YourMembership’s Association Management Software (AMS) is designed to help small-staff association leaders like you easily manage membership activities, create and build engagement with members, and increase revenue so your organization keeps moving forward.
Customer Reviews
Michael M.
Advanced user of YourMembershipWhat we like about YourMembership is that it does so many things well. The biggest pieces of our IT needs are our membership database, our three annual meetings (conferences), and our website. It's very user-friendly—we were able to launch our YM site on our own, as a small administrative staff. We have about 10,000 members, quite a few types members, and various different dues categories within each member type. YM allows us to manage all of this handily. Our website has hundreds of pages, some of which are limited to members only, others not, as well as countless documents linked and hosted our website. YM lets us manage that efficiently as well. We have about 4,000 registrants across our three meetings each year, and we manage registration and sales through YM. Data management is also straightforward on YM. You can upload data, including new records and updates to existing records. YM also offers a number of reporting options, including building complex queries and reports, as well as doing various searches. Also critically important, YM has excellent customer service. They always respond quickly and work hard to resolve any issues.
There are limits to an AMS approach to IT, and some of this is related to that fact. We've been with YM for about seven years, and some things have not really changed, requiring us to use additional IT services to meet our needs. The forum functionality is extremely limited, so we've needed to use a third party solution. The store functionality is minimal and hasn't changed over the years. There's no easy way to process payments by swiping credit cards at meetings. Form-building and processing functionality is limited. We're glad to have the ability to produce simple forms, but there's been no improvement over the years. Forms can have attachments, but managing those attachments is very tedious. We've had to use third-parties for various form building and processing needs. YM has just this year upgraded their email system, so I can't speak to that—we had to move to a third party a couple years ago. We've found that YM's API is nonstandard in a number of ways, making integrations with third parties difficult and expensive, but YM is launching a standardized REST API this year, so that should be improving soon.
If your goals include any of the following, YM is definitely worth considering:
- Having a website that non-technical staff can easily manage and edit.
- Being able to manage much of association business on one platform, including membership, donations, conferences, email, and more.
- The ability to upload data as needed, as well as to perform many different queries and reports on existing data.
We wanted a way for individual staff members to be able to create and update the pages of the website that relate to their areas of responsibility. YM's custom page functionality made this very easy to achieve. As I mentioned, we have hundreds of pages, and we couldn't manage it all if it was only up to one or two people to update pages. We have three divisions, each with their own pages that key division personnel can update themselves. YM's group and group roles functionality make this possible. YM also makes it possible to host rotating advertisements on the site, which is important to us. Though the API has been troublesome for us, the fact that YM has an API has made it possible for us to integrate with a number of third-party solutions. As I mentioned, YM is upgrading their API right now, so we anticipate improvement in this area. We often need to collect information from members, and YM's form functionality allows us to do this. We can create a custom form and display it on a custom page. We can then export the responses as CSVs to process in Excel. Attachments require a bit of manual labor to manage. We're able to have members-only areas of the website that only logged-in, current members can access. We're able to receive donations, process meeting registrations, and sell advertising through the store functionality of the site.
