Fonteva Review

Fonteva as an AMS is a series of Apps built upon Salesforce. Within each app are Custom Objects, each with their own set of Fields and Relationships to other Objects within the system. There's no real magic here.

I strongly feel that our move to a Salesforce-based system was a strong move. However, the Fonteva experience has not lived up to the hype.

When you see the reviews on G2Crowd and other software-based systems, understand that these reviews are incentivized during training. Every review posted is rewarded with a gift card. At this point in onboarding, virtually noone is within implementation yet, and everyone is excited at the possibilities. The training makes the system look easy to use, and people are delighted to submit positive reviews.

Fast forward to implementation. Fonteva has changed its business model entirely where they typically no longer do implemeations themselves. They have developed relationships with other external companies to handle all implementations including side-by-side configuration, training, testing, and data transfer. This will incur more costs.

We were not within that model, and their Managed Services team did our implementation. There were several staff changes mid-stream, and, subsequently, we had extra time added to our implemenation for people to get up-to-speed in our process. The newer people did not appear to have the depth of knowledge of some of the previous workers. Many requirements went unfulfilled. Moreover, we have had to conform our business processes to fit within the constraints of their system. Despite being on a "base" system, we experienced many delays, bad data transfers, and misconfigurations.

The eCommerce system is among the most troubling part of the system, particularly as it pertains to the eStore. The inabilities to properly use standard eCommerce data structures, categories to which you can link, rich text editing for descriptions, and general SEO were among the top disappointments of this system. We have had problems too with automations including invoicing. Moreover, we've experienced problems with their Events with lots of documentation on the issues and no movement toward resolving the issues.

One of the biggest concerns is their two "free" upgrades every year. There are patches to fix things distributed frequently, but without notice to the admins. Admins are not trained to perform upgrades during training. We have two in-house admins who have attended all trainings, and neither have been trained in that part of the system. Therefore, you must rely on either Fonteva's Managed Services or a partner program to perform the upgrades. Each upgrade can take 22-100 hours depending on who your service provider is. Hourly rates are between $125-250. Fonteva users including admins and staff are expected to perform all testing themselves. 

Also, be aware that Fonteva will always convince you to conform to their system as previously mentioned. This is for good reason... upgrades may not take any customizations into account, and, therefore, customizations may require to be completely redone adding to the hours spend and, subsequently, to the dollars spent.

Part of what is also leading to our struggles is that -- while we can integrate with Salesforce very well for email marketing, marketing automation, and other systems -- accessing the important membership data within Fontava's custom objects oftentimes results in the need for more complex integrations. For instance, Badges are used to denote what kind of membership (or Subscription) someone has, and each Subscriptions have Current Term Start Date and Current Term End Date. However, these do not always show on the Contact record which is used for most integrations. Therefore, doing automations such as abandoned cart emails, receipt emails, renewal emails, welcome emails, and other triggered automations normally easily handled through other standard eCommerce systems either are impossible to do or are unreliable.

Finally, integration with partners such as HigherLogic are not quite up to par. For instance, the integration with WordPress requires both SAML and OAuth, though originally we were scoped with SAML only. Upon launch, this added many additional hours than the forecasted LOE (level of effort). We used a vendor suggested by their team for the plugin and vetted by them in a meeting early on in the process. However, at integration, they claimed they gave us no such recommendation despite evidence in emails and project management supporting the contrary. Furthermore, they only have documentation for integration with Higher Logic for SAML. However, for the Higher Logic app, OAuth is required. There's no documentation for the Connected App between Fonteva and Higher Logic via OAuth, so our integration could not happen, and we had to forego the app.

To be clear, we went through a lengthy RFP and vetting process to find a new AMS system. We employed a consultant and had numerous demos and interviews with other users. However, there was a lot of misinformation presented to us. We are limping along on this system, and are trying to find ways to make things better within the Salesforce environment. We've noticed a lot of other associations having questions about Fonteva and reporting issues strongly on ASAE Collaborate and on other discussion boards. I hope this incentivizes change, frankly.