Fonteva

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.

Fonteva could be amazing but it falls short in several areas. I'm concerned that they cannot keep up with the growth of their customer base. Changes are coming to the structure of the AMS that will break many of our established workflows, reporting structures, and integrations. Fonteva says they will help us with the changeover but our history with them has shown that it can take far too long to get projects moving or arrive at a practical solution. 

Staff is great though, and support team is knowlegable. Wish there were more of them. 

I've been using Fonteva for about 5 months now. As a membership professional (non-IT person) I've found it fairly easy to pick-up. I love the ability to customize our join process (a luxury we've never had). The online training and customer support is always helpful as I try to learn new things. I'm enjoying all the features of the reports and dashboards to help better utilize our data. This is much better than our previous AMS! 
 

Fonteva gives you the best combination of a hugely wide platform in Salesforce meaning you can roll it out easily across your organisation, with the depth of AMS functionality needed specifically for running complex memberships and events. The combination gives you an upgradeable cloud solution that you will not outgrow.

My experience of implementing it has been positive and the support provided was good.

Our company recently changed over from CRM to Fonteva at the end of July. Although it’s still new to our association, the benefits already are beginning to shine. This system is so intuitive & user-friendly. Everything is all in one hub & all the wording is very easy to understand. Can’t wait to see how this continues to improve our processes over time! 

I am really enjoying the Fonteva platform and the ease that it has brought to managing our association. The best feature by far is the ability to look up names and see popular nicknames show as well. Such as Dave for David. That helps to be sure that you are capturing the right member and since it is so quick there is less time fumbling around. I have been happy with the tools we have been given and am excited for future rollouts such as the Lightning experience for users.

We've been with Fonteva for 2 years. It is critical to have a well-qualified and experienced SalesForce and Fonteva integration team involved. Previous administration attempted to go with low cost, low experience integration team and it cost us dearly. Be ready to spend on the ongoing development costs as it is a very customizable system and therefore requires a significant investment in initial development and ongoing feature enhancements.

Their strength is in the membership functions, event management features are not as well developed as other industry standard systems (i.e. Cvent, etc.).

I began using Fonteva in 2015. Fonteva is built on Salesforce, which brings its own Pros & Cons, so let's start with Salesforce:

Salesforce is super customizable. It can do a ton (plenty of resources available online that can show you). This also makes it very complex and the learning curve is steep. It also means it's easy to accidentaly customize something in the wrong way and break something. You want to make sure you have someone who knows Salesforce or have funds budgeted on an ongoing basis to contract out to someone who does.

Salesforce is extremely reliable, widely supported, has an active user community for troubleshooting or searching for ideas, plenty of experts out there, and integrates with a ton of other applications. But you'll pay more (potentially a lot more) for a lot of those integrations. Also, those integrations are all built to talk to Salesforce, not Fonteva. So typically you need to manually tweak integrations to make sure they work with the Fonteva tools. Which brings me to...

Salesforce can be expensive -- user licenses are just shy of $2000/yr. and depending on how much data you have, you could pay additional costs for data storage, contract work, etc. In addition -- and this can be confusing but is important -- part of Fonteva's business model is that they are a reseller/"wholesaler" of Salesforce licenses, which is fine. Essentially, going through Fonteva, you purchase your Salesforce licenses at the same price you normally would if you had gone direct -- except now you get access to Fonteva's software and Fonteva gets their cut from buying the licenses at wholesale discount. It's a win-win with one very important CAVEAT: the licenses you purchase through Fonteva do not include access to Leads, Opportunities and Campaigns. You may not need access to those (and personally I don't think you do, but I'm not running your business) but, do some homework up front because if you indeed need access to those, you will have to buy anyone that needs that access a second license direct from Salesforce at pretty much the same price (...each person needing a dual license would cost in total nearly $4000 per year).

