Personify Review

The version of Personify that we use has been around a long time.  This review is not for their most current product, which we do not have and cannot review.  If you are looking for a review of Personify Cloud, this may be marginally helpful.

It performs traditional and core AMS features in a generally robust and reliable manner, albeit with complexity, and in the version we have, it's pretty stale.  Basic things do what you expect them to do and if you want to customize or configure, the system is designed for that.  Once encouraging customers to do their own customizations (long ago), Personify has done a 360 on that and not only encourages staying close to base as a concept, but also prefers/advises/requires that you use their professional services to ensure quality control and effective support.  There is something to be said for that philosophy, although the lack of open environment, development/partner network and choice leads to very high costs to customizations.

The eBusiness provides flexibility to run on a select number of CMS systems, which we leverage.  Again, however, the architecture on our version is stale, there are complexities involved and it's expensive to modify/customize and slow to compile.   Their eBusiness needs a major overhaul to be feature competitive with modern, natively cloud-based eCommerce systems.

The analytics and reporting is also pretty stale...again, our version is stale, so this is not reflective of their most current product.  After an attempt to enter the Business Intelligence market some years ago, Personify abandoned that effort.  There are no BI capabilities, although some of the major BI players in the association space have existing integrations into Personify, which is a better model IMO.  While I don't think an AMS needs to have BI capabilities, the Data Analyzer tool for self-help ad-hoc reporting is margially adequate.

Other modules like Meetings, Committees, Advertisiing, Credentialing and Fundraising work at somewhat adequate levels, generally strong in the database/back-end feature set, but lacking in the online toolset.  There are superior tools available in the marketplace for all of them, if you are willing to abandon the "all-in-one" AMS model for them.  

Personify does offer the Shuffle Exchange iPaaS to ease integrations between systems, which we have adapted to great success.

Customer Service and Account Management are hit-or-miss, with more misses than hits.   If you are looking for someone to manage their relationship and stay on top of what their client's need, I don't know that Personify will meet the bill.  My experience is that when I'm not actively managing the strategic relationship, we are forgotton.  Personify has tried different models over the years, and to their credit, each new Management Team tries to remedy the problem, but nothing has really worked well for a long time, IMO.

Personify has a pathway to their Cloud version, which is more aligned with SaaS and has a fresh, browser interface with a new set of APIs and other foundational technology.  Again, I cannot speak to their new version with any creditibility or experience.    Simiarly, Personify has acquired new products over the recent years, Wild Apricot, MemberClicks and A2Z.  If you are using, or plan to use one or more of those products, there might be synergies for you, I'm not sure.  We don't have any of those, so their introduction into the Personify family has had limited value to us as a customer.  YMMV.