Fonteva Review

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.