GrowthZone

We are a new Chamber user, with the Association Edition.  I used ChamberMaster with a previous Chamber position I held, but the changes/additions that are in place now are extreme!!!!  There is almost too much!  Some things are a bit harder to undertake, but I believe this is basically a "learning curve" on my part.

I do wish that it had more of the POS capabilities, in addition to the data collection facilities.  I have spoken with Customer Service, and I belive this is something that is hopefully planned for implementation in the near future.

Love the Customer Service team....GREAT HELP!!!!!

Growth Zone and Chamber Master really have us covered in the Chamber of Commerce World.  This software is much more than just SAS, it is all encompasing.  We utilize Chamber Master for management of our members, for an amazing website, billing, event coordination and registration...Plus so much more.  There are so many more parts of what Chamber Master offers us that we look forward to discovering those options to help us run our Chamber more efficiantly in the future.  

This was a big project for our company and it was made much easier with the help of Growthzone staff - they were knowledgeable, helpful, patient and knew thier stuff. It was a much better expereince than I expected. They were able to explain the big techy terms that I did not understand and broke it down for me.

We've been on the GrowthZone Association Edition for almost four years now and I don't know what we'd do without the system.

We utilize college students, part-time, to do much of the internal maintenance. Via a few tutorials we recorded, and a minimum amount of online coaching, we're able to ramp them up in the system within a few hours. Whenever we have run into glitches or issues, customer service has been quick to respond and escalate our needs appropriately. Many times, we have submitted new ideas which are voted upon in the user portal, gaining community support and utlimately coming to fruition.  This means the software is constanly being improved and updated based on what the users are asking for!

We have experienced near zero downtime throughout our experience. There have been cases where minor user issues popped up, forms not populating a State field, inability to submit, etc.  When these have occurred, customer service has responded quickly - solving the problem and providing a means to reach back to any impacted members / visitors.

The system is highly customizable, the only issue we've had is imitations in permissions where we wish to allow non-staff users to manage the DB for their group.  For example, the president or secretary of a chapter having the capability to manage the chapter without visibility into other chapters.  We have managed some work-arounds in this area, and I believe GZ will come up with the needed changes in the near future.

You can't go wrong with this system - onboarding is great, it's easy to learn and use, great support, flexible and constantly improving!

I was impressed with how easy it was to learn, navigate, and user friendly. We opt to integrate it with our existing webpage (WordPress) and it has saved us so much time in adding new content and updates. It has allowed us to stay in contact with our members more efficiently than we ever had before. The billing and invoicing are so much quicker, easy, and convenient especially for events. We use to have to mail out our invoices, whereas now we can mass email all members. It is even convenient for our members to pay online and have their card information saved for future charges. For events, we can track how many are attending, who paid, unpaid, print out name tags, and roster. They even have their own reports on everything. We were creating so many spreadsheets in the past that now all we have to do is download and edit. Overall we are very happy with Growthzone ChamberMaster. It has made our job so much easier.

Our organization was looking for something capable, but more simple than the AMS we were using when we moved to GrowthZone, and we have been quite happy. Lots of new features being added all the time, driven by user requests. Great customer service.

GrowthZone lacks some of the customization and control you might find in a more complicated (expensive) platform, but the staff is super helpful, and willing to find solutions.

Our association switched management systems from Membrosia to GrowthZone at the beginning of 2020, and we have been SO happy with the change! Our office went through weekly training sessions with support staff, which were tailored to each of our positions (event management, billing, membership, etc.). After finishing the training, we still have access to live support as well as an extensive "wiki" where the answer to almost every question can be found if you're willing to do some searching. GrowthZone is so much more modern and user-friendly than our previous system, and we can easily integrate it into our website for event registrations. Everything has been so much easier to manage since making the switch, I would definitely recommend the software and their excellent support team!

My experience with GrowthZone has been great. The move from ChamberMaster to GrowthZone ran very smoothly and the transition team was fantastic. The system has excellent features and continues to develop even more integrations. I like the functionality and the system itself is very user friendly. There are times when customer service response time is slow and there is some room for improvement with customization options. One of the best things about this system is that it's a one stop shop for billing, event management, member interface, CRM, marketing, automation, project management and more. I'd absolutley recommend GrowthZone.

