Hard to manage an AMS for a very large association
Submitted Jul. 8, 2015
At the American Chemical Society, we are a large association (>161,000 members and numerous other users/stakeholders). We switched to NetForum several years ago to replace a proprietary system, which was getting long in the tooth and hard to maintain. NetForum has been a robust solution that supports many of the customizations that we've needed, including management of local sections (chapters), technical divisions, our extensive governance structure, and integration with a wide range of other systems. On the plus side, it has been robust and reliable. On the minus side, it does require a team of several dedicated IT staff to keep our implementation updated and working, the promise of widespread staff access to business intelligence has not yet been realized, and we still have to run separate systems for meeting management, abstracts management, web content management, institutional customer relationship management, and much more. NetForum has proven to be a robust hub for our individual customer data, though.
