Might be fine if you are a stodgy old-school association- with no need of the modern internet world
Frankly, This is a negative review. Overall my big complaint is that YM seems to be living in an internet world of at least 10 years ago. If you are an organization that simply has a lot of members and does not care about growth, has very little entrepeneurial spirit, it might be fine for you. But if you are interested in growth, selling trainings, this is not the AMS for you. In all fairness, I really don't know what else is out there. But there simply has to be AMS that can do better than YM
Lets begin at the beginning. I actually was using affiniscape when they were aquired by YM a number of years ago. The implementation of the new system was a nightmare. When my staff and I talk about it, we still shudder. IN fact it was the trauma of this move, that has probably kept me using this company, since it is the devil I know. The idea of going through another implementation nightmare is just too much to bare.
When we first started, I was told that website redesigns would be included in the fee. We started to look at a website redesign and found out that it would be very expensive. What works. Well it keeps track of our members. we can charge them their dues. It has auto renew. It has a certain amount of automation about sending emails for people who have not paid their dues, but it is fairly limited. The reporting system is not very user friendly for us. Given that YM has over 1000 clients, you would think they would come up with a host of basic reports would be easy to use, but they don't. If they do, I don;t know about it. Which is another problem. Ther is virtually no communication from them to member about new things.
We do use their conference module. That works fairly well. It allows for member pricing and non member pricing. The only problem is that the actual webpages that you would want to send people to tell then about the conference are ugly or very difficult to make attractive. So we have to use another website and then send them into YM only for the payment part.
Their E-mail module is horrible and has not been updated in years. Very little in the way of metrics, open rates etc. We actually don;t use it and pay for awebber, because we have a lot of customers that are not members, or people who are just on our mailing list. It is almost impossible to categorize them in YM
YM has really weird ideas about things. For instance, everyone in the data base is considered a member. They might be considered a non dues paying member. But they are considered a member. This does weird things to their reporting.
YM has a lot of bells and whistles that we don't find useful, and does not have things that we think would be super helpful. For instance, we would love to have an affilate system integrated so that we could do affiliate marketing for our conference or our programs.
Here is another issue tht just happened late in 2019. We wanted to update our privacy settings to be more in compliance with GDPR. I consulted with YM about various things on how to do this. I was given wrong information several times, that I only caught because I know to double and triple check everything. Most importantly, I wanted people to be abe to set their own privacy settings. My understanding GDPR requires that a person makes an affirmative choice for things that are more public. Ufortuantely YM does not allow this. Members are required to accept more public options and then elect to make them more private. This is the opposite of what I believe GDPR requires.
Here is one more annoying thing, that speaks to the lack of detail. YM has an ability to show approximate currency conversions. Okay that is nice. But it does not work if you have an early bird price for your event. So the person is given a totally wrong number. Yes you can turn the entire thing off. But, why do things half way?