Ok, now onto Fonteva specifically. Early on, we had a lot of issues with the product -- partly because the product was still young, partly because we were dealing with that steep learning curve of Salesforce. To Fonteva's credit, they have constantly improved the product with a new releases every 6 months or so. New features, streamline existing ones, bug fixes, etc. It provides tools for most everything you would need: e-commerce, event reg, CRM, member directory, member portal, membership renewals, etc. (Reporting is also very strong, but that's Salesforce functionality, not Fonteva.). I am not an accountant, but I have talked to folks in finance from different orgs who use it and say that it is quirky; so you may want to make sure your finance person(s) are able to look under the hood.

Customer service: early on this was a problem and is something they have 100% improved. It used to be that every support ticket was billable. That has changed now to be dependent on the cause of the issue. If it's their bug, they fix it. If you screwed something up, you pay for them to fix it. Totally reasonable. We have encountered bugs and they do tend to take a little time to get fixed (weeks), so I dock points on the product reliability for that but not the customer service.

For a small association, I can't say it's justifiable unless by chance you happen to have a Salesforce pro in house. Otherwise, you might be biting off more than you can chew. As you get bigger from a mid-size association or larger, that can devote more resources to the AMS, it might be worth it as you are able to take advantage of all of its capabilities rather than be overwhelmed by them.

Easy to use UI. Good support for documentation. More online support. But lacking in security and deployments.

Our medium sized, membership-based non-profit transitioned to Fonteva ~18 months ago. While we should have handled some things differently with the implementation, Fonteva is a great product. Although we are 18 months live, we are now getting a full understanding of all of the capabilities and ease of use Fonteva Membership has to offer. 

Although I am a PM and end-user, I have been able to take on more administrator tasks to take advantage of all things Fonteva has to offer. 

The customer service and training provided by Fonteva is exceptional. All staff in the building are extremely welcoming and collaborative.

Extends salesforce in ways that make sense for membership and event management. Almost meets all of our needs without much development.

Robust events builder and management. This is something which is absent from our current CRM. I'm not sure if we're going to use the events management but from an admin perspective it is mature enough to handle our attendance for our smaller events.

Great training and support staff!

Nothing to dislike. I do not have experience with other Salesforce implementations so I don't have comparisons.

Consider admin training a must. It was very comprehensive. As someone who had very little Salesforce experience to begin with I now feel very comfortable with Fonteva setup.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are moving from an old, antiquated CRM with lots of customization to Fonteva. Because of all of our custom code it was difficult or impossible to upgrade. Fonteva handles the development here so we will not have to worry about it!

Friendly UI and easy to use.

My organization started using Fonteva a few months ago. The transition from an in-house program to this was challenging but Fonteva made the transition very smooth. They keep us up to date with the latest news and updates in the system so we can make the appropriate business decisions. A lot of work underway but we are in good hands with Fonteva team.

We selected Fonteva over all the other AMSs in large part because of their SPARK framework.  SPARK makes integrations much easier to develop, maintain and troubleshoot.  SPARK plus the SFDC framework. Has allowed us to expand and improve all our integrations.  I highly recommend Fonteva for your AMS

Fonteva is built on Salesforce platform which also comes with its AppExchange market place. It is a great ecosystem that comes with continued innovacations from Salesforce and Fonteva. It is the wining solution in the long run. This ecosystem is similar to what Apple has done its own iOS and AppStore. This is the AMS solution you can count on that will grow with you.

In order to support our robust and complicated membership price rules, reporting needs, board expectations, and committee/community group nuances, we had to do a lot of customizations to the out-of-the-box product in order to succeed. It’s wonderful that the system supports these intense customizations, but sometimes frustrating when changes fail between UAT and production, or when normal work processes are delayed waiting for the buildout of custom objects, roll up fields, and price rules. Overall, the service that we’ve received from the Fonteva team has been great (partially because we’re willing to pop down to their office to talk things out in person!), and I’ve been very grateful to our BAs and support team. It’s been two months of tribulations after go-live, after a long discovery and implementation process, but I see the light at the end of the tunnel with this robust software.

Fonteva has built an amazing product on Salesforce. We did our go live over 2 years ago and have helped us grow our AMS since the beginning.