Fonteva

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. 

We conducted an in-depth search and review to evaluate and select an Association Management Software (AMS) for our medium sized Association. There are a variety of reasons as to why we selected Fonteva, but to summarize here are our main reasons for selecting this product.

1. User Experience - The SF Lightning and Fonteva user experience for our end users is clean, simple, and easy to learn. The flexibility it offers is clear and concise to staff and will make their day to day work much more efficient. The system is highly configurable.

2. Community Groups - For a chapter based association like ours there will be many benefits to having this feature enabled. Chapters will have a variety of accessible features that our current AMS doesn't easily offer.

3. Integration - We use a wide variety of other software to run our organization. Salesforce and Fonteva's ability to connect with and integrate is simple and cost efficient.

I highly recommend this a solution for your Association.

Overall Fonteva has been easy to use. Fonteva Training has helped in understanding the product and how our orginzation will adapt into Fonteva. 

Fonteva's MemberNation product is a robust tool that is configurable to any size organization. Our process began with an in depth 4 day administrator training. Their knowledgeable staff have been very engaged in our organization and have been helping us customize MemberNation to fit our unique needs. Being based on Salesforce allows them to service many organization sizes. Coming off an old legacy system we have a lot of bad business practices and their implementation team have also been helpful to us in understanding best business practices and transitioning us to them.

Extremely easy to use and being built into salesforce makes the data available for easy reporting. Fonteva allows us to combine outdated systems into one unified place to access out member data.