Your Membership

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. 

If you are an association with parent/company members, this is probably not the AMS for you. It is very dificult to manage. For indidividual memberships, it works very well.

YM just did a major upgrade with their email system to improve deliverabilty, but there are still some major improvements needed – such as making the templates more user friendly and having them look more professional. The WYSIWYG editors (for both email and the website itself) could also use some updating as they seem to have fallen behind the times. Some users have explained to us their process for renewing membership and registering for a meeting can be confusing – which I can agree it can be – but some of it is a learning curve to a new system.

It is difficult to find an AMS that meets all of your needs well. YM might be the one that works best for you depending on what exactly you are looking for, but don't expect it to be an all-in-one without any trade-offs.

For someone just learning the admin side of YM it is fairly user friendly. Created a number of eblasts that I was able to send out (nice not having to use constant contact)

Whoever wrote this program has clearly never had a real job in their life.  Certainly not one managing data.  The fields all have different titles within different places in the program, making it a crapshoot to get your data out because something different always comes out when you use API.  Example, the field Member ID is also Website ID and Website Member ID and Member Website ID.   I could go on and on but basically they are horribly disorganized and don't know what they are doing. When you ask about a capability and they don't have it, they argue with you, like "well, why would you need to search job titles"?  They do not back up your data, y ou are responsible for doing that yourself, so if something happens to their servers, you're screwed (this may have changed since they switched to amazon, but they couldn't comprehend why it was an issue before that). THe biggest reason we left was because their servers have been abused and blacklisted so many times that none of our emails were getting through. Their servers went down one time on our last day of registration and they took 2 days to even figure out why and get them back up. While visually appealing, this program is a precariously built house of cards and the slightest wind is going to make the entire thing fall apart.  Couldn't get our data out of there fast enough.

Your membership does a fine job as a database for association membership.  The website templates are not very creative and does not allow us to customize teh templates.  There are parts of the website that are not mobile friendly.  We find that the conference registration set-up is not very user friendly.

We implemented YM in 2014.  Very little complaints then but things have gradually reached the point of absurdity.  Today we received an answer to a support ticket that was submitted six months ago.   You will never have an account executive assigned to your account post implementation.  After five (5) years, we still do not have a live person that we can speak with.  Any issues that arise are only addressed through a support ticket that will take weeks or months to respond.  I don't know if Community Brands aquisition has had any influence but things have gradually gotten much worse.   We are currently exploring other options, I know it will be painful, but it will be worth it to find an AMS that cares about their clients. 

We have been using YourMembership for six years in a 2500 person association.  Initially we struggled because we had not invested the time to learn the system and use it as designed.  You have to fully embrace a new AMS system.  They are all a little different and have their pluses and minuses.  More importantly, you need to minimize expensive customization that is hard to maintain over time.

The core membership system is solid.  Members don’t have issues using it or accessing data.  Member community actions are well supported.  Reporting is adequate to good.

event registration for complex events is handled well with processing for credit cards.  It’s not a full function system like CVent, but it is fully integrated with member data.

email capabilities are adequate but limited unless you upgrade at additional cost.  I’d rate the email system barely adequate but it does the job and is fully integrated with real time data.  It does not do a good job supporting large prospect lists.

all in all, I recommend the system above other systems we have us3 or considered.  There are no major gaps or issues.