** Note: MemberZone is No Longer an Actively Sold Product  

My company is a non profit dealing with the next technological revolution (Industry 4.0), our mission is to advise and educate the manufacturing world of these new technologies and encourage their adoption. It's an ironic sell to me, as we rely on Growthzone (Memberzone) for a significant part of our business- which is essentially an Excel sheet with HTML over the top of it. 

Implementation:

1. We came from Salesforce, adoption went poorly. The categorizations have no capacity for branching options, so we lost our ability to drill down into each company's specialties by category.
2. AMS is also prone to duplicate creation in the event of slight data differences, which resulted in thousands more records than our true membership.
3. I'll get further into the ease of use later, but user adoption was and continues to be a huge challenge. Growthzone does have a whole host of videos to understand processes, but unless you are a system administrator who seeks to understand how the moving parts all work together, user frustration is high for all the tiny steps required to do simple tasks. This frustration can lead to mistakes or skipped steps, which impacts event revenue, invoice delivery, member frustration, and more.

Customer Service: Poor. GrowthZone employs far more sales reps than it does technicians- support agent assigned to your account is not inherintly knowledgable about the AMS features, technical questions, or the improvements coming down the line. Their feature growth is glacially slow, and the "innovations" are items that have been staples of website development for ten years. 

Ease of Use:

1. API: Growthzone has an API, but its documentation is nonsensical and intentionally vague. Support technicians don't understand how to support the API, we have had a professional web developer attempt to use the Key supplied by GZ to integrate with our other cloud solutions without success; and support answered numerous clarifying inquiries with templated email responses rather than troubleshooting the issue.
2. Invoicing: One of the biggest headaches and costs of time. In growthzone, Fees are split into Dues or Events, which exist separately and cannot be combined on a single invoice if you need sponsor revenue to apply towards event budgets for reporting. This means if you are an organization which sells membership and sponsorships in bundles- to properly be able to track these all against their proper monetary allocation, you are forced to create separate invoices for each item. Separate line items on the same invoice do not work properly for event revenue. This leads into another problem, packages now have to be combined out of system (we use word) and sent manually to the member. This again requires manual entry of payment on return of the form.
   1. As a positive point, batched invoices to work and generate if they are set up correctly. Merge fields from the database function well, which allows greater customization of cover letters on delivery to members. 
   2. You can set up automatic billing, however you cannot perform it/require its setup on member joining. The steps are not made clear to members by the product, so responsability falls to you to educate and manually drive the adoption of Auto billing
   3. The AMS cannot re send receipts for paid transactions, you can generate a sales receipt (but this also mimicks a payment on the member's account tab and can confuse accounting).
   4. I'll talk more about the lack of comprehensive change logs, but as it applies to invoicing invoice records can be deleted with impunity and it is near impossible to maintain accountability.
   5. The "Bundle" option for invoicing does not function with event sponsorships, or tie sold sponsorships to their related event budget. Bundle also requires manual assignment of money as it is "recognized" by accounting.
3. Change Logs: The AMS has system notes, but they are system wide and coded so generically that even attempting to find a change when you know the exact date, time, and record changed it is still a 15-20 minute challenge to locate a change. 
   1. Change log is system wide, which means you cannot find details of specific fields except by paring down from the full system log. Most other sites and databases have individual pages and change logs (or historical data) for fields designated as important to the system.
   2. Only member change date shown is a "Date Modified" which could be on any element of the record's ten tabs.
   3. Deleted invoice and sponsorship data is unrecoverable without paid support, which wouldn't be a problem if a reference number and title were left on the member account tab so historical data can be better understood.
4. Dashboards, Reports, & Data Export: Not very user friendly. Dashboards and Reports are pre built, even though the coding is there to pull pie charts, bar graphs, web data, and other complex items- they don't allow you to employ these elements for your own use. Data exporting does not pull in any logical order, requiring the user to sort the material every time it's exported. Pulling from pre built reports pulls database fields outside those in the web version of the report, again requiring manual transformation of the data to be usable once it leaves GrowthZone.

