Naylor Association Solutions Review

Over the 6 years that we have been a client of Naylor/Timberlake, we have experienced good and bad things within our database. 

Good:

• Customer Service - they are usually very responsive and can answer the questions that we have had. If they do not know the answer, they take a few hours to days to respond with the help that we need.
• Events Module - It is one of the best features on the system. In the past 6 years, they have made improvements to it.
• Website Creation - It is really easy to create pages for the website. Especially if you do not have experience with coding. However, it is somewhat cumbersome to work in when you have to edit pages. There are times when we have to continue to save and check and edit and then save and check again with the webpage because the editor system didn't like what we did or how we entered.
• Reporting - The reporting from Naylor is a lot better than our last AMS. You have the option to build your own reports which is great. 

Bad:

• Chaptering - Naylor considers chapters a "committee" which is super frustrating for associations like us. We have 50 chapters that are under our association, but are run by volunteers of that chapter. When a new member joins, the system says "Committees" and not chapters. Before we signed on with Naylor, we asked them if they had chapter options and understood how chapters worked. They said yes. That is NOT the case at all. This is one of the most frustrating things within this platform.
• Duplicates - you cannot delete or merge duplicate records AT ALL within Naylor. We have asked them to add this as a new feature for years and they do not consider this a priority. All associations unfortunately deal with duplicate entries at some time or another. This should absolutely be a feature within every AMS.
• Integrations - 
  Informz: We were one of the beta testers for the syncing feature between Naylor and Informz. It does not work at all. There is no activity sync at this time so we are basically paying for Informz and not able to use it to its full capacity. We were informed by Naylor that the activity sync works, but Informz said they are waiting on Naylor. It is a lot of back and forth and no responsibility has been taken.
  QuickBooks:  The system does not integrate correctly with QuickBooks unfortunately.
• Financials - Inability to have more than one GL code per transaction.
• Blogs - The part of the system is okay, but when a person comments on a blog post, it does not send the original author an email of the comment so I have to manually go in and check each blog post every week to see if there were comments and then email the author to visit their article to comment. It's a lot of work on my end that I do not have time to do.
• Advertising - The only trackable ads are on the homepage per our theme. But they provide options to add advertisements throughout your website...they just aren't trackable. It seems like the advertising module was simply an afterthought.
• Organizational membership feature - This is not easy to use. We are a membership association for individuals, however some organizations like to pay for their employee's memberships so we created an org membership dues category. Unfortunately, you cannot merge people in and out of this membership, so if Sally Smith leaves ABC organization for XYZ organization, and has been a member for 20 years, she has to create a brand new account and since we cannot merge her information to her new account, she loses everything in her record.
• Donations - It is completely disconnected from everything else. You cannot do a membership payment and a donation on the same transaction.
• Certifications - very basic feature that you cannot post details within. We have an actual credential and there is no way to track any information within Naylor.
• Store features - There is no shopping cart feature where you can visit your cart at any time. The store features are very lacking. A non-member/potential member cannot find the store within our theme easily at all. They basically either have to receive a link to purchase from there or create a new account to purchase. If they do not purchase a membership with their purchase, we do not see any of their contact information to be able to reach out to them to promote membership or events.
• Forum - Naylor's forum is lacking. It speaks volumes that they don't even use their own forum for their clients to communicate...they use Higher Logic. We moved away from their forum and went with Higher Logic for our membership community forum. It was a very wise choice on our part!

Thanks!