YourMembership is a pretty solid all around AMS that is extremely customizable out of the box. It's great for small - medium associations. It does most things very well: member management, event registration, automation of registration/renewal process, etc. The two areas that we have had issues with YourMembership are with their wysiwyg editors for things like newsletters and web content, and customer service. The wysiwig editor for some reason was very glitchy. We'd write content, insert pictures, etc and hit save. Sometimes it would, sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes it wouldn't but then the changes would populate 24 hours later. If we reused a template and deleted material from an old newsletter to enter new content, or even if you were just doing heavy edits on a page, often the html code wouldn't delete properly and the new content would be completely junked up with old code. Our communications staff person frequently had to reach out to friends/family familiar with html to clean up the content because YM's wysiwyg editor just couldn't handle it. A workaround is to start with a blank slate each time, which YM seemed to have no problem with. But the minute you start introducing special designed templates or copying templates, it was a major headache. At one point YM customer service admitted that they knew their wysiwyg editor wasn't the best, but with no plans (at the time - now 2 years ago) for upgrading it. Second frustration was customer service. While YM claims that unlimited customer service is free and included in all packages, they have really struggled with providing excellent customer service. To their credit, the company invested extensively in this about 5 years, recognizing that they had issues. But they went from just poor customer service to an automated "ticket" model where you're requested to submit a ticket for support, which then gets triaged into a system of "urgent i.e., my website's down" to "get back to me sometime in the next 6 months" (paraphrasing, of course). This would get very frustrating when you're in the middle of working on a project in the AMS, get stuck, have a question they could answer fairly quickly, and then you have to submit a support ticket...and wait...and wait...and wait. Sometimes days, occasionally weeks. Sometimes you'd get a response within hours. I understand everyone has high volume days, but it was super frustrating that your whole project would have to be put on hold and delayed because of the ticket system. They've been trying to improve by adding an option to call a live person right away, which has helped. And to their credit, YM IS always working on improvements. But just being honest about where the frustration points have been. Overall, most things worked great with YM and it definitely helped our association increase revenue dues and streamline membership management and event registrations. I would definitely recommend it and would even consider it for a new organization I'm with now. But every AMS has it's strengths and weaknesses and you just need to prioritize what's the most important thing for your association and what are the pain points that you can live with.

My association has been using YourMembership for our AMS for roughly 4 years. It is a cheap bandaide for any association who has a small budget. 

Customer Support:

• Dozens of support tickets throughout the years
• Several tickets eventually were closed by our staff because issues were never resolved
• When serious issues on YM's end that caused major features of our website to not work - the only way we eventually got customer support was to submit Facebook comments on YM's public page and using Twitter (after calling them repeatedly and submitting support tickets)

Front End Search:

• YM uses Melissa Data which causes numerous issues for our members who want to appear in search results on our website. If an address does not fit a specific format - they are excluded from search results which is one of the major reasons someone joins our association.
• Front End Search - several times a year, this feature does not work at all which causes additional work for our staff and loss of revenue
• The public version of a member's profile - extremely underwhelming in design/features

Customization:

• Little to no customization throughout the front and back end
• Page layouts are cookie-cutter and regardless of additional HTML/CSS - there are still limitations

Responsive Design:

• Forget it - non-existent 

Other Features:

• Front End Calendar - There is no ability to search by date/subject/location - you can only look by numerical order of dates which causes members/the public (even staff) to scroll through a dozen + pages to locate a workshop. This causes additional work for staff. 
• Member Only Section - Difficult to navigate (for members and staff). Members rarely use any features. 
• Membership Renewal - In the past several months - we have received dozens of complaints on the inability to complete a membership renewal online through YM. The member gets "looped" back to their profile when attempting to renew which causes angry calls to our office and loss of revenue due to member frustration.

I used Your Membership for 1 year; it was not meeting our needs, data was all over the place. However it's been more than 4 years and I don't know if they've made improvements since.

Your Membership (now Community Brands) is a really broad system, membership management, really powerful event management (we've run several multi day conferences through it), Groups (or chapters) Special Interest Groups or regions, SocialLink for building a community (with mobile app), intergrated Content Management System to run your website, and loads more for a really competitve price, gives you the functionality of MS Dynamix or Salesforce for a fraction of the price. It's not perfect and any system will expect you to do some things it's way rather than the way you might like to do things but, that said we haven't found anything that we have not been able to do. Team it up with YM's Learning Management System and Careers platform and you've got membership, learning and jobs all under one roof, so to speak.

We implemented in 6 months, with 10,000 members and a re-structured membership fees system, created a new website and launched 2 months prior to our bulk of renewals in january without any major problems, thanks to the support of the YM inlementation team and Joe and Melinda of Starkweather Association Services. Both YM and Starkweather now have a permanant UK support/consultancy presence. We've recently added YM's Learning Management System to our members portfolio of resources.

For the money a really strong and powerful platform for any small to medium association in the US or UK.