Reliability: A positive note for this AMS. Once you understand the limitations of the AMS, systems are always consistent. Communication (mail merges and marketing) functions, form builder allows you to create and distribute custom forms for completion by members, the member portal allows member companies to interact in a variety of ways, and the website plugin elements are relatively customizable with changes taking place instantly (does not require any coding knowledge to edit). I took off one star because you do have to understand the rough edges of the system to make things work as they're expected to.

Customization: Limited in utility, little effectual change can be made to core systems.

1. Only database fields easily manipulated are Custom Fields. You can't control which are publicly visible through the portal, even though some would be valuable to display.
2. Categories can't be drilled down as I stated towards the beggining, self selection leads to no order/organization among members.
3. Website customization is limited to colors, can't alter much else.
4. No real customization of general display information, or required fields
5. If you have a core business need for your AMS, it cannot be customized into GrowthZone. You can make forum suggestions for feature changes.

In Summary:

       Pros:

• One of the lowest priced solutions available
• Basic and manual features are reliable- if you can live within the systems and keep Dues separate from Events it can run things effectively
• Website customizations, merged email outreach, and general user management are clear and low impact.

        Cons:

• Customization on a broader standpoint are non existant. If your model doesn't fit the template you will struggle with this AMS
• No integrations with any solutions. API is non functional, which means no auto sync of email communications, no way to connect sold items to your workflow processing, no ability to pull contact information into other applications without physically searching for it in GrowthZone and copying it to the other application.
• No true CRM. Sales will have to come up with an alternative way to track leads and the sales process
• Improvements are far too slow. This AMS will not be able to keep up with increasing demands. No ability to automate or auto populate information, the limitations I've discussed in my review above take years to fix (if they ever get addressed), the manual investment required to perform any task will be unsustainable if your organization grows. Other solutions are actively working to cut out steps, what takes me five separate invoices on different pages and then creating an invoice in word can be created all from a single page on other AMS solutions and sent out in less than five minutes.

I can't reccomend this product for Associations with dynamic environments, GrowthZone simply lacks the versatility to roll with the punches and keep admin time related to growth under control.

 

 

I am new to the GrowthZone system and when had a question about how to generate a report, a rep created a video just for me. How do I know it was just for me? They used our associations system in the video. It wasn't a generic video or showing another association with half the info blurred out, it was our exactly as I see it when I log in. I've dealt with various companies over the years in my business but have not seen customer support like this. Top notch!!

GrowthZone has provided us with an extremely easy-to-use platform for managing our membership, job postings & events. The system is easy to learn, and the customer service from the GrowthZone team is great. Oh and did I mention it's affordable? There's no need to break the bank to have everything you need in an AMS - just go with GrowthZone!

Great tool, it saves our staff an enormous amount time and our association a great deal of money! Our members love all the great features in the Member Information Center.

As the Chief Executive of the Waikato Chamber of Commerce, having access to good data is critical. GrowthZone and their product ChamberMaster have given us effectively several extra pairs of hands to not only give us good data to make great decitions, but also with the association forums and white papers that they manage and produce, these have allowed us access from New Zealand to a global team, that's powerful beacause where there is teamwork and collaboration wonderful things can be achieved.

A few years ago, we were using CiviCRM. When we moved to ChamberMaster/MemberZone, we were initially very happy. It solved a lot of problems and allowed us to scale up more easily. This system is one reason we've grown so much in the past 2 years. However, we are a hybrid of international organization with limited Chamber of Commerce similarities. ChamberMaster is clearly designed for local organizations. They have virtually no Chapter President functionality outside of what we provide from HQ. So, it depends on your organization; if you are local only, it could be very beneficial. If you cross state or country lines, keep looking. If you have a headquarters-with-chapters structure, keep looking. Customer service is superb as long as it is during business hours.