone has, and each Subscriptions have Current Term Start Date and Current Term End Date. However, these do not always show on the Contact record which is used for most integrations. Therefore, doing automations such as abandoned cart emails, receipt emails, renewal emails, welcome emails, and other triggered automations normally easily handled through other standard eCommerce systems either are impossible to do or are unreliable.

Finally, integration with partners such as HigherLogic are not quite up to par. For instance, the integration with WordPress requires both SAML and OAuth, though originally we were scoped with SAML only. Upon launch, this added many additional hours than the forecasted LOE (level of effort). We used a vendor suggested by their team for the plugin and vetted by them in a meeting early on in the process. However, at integration, they claimed they gave us no such recommendation despite evidence in emails and project management supporting the contrary. Furthermore, they only have documentation for integration with Higher Logic for SAML. However, for the Higher Logic app, OAuth is required. There's no documentation for the Connected App between Fonteva and Higher Logic via OAuth, so our integration could not happen, and we had to forego the app.

To be clear, we went through a lengthy RFP and vetting process to find a new AMS system. We employed a consultant and had numerous demos and interviews with other users. However, there was a lot of misinformation presented to us. We are limping along on this system, and are trying to find ways to make things better within the Salesforce environment. We've noticed a lot of other associations having questions about Fonteva and reporting issues strongly on ASAE Collaborate and on other discussion boards. I hope this incentivizes change, frankly.