Avectra recently released version 2.0 of netFORUM and several of their existing clients are now working through the process of upgrading.

Christy Gemuendt, Project Manager, Healthcare Assn. of NY State, had the following things to say about their upgrade (posted with her permission):

• Overall, the upgrade went very smoothly. There were very few "showstoppers" found during the testing process. Anything found was fixed in very short order.
• The interface was VERY well received. Even my most cantankerous users are smiling. Big kudos on the overhaul of the UI.
• Users are loving a number of the features, such as add batch on the fly and favorites.
• There are noticeable performance enhancements, and we aren't even taking advantage of all of them yet (we don't yet run IE 7.0, which is required for some of the AJAX enhancements to be most effective).
• We noticed reports are running *fast* compared to before. We received so few helpdesk calls today (all so far have been related to user education) regarding the system that I am thinking of buying a few extra lottery tickets on my way home….

Upgrades are one of the necessary evils that we all have to endure with our data management systems. Congratulations to HANYS and to Avectra for a job well done. I hope to hear from more Avectra clients about smooth and successful upgrades.

Full disclosure: EDM is an independent third-party consulting firm. This means we have no financial relationship with any of the vendors mentioned in this blog. We provide unbiased opinions on what we see.

I recently sat in a demo for ISSI's IMPAK software. I've been working with ISSI since 2002. I've always said that ISSI offers more "bang for your buck" (i.e., functionality for the dollar) than just about any AMS on the market, and the latest offering didn't disappoint.

During the demo, three things jumped out at me:

1. The contact management piece within IMPAK now provides auto-email capability. Simply put, this means that if an activity is assigned to another user (e.g., a call comes in and another staffer needs to respond to it), the IMPAK system will kick off an email to the staff person who was assigned to the task, even if that person is not logged into the database.
2. Their grassroots module now has an integration with CapWiz.
3. A sponsors module has been added as a separate module (sponsors used to be managed within events). This provides additional functionality.

As is typical of ISSI, all of these modules come as part of the baseline package. I'm amazed at what they squeeze into their AMS for such a relatively low price.

UPDATE: Full disclosure: EDM is an independent third-party consulting firm. This means we have no financial relationship with any of the vendors mentioned in this blog. We provide unbiased opinions on what we see.

A vendor asked me the following: "What are the top 5 most useful or most valuable reports that you've seen from an AMS?"

My response:

I think the top five will vary based on three things: type of membership (trade vs. professional vs. hybrid); largest source of non-dues revenue (e.g., events, certification, products, fundraising, other); and what is politically important (e.g., committee participation, speaking/presenting, PAC).

But in general, I would suggest these:

1. Membership count by membership type, including dollars per category
2. Invoicing (i.e., ability to print one or a group of invoices from the system without having to format or merge)
3. Aged receivables (30-60-90 days old)
4. Event attendance count broken out by registrant type, with revenue
5. Event attendance by last name

What do you think? What's your single most important report from your AMS?

ARC Solutions is a small but growing AMS provider located in Washington, DC. One of my clients purchased their original product (the MAP) so I've had some extensive experience using the product and working with the company.

ARC recently secured $1 million in funding from two venture capital firms to help develop their new product, Polaris. I had an opportunity to see a demo of Polaris recently, and overall, I was pretty impressed. The product is fully web-based and takes advantage of AJAX functionality throughout. It has a nicer user interface and seems relatively easy to navigate. Most importantly, they've made some significant changes to the architecture so that organizational and individual membership is managed more elegantly, and financial management is now done via batches.

One of the cooler tools they have is a "screen development" tool that allows the user to create separate screens for editing data, capturing data, and viewing data. This is a pretty big leap forward, as most systems on the market tend to have the same screen for capture and edit, and frequently even the same screen for display of data. Polaris allows you to modify each separately. Very slick.

ARC is seeking further financing and I expect to see a lot more from them in the coming months and years. You can find them at ARC Solutions.

UPDATE: Full disclosure: EDM is an independent third-party consulting firm. This means we have no financial relationship with any of the vendors mentioned in this blog. We provide unbiased opinions on what we see.

Protech held their first annual users group conference last week in DC. I thought it was a pretty good effort, but I hate attending conferences at the Reagan Building. That building was designed to confuse me.

At any rate, once I was able to find the conference and the meeting rooms, I was pleased with what I saw and heard. Protech did a nice job of developing a cross-section of break-out sessions covering both technical and non-technical topics. They also announced that they will be working on developing a CRM for Members users group, which is great news. I’m constantly harping on my clients (and at the AMS vendors) to get active in their users group, and if there isn’t a users group, start one! (Here’s a short rant from several years ago: http://www.effectivedatabase.com/join_users_group.shtml).

CRM4M is  very promising product, but it will be much better served if the customers can get organized and communicate to Protech what their needs are.

One cool thing I learned: The link from CRM4M to Excel can be dynamic. That is, you can create a query, export it to Excel, and make the link dynamic to the website so that every time the Excel sheet is opened, it checks the database to see if data has been updated. Very cool!

A less cool note was that the Word merge capabilities in CRM4M only work through Outlook. That is, you have to be using Outlook as your database view (which is very cool in its own right) to use the Word merge capabilities. This is less cool because many users work from the web browser rather than from Outlook.

UPDATE: Full disclosure: EDM is an independent third-party consulting firm. This means we have no financial relationship with any of the vendors mentioned in this blog. We provide unbiased opinions on what we see.

So this is very cool: http://wiki.avectra.com

Avectra has created a wiki for (as they put it) "the use of its staff, clients, prospects and partners to share and expand our knowlege of netFORUM." Right now it's still an open site. It will be interesting to see if stays public, because it's bound to include information about the netFORUM product that they won't want their competitors to see.

On the other hand, perhaps this transparency will give them a competitive edge. I'd love to see it stay public and hopefully it will grow. I'm constantly harping on my clients (and anyone who will listen) to get active in their vendors' users groups, and this wiki is certainly another avenue for participation.

UPDATE: Full disclosure: EDM is an independent third-party consulting firm. This means we have no financial relationship with any of the vendors mentioned in this blog. We provide unbiased opinions on what we see.

I had the opportunity to attend TMA Resources Annual Users Group meeting (TAUG) last week in Albuquerque. They put on a very impressive event, including two sessions specifically focused on AMS consultants.

TMAR is focused on their new AMS product dubbed Personify. The product looks very slick, including some nice integrations with Business Objects for dashboards, analytics, etc. I don’t have any ideas on pricing at this point, but I’m fairly certain this product will be out of reach of smaller associations (those with budgets under $5 million).

In one session on customer service, I got to hear the story of an association that had raised its dues by $5. As a result, as many as 25% of their members were paying the old dues, even though the new dues were clearly printed on the invoice. The customers were saying, in effect, sorry, I’m not paying higher dues. The association was seeing this as a “customer service” issue. I’m sorry, but if a quarter of your members are refusing to pay a nominal dues increase, you don’t have a customer service issue, you have a business model and value communications issue. No amount of customer service training or database improvements is going to fix that!

UPDATE: Full disclosure: EDM is an independent third-party consulting firm. This means we have no financial relationship with any of the vendors mentioned in this blog. We provide unbiased opinions on what we see.