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The AMS landscape is evolving rapidly. With the ever-changing nature of technology, older comments can sometimes provide a skewed view to the person seeking feedback. Archived reviews are more than 60 months old, and aren't counted towards the average five star ratings or percent recommended.
iMIS is a great system, but the structure of how to keep it operational not so much. We are a small association and in order to use the AMS we have to go through a reseller who charges us for phone calls/emails and support. We have a few additional add-ons to accomplish what we need and they are two other resellers of our AMS so they don't always place nice together.
Our users have been very happy with the functionality of the RiSE platform in version 20.2. They find the web version easier to adapt to over the desktop version. We upgraded to 20.2 in March 2017. Since this was an upgrade, implementation went very well. We are still in the process of transitioning users to the web version. Our concern is not being able to be in full high-availability mode. We have manual process in place to switch servers (application & SQL) if needed. We understand true high-availability will be available soon.
I'll caveat this review with the fact that it was never properly launched with our staff nearly 18 years ago. From day one, there were issues that could have been mitigated with proper training and actually configuring it to our needs. That said, later attempts to configure this system required outside sources. As well, any custom reports needed to be handled by outside sources which drove our expenses up and delayed tasks.
At both my current and last shops, we've iMIS. First experience with membership relationship software in the Association space. Prior, I've worked in nonprofit fundraising so I was familiar with biggies like Raiser's Edge and Team Approach as well as email/advo tools like GetActive and Convio. On one hand, iMIS just seems like it's too much product for a small association like ours. We ARE aspirational and often do create needs for it that need customization but the cost seems high for us.
We are on iMIS version 15.2 and have been using the product for several years. We find the product to be quite robust and flexible to handle new business processes as needed. The product has limitations and is not the most intuitive but overall is efficient.
We are beginning to outgrow iMIS. It has been great up until now, but as we are looking to get more sophisticated we are evaluating if iMIS truly can meet our needs and keep up with us.
iMIS is a powerful database, but using it to its fullest capabilities can be a challenge. Without extensive training, it serves as an overly-expensive platform for mundane tasks. Customization can make it powerful, but they too are expensive and can be undone by upgrades. For associations with the resources and time to invest, iMIS can be the correct AMS.
We implemented iMIS 15 in 2012 and recently upgraded to iMiS 20, with iFinity (ASI partner). We have 9 users the system is integrated to the website and is used to drive all of our marketing and comms. We find the system to be user-friendly and powerful for most users. Beware - people will need a lot of training, so 'casual' use does not work, but if you have happy to invest, then it works really well. The website and finance integration are reliable and gives us what we need.
iMIS 20 isn't a bad AMS, especially compared to some of the horror stories I've heard. But it is clunky, is hard to customize, and can sometimes have glitches. However, it is much improved over 15.2, and maybe they're on the right track. The RiSE website platform would get most of my scorn. It is poorly structured and extremely difficult to work with once you pass an intermediate level of need.
When I joined our organization 2 years ago, we had been using iMIS for more than 8 years. We'd used iMIS 15 and 20. In my opinion, I've found that iMIS works ok if you have a straightforward membership management program with very little requirements for advanced features. I've used and implemented other association management systems before (the big ones, you know the names) and they are far superior to iMIS. iMIS appears to be the laggard of the bunch and certainly not progressive nor innovative. Reliable, yes! It works. Understanding the underlying data architecture...