This is a nice system with many modules and options.  Get ready to spend many hours in setup.  Once it is running the way you want, there will be some upgrades along the way which sometimes requires more hours to figure out how to do things.  This system has also been known to go down but I personally only experienced this once where it was an issue.  If your association has the money, pay YourMembership to help with setup/modifying modules.  The online tutorials are good, however, 

We've been disappointed with YM, particularly as a solution for organizations with international membership.  They were slow in addressing GDPR requirements, and have in general been more focused on their own roadmap ("we aren't thinking about GDPR right now, we're moving to AWS") instead of their customer needs.  It's frustrating to not have an account manager to help support our team.  Using a generic email address and dealing with different people every time there's an issue means lots of duplicated work and lost progress.  The functionality is missing some important features for us, although we could have a problematic implementation.

We joined YM in 2014.  Their price point was great, and implementation was a breeze.

Since becoming CommunityBrands; however, their performance has steeply declined.  They gobbled up a ton of smaller platforms, and have tried to integrate them into a single AMS platform with mixed results.  Our front-end and back-end sites have been down at random times, and always seem to have performance issues.  A lot of of our members have trouble logging in, and never receive password reset emails or notifications.  The YM email servers keep popping up on internet blacklists and bouncing our email campaigns. 

They recently made a move to AWS cloud services as they had outgrown their Orlando facility.  This migration wasn't well planned out, and has gone very badly.  They actually crashed out their entire database and had to rebuild it from backup earlier this month.  There was a change to our domain DNS which needed to occur during the migration.  We opened a support ticket in January 2018 to prepare for this.  We have still not heard back from their support team (June 2018), and have still not been able to update our DNS to fully integrate our site to the AWS.

In short, they appear to have brought in a new management team that is focused solely on buying out smaller platforms and nothing else.  Every new announcement of another company acquired has meant a new slew of bugs and performance problems with their original Yourmembership product.  They've grown far too fast and their product and support hasn't grown with the acquision plan.

Not recommended.

The organization has gone through many transfers in ownership over the last 5 years.  Finally, it seems some stability has been achieved.  The senior staff are exceptional in helping clients trouble shoot issues but it takes time to get an issue escalated.

This product sounded ideal for our organization upon review. Unfortunately, the best thing YourMembership is the sales pitch. 

It works just fine if you want a basic member database, but all the other features of the platform are outdated, difficult to use, frustrating for our members and in the end, costly to us. The event management/registration feature is barely usable. Y.M. recently moved to the Amazon cloud and the system has gone haywire. I ended up with lost event registrations, mixed up billing issues and people canceling out of their purchases due to frustration. The customer service response too often is along the lines of, "you shouldn't use this function that is built into the system and meant to be used".  

I could go on, but generally very disappointed with a system we are paying too much for and provides so much less than promised. 

I was disappointed with what seemed like a complex software that should handle simple requests - but I couldn't assign members to committees, couldn't assign the financial person to get the dues, find payment info easily, or make quick changes to the website.

There are just too many places to hunt around for memberhsip information. There are just too many sections period.

Yourmembership.com has allowed our organization to offer members a professional website and the opportunity to engage in activity like online registration, job board, and tracking professional development. It also allows our volunteers to help maintain the site content and be more invested in their responsibility as a leader. The support from YM staff is great, and while there are some features that we wish were better and more flezflex, our overall experience has been positive.

We have used YourMembership for over 5 years. They have grown so much as a company in those short years.  Every year they have more added abilities within the AMS.  Once you have a hang of it, its pretty easy going. As a two staff member group who works on the database it's a lot of information to retain.  Bigger associations who have more staff may benefit most for multiple people to master each area.  The support staff at YM is very help. They get back to you as soon as possible and are always courteous. Their annual conferences provide a ton of information.  I would reccomend anyone who switches to YM to attend to learn best practices on using the product.  A lot of other companies also work with YM to integrate easily. It's also a great way to network with others who use the product. I would reccomend YM to anyone looking for a new AMS. 

YiurMembership has allowed us to give all staff access to our member database. This enables everyone on staff to answer questions our members bring to us, so they don’t get passed person to person. It also allows our members to update their own records, so changes are made in a timely manner and out data is cleaner and more reliable.