Impexium

Impexium is an incredibly complicated and frustrating product to use. The technology is supposed to be the tool to help manage your association. Instead, you end up spending more time managing the tool than interacting with your members. I have often wondered if the old-fashioned rolodex would be a better replacement. There are constant bugs and glitches, and support staff refuse to acknowledge any fault by the system. 

There's a number of issues we have with Impexium, after being on the system for a few years now. We have a complex dues structure setup that always breaks after an upgrade, even after testing it in the Sandbox environment. We have customization that is an voluntary dues that can be opted out of, which cannot be adjusted by the member after an upgrade and prevents them from the ability to pay their dues online. It's also difficult to trust the data when we create queries as it isn't always accurate. We need to create multiple queries to triple-check that the data we're given appears to be accurate. We have never been able to utilize the dashboards app to the full extent either, as the app doesn't work. Another frustration with data is that it isn't real-time - most changes we make in the system, such as updating an individual's record - will not appear in a query for 24 hours. This makes it difficult to update data and use it right away. Anything that needs to be 'customized' in the system, for example if we have an increase in dues and the formula needs to be changed - it is an additional cost to have it changed, which is frustrating. It might be due to some of the intricacies of our business processes that we run into all of these issues, but these are just some of the difficulties that make it hard for us to carry out our functions with Impexium. It’s capable of handling the basics but is limited if you need to customize it to fit your business's needs.

After an extensive search, my association contracted with Impexium to provide our first AMS platform. We were on a fast track to have a system up and running in 90 days in time for our first membership dues drive with the system. Impexium’s project manager was efficient and helpful as we navigated terms and processes with which we were unfamiliar. Fast forward four years later and we continue to be satisfied that we made the right decision to go with Impexium. While there have been many growing pains for both of us, the support team has been responsive and helpful. The leaders have made decisions that have benefitted us as a customer, going so far as to provide a service for free when we had to cancel our in-person convention and refund 400 registrants. I still have much to learn to take full advantage of what the platform has to offer, but I am confident when I reach out to Impexium, I will be given the consideration and support I count on as a customer and client. 

My association went live with Impexium in 2016 transitioning from Personify. The changes on the new platform were great for association operations. Sometimes the program can be slow if a lot of staff are in the system at the same time but the Impexium staff is really nice and responsive to concerns and help. The product itself is very easy to use. My tip would be to take your time in the implementation and sales phase to make sure you are building out what you want.

We are a mid-size association and moved to Impexium last year. We transitioned from Netforum Pro. We have been very happy with the improvements we've gained from moving. We love that it has open API (yes, you should know something about API if you are responsible for selecting an AMS), and that it's web functionality allows us to make our system so member centric. They are very responsive in terms of support and have worked with us to configure our system and add requests to their roadmap. We'd like to see them continue to build out their tasks and opportunties to make tracking to-do items easier. It works very well for all of our membership needs. I do see where a salesforce based system would be more appropriate for a large association however costs and time required to configure that type of system were out of reach for us. Impexium was a great solution!

Impexium has been the solution we’ve needed to help us easily manage our membership data. Unlike our previous AMS, the screen is not cluttered, and the navigation is straightforward. All the data I need on a member or partner is right there or a few clicks away. I think it actually saves me time.

During set-up, I found the platform to be easily configurable. Although the Impexium staff provided guidance on how to configure the environment, I found the documentation and videos available within the help portal to suffice. There were some apps that we chose not to configure prior to going live, however, we’ve since revisited those apps and was able to figure out how to set things up on our own just from looking at the documentation.

My favorite part of Impexium is the queries and dashboards. In our old system, we had to call the vendor to get data out of the system. This was inconvenient, a hassle, costly and it would sometimes take days for a response. With Impexium, we’re able to query the data on our own and take advantage of the visualizations within the analytics tool. This has made a significant difference in how we present our data for presentations as we can rely on utilizing Impexium to present the data in a visually striking manner. It’s quite intuitive to the point that even our non-power users can easily create queries on their own.

The Impexium team has extensive association technology experience and some are former association staff. Impexium’s marketing team even helped us develop a campaign to introduce Impexium to our members. Overall, we were able to complete the implementation on-time and on budget. In addition, I feel comfortable knowing that we can turn to Impexium for additional consulting and assistance as needed.

As with any software, from a functionality and features perspective, there are some areas of improvement. Fortunately, Impexium has been pretty great with rolling out new features - including some features that we’ve requested. In all my years of managing the internal tools for my association, I can honestly say that it’s hard to find a software company that does this at the same rate as Impexium.

Although we’ve transitioned from a highly customized platform to Impexium’s SaaS platform, I can definitely say that this was a worthwhile investment. I’m not as nervous anymore when we near an upgrade given that Impexium upgrades are automatic and for once nothing breaks!

