Breadth not Depth
We have been using YourMembership for a few years now. Our annual spend on IT has more than doubled since adopting YM as our AMS.
The web site design process (we chose a custom design) was a bit fraught. YM uses a proprietary content management system built on .NET, I believe, and the CMS would appear to be pretty challenged in terms of page template design and flexibility. We were told a number of times that what we wanted to do on various pages could not be done, or not be done easily, so we ended up with a site with fewer design features than we had before (coding html and css ourselves).
The kinds of things we were asking for were not out of the ordinary - essentially a variety of layouts, custom forms, advertising banners, and image sliders. Bear in mind that you will generally have to make many design compromises when working with a combined CMS/AMS, but whatever CMS platform YM has standardized on seems pretty limited. But, in the end, we got a working site that conformed to most of the design requirements at the end of the process and the site did not look like a standard YM site.
Membership management is a strong suit with the software. We have a simple membership structure with organizational members and have been able to relate people to their organizations easily - our prior solution (which was custom built on LAMP was less capable). Membership renewal is pretty straightforward and membership management is easy - which it should be.
My biggest concern with YM is that many of its other features: event management and registration, permission-based email marketing, and credentialling are all either pretty weak or inflexible in their implementation. We have had to change business processes to accommodate the software over and over again instead of the other way around. We knew this sort of thing would happen, but we were surprised how often and in how many different places. Suffice to say, we chose the software based on our requirements list, but found that some of the software's capabilities are so diminished that we really can't use the built in functionality.
We have opted, for mission critical processes, to use other software or services and incur the cost of programming API's that interact with YM. This has worked especially well for our marketing department which completed a sucessful integration with Infusionsoft. Now we can share member information with our marketing platform AND have a capable marketing platform to work with. We will probably do the same with event registration and certification. We also lean heavily on tools like Formstack for collecting information the YM system doesn't and Squarespace creating landing pages or microsites. We can create an event-specific micro site for a few hundred dollars a year, the quote for the same from YM was many thousands of dollars and a very long timeline.
All of this leads me to believe we should have focused on a simpler membership-focused product and selected best-of-breed apps to manage other parts of our association business. We could have spent more of our budget on integration, and gotten better tools to work with, if we had spent less on our "all in one" association management solution. Now we are doing both, which just feels like wasting money.
I have started researching other options, but the integration issues, especially with event management seem potentially difficult. Perhaps I'll look for the ReviewMySystemsIntegrator site next.
In short YM does membership well, it does a lot of things, but it does not do most of them very well.
