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Potentially good for direct membership orgs, bad for trade associations

Customer Service
4
Does your AMS vendor respond to your organization's requests in a timely and thorough way?
Ease of Use
3
Reliability
4
Customization
2
Version: 
Cloud/web based so always current version
Membership Size: 
101-500
Industry Type: 
Education
Organization Type: 
Trade Membership
Primary Job Function: 
Technology
Number of Years Using the AMS: 
Less than 1 year

YM is the second AMS I've had the experience to administrate and care for. My previous association operated like a trade association (memberships sold primarily to orgs), and my new association operates much the same. YM appears to work well if you have individual memberships but it is definitely not suited for orgs that sell their memberships to entities.

My association didn't choose it directly. They were force-migrated when Affiniscape was bought/sold by YM and YM migrated customers off of Affiniscape to YM. 

On the positive side:

  • It's pretty reliable (just a few rare errors each month when saving a record but usually the change is saved)
  • The web interface is pretty straight forward
  • The feature set is pretty good, especially given how affordable it is
  • The website CMS is decent and includes version control / change rollbacks
  • You can easily add a lot of custom fields for the member directory (CRM)
  • The company continues to make improvements (although most seem modest)

 

On the negative side:

  • It's great that you can add custom fields but organizing their appearance is tedious; we also wish we could put them into collapsible areas or tabs for a nicer UX
  • It doesn't support employment history tracking or relationship records / tracking
  • When inputting a company (organization) record, you are forced to enter a first name and last name for the company record. WTF?
  • The event registration feature is pretty weak. It can likely work okay for basic (small) one day events with basic registration needs, but beyond that, you'll be quite frustrated.
  • Their 'Social Connect' add-on, which YM admins can check out since YM uses it as a customer community for YM admins, is odd. You can define forums for users to post in, but subscribing to forums isn't prominent or intuitive. Also, there's a page the "My Feed" but you can't get notified when someone replies or comments to your post, which seems odd.

There are many features that we don't use so I can't comment on those.