It's great to get feedback from people who have the same problems as us. The community is great about [answering] any questions you have or [help] you figure [them] out. You get the feeling that you are all in this together working as one to solve everyone's issues as they come up.
Pros
Answer question
find new features
feeling of community
Cons
need more users
better search
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have a question about a function or tech problem it's a great place to get answers
Abila netFORUM Enterprise is being used across the organization to house membership and invoicing data. It allows all employees to have access to the membership information and keeps contact information, award recognition, items purchased, etc., in one place. It helps employees to have a central access point for member information and to be able to run queries and reports to provide a bigger picture of the data.
Pros
Can store a lot of information. There are many different modules and each module has a lot of spaces for details such as birthday, gender, spouse and children's names, emergency contact information, photos and more.
Can be linked to our internal systems. Our awards system is run through our organization's website but the winners are sent to netFORUM so that their records indicate the awards and distinctions they have achieved without us having to manually enter all of these.
Can provide a lot of reporting information which is useful for data collection or year-end reporting needs.
Cons
The queries and reports are not user-friendly. One really needs to understand the search terminology to run queries and reports.
There is no way to prevent duplicates so if someone enters an updated address for a member but creates a new record instead of updating the current record, there are now two records for that person which makes some of the data difficult to sift through.
Linking members to their organization is difficult because if someone enters an organization slightly differently from the way it is registered in netFORUM, the person will not be linked to the organization and the reports that say how many members come from a specific institution is now inaccurate.
Likelihood to Recommend
netFORUm is generally good for small to medium membership organizations but can definitely pose problems in the amount of data and the reporting tools as the membership grows.