Impexium’s implementation was smooth and their team was knowledgeable. We found our project management team (project manager, trainer, executive sponsor, business analyst) to be approachable, proactive and used best practices to manage our project. Since our go-live, the account management team and support has repeatedly recommended how to best leverage the platform to efficiently and effectively achieve our goals.

Integration with other vendors is critical to our association’s business and the overall member experience—during our implementation, Impexium’s modern, open APIs allowed us to quickly (and successfully) integrate with these partners to ensure we had business continuity from day 1 of our “go-live.”

Because of Impexium’s SaaS-based model, we don’t have to worry about lengthy, expensive or disruptive upgrades. Unlike our previous platform, our data and/or the integrations to other solutions are not affected or broken by the upgrade. There are never any data problems or issues with data–we trust that the data we entered is the data we are exporting. 

It has been over 2 years since our go-live and we are still 100% happy with our choice to move forward with Impexium + the overall value the platform delivers to our staff and members.

My Association recently moved to a new AMS – Impexium and it has been quite a struggle to say the least! From wait times (as you mentioned) to the system timing me out after processing a couple payments at a time. My processing turn around went from 24hrs to 1.5 weeks at best! 

Reports are not customizable; IT staff there doesn't understand our business practices; Support portal doesn't allow for real time discussion of issues in the database

We recently migrated to Impexium after using a long-time enterprise AMS. This is a fairly new startup company with a small staff. Since they are still in their start-up phase, you will not find a robust help system, technical documentation (table and field descriptions and relationships), a user group to lean on for support, or 3rd party developers or products. These are all things we used like crutches in the old AMS and are missing them now. If you are moving from a system where this was never a necessity, then this would not be an issue for you.

Our requirements included the ability to develop queries and variations of queries but we found that Impexium’s query builder is extremely limited. The standard Impexium invoices and receipts cannot be modified per client and we’ve had to build reports that act as invoices and receipts which are available only to staff users, thus defeating some of the ‘self-service’ functions for members. If you are ok with standard invoices and receipts out-of-the-box, then this again would not be a problem for you.

Because the system is SaaS, we lost the ability to use SQL triggers such as automatically doing a proration calculation for dues on an order, and automatically totally up a field composed of several other fields. We now have to pull out our calculators to do simple tasks. If you never had the luxury of triggers or stored procedures then this also would not be an issue.

We find that the UI for members, which is really the same as for staff, is not meeting our needs and we are already needing to build a custom solution that will be more user friendly for our members. Yes users can pay online which is great for simple dues, but not so great when dues are supposedly being paid by a different org. If your small association is based on individuals with a simple dues system then perhaps the UI would suit your member needs.

There appears to be no way to generate mass orders on companies who are eligible to be members but do not currently have an active membership on the record. This means that if a member expires, the mass invoicing will not produce an order and invoice automatically. To be fair, there may be some workaround for this that is not apparent yet.

The system is so slow that membership service staff needs to write down any member data changes while on the phone and actually make the changes later. But SaaS is slow, so we are told.

In Impexium, an email address must be completely unique, not in the system at all. This is probably fine for most organizations, but it causes some difficulties for members who are ‘companies’ and use generic email accounts by function such as accounting@company.com with specific individuals moving in and out of the position.

If you are a large trade association, have complex dues or invoices, if you want to customize the web experience, or if you need to be able to create mid- to advance-level queries, this is not the best option for you. If you are a small organization, based on individual memberships with simple dues and can’t afford one of the big systems, this might be worth a demo.

Pros: Great features - if you have a year or so lead time to figure out how to use them. If long wait times for responses are your thing - go for it. Cons: Customer service - we transitioned in March from IMPAK. Our PM was more interested in getting her piece done to worry about what was best for our organization. I requested a report in March and it now practically July - still no idea where that report is or the status after several attempts to follow-up. Role: I'm the administrator Time Used: Less than 6 months Frequency Used: Daily

So far we are satisfied with our migration to Impexium. We asked them to import data from our previous AMS and link to another more robust database. This was a cumbersome project and the integration and development team did a great job getting the data into Impexium & linking it properly to our member records with accurate flow down. The Impexium AMS is mobile friendly, easy to navigate and our members have nothing but positive things to say. We feel the system will enhance our member experience in the memberÕs only section. Impexium integrates with Informz which will allow our members to opt in and out of our 5 different newsletters. Our challenges have been sometimes itÕs very quick to navigate in the system, sometimes not. Pulling reports and queries is a little more difficult than we had planned. (I believe they are currently working on the final development of these modules) There are more base reports than I would like. We still use a 3rd party registration company for our annual show registration as Impexium does not provide affordable onsite help. It also does do not lead retrieval. Our first API attempt did not work between the two systems. IÕm confident it will work in the future. Our smaller (up to 600 persons) event and webinar registration is working smoothly.