Fonteva Review

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.