GrowthZone

Great organization for my membership.

Avantages :

Very easy to pull up members accounts, billing information, general contact information, and the reps information. Making membership mailing labels and membership reports is very easy with this software. I use this software to easily find any membership representative information I need. This software has also made it easy to look up and find a member.

Inconvénients :

The only con I have for this software would be the new update, i'm so used to the old version it'll take time to learn the updated.

GrowthZone - So Far, So Good

Avantages :

Our association had been searching for a new AMS after being with our old system for over 7 years. We needed something fresh & up-to-date for our members. After a couple of months of research and demo requests, we decided to go with GrowthZone. We really like that this company offers a mobile app for our members. We also got a new website through GrowthZone which is considerably better than our old, slow site. We've received a lot of compliments from our members already. The system seems to be fairly simple to use for billing, event management and membership organization. We have not gone through a membership renewal season yet so can not speak to how smoothly that runs.

Inconvénients :

We did have an issue with moving our members into the system on the backend before launching GrowthZone association-wide. The issue had to do with our membership agency tiers versus individual professional accounts. A huge number of members had to be added manually only to find out that there was another work around that we were not made aware of. It got taken care of but was certainly a headache and waste of staff time in the beginning.

Could be great with a little work

Commentaires : We chose GZ because it offered us the ability to use the same company for website development and hosting and AMS system ensuring compatibility. We are very happy with the look and feel of our website and the CMS used to manage it. Our migration to GZ for the AMS side was rocky at best. Our project manager had never gone through a detailed conversion before. While she was very service oriented and nice to work with, her inexperience caused many issues. We like GZ's ability to give a good view of member activity. I like that when I am on the phone with a member, I can see their engagement, make notes, and create follow up task items. G

Avantages :

The user interface, look, and feel of the back end. Also like the ability to integrate with the company website to create a good member only user experience. It also has a pretty good project management system, though it desperately needs push notifications via email. The only notification it provides is a badge count on the top menu of the software. So if you are disciplined to check there, the PM works well. GZ also has a certification/continuing education component which we find valuable.

Inconvénients :

Customer support needs work. GZ is very slow to respond to issues. Many times entered tickets are not responded to (first response) for 3 or more days (I am not counting the automated message generated that the ticket was received and someone would review). And, when the "front line" or 1st level support team reaches out, frequently they aren't completely familiar with the ins and outs of the software, so the first 3 emails or 15 minutes of the call are spent teaching them how the system works. The communications functionality has a great vision, but is inconsistent and extremely buggy. It is difficult and many times impossible to send a merged email to multiple members. Members get emails or newsletters with the fields not merged properly. It feels like the database was not developed with a vision and as the software was enhanced and features added, bandaids were placed on the tables to make them work together. Field naming is inconsistent and many times not working as a true relational database. Feels like a consequence of growing quickly and not having one responsible group overseeing the programming growth. Different naming philosophy throughout different modules.

The best investment of time, energy, and money we have made!

Commentaires : GrowthZone has been a huge learning curve, but a fascinating one. It has made things so much easier on the back end of all of our processes. I just said today that if I had the time I could dive in to GrowthZone and spend hours making our systems even better. There are so many options and abilities to streamline work with this system.

Avantages :

So many things! They are hard to name. See the previous page for specific comments.

Inconvénients :

We would like to see the events area improved some. The exhibitors section does not jive well with the sponsors. Our sponsors get free event tickets and the ability to exhibit as well. Also, the event emails show the sponsor logos looking jumbled and mismatched so we were not able to show our sponsors when using that function. (I used the email designer when we needed to show our sponsors.) The sponsor logos also look different on the event page vs. the registration page. We much prefer the format used on the registration page. Finally, it would be awesome to be able to create a landing page for an event. We tried to use the event page for that purpose, but it was hard because the description box is not like the website tool, it is very 'old school' to do graphics and text in. For our next conference we will build a web page to have it look more professional.

More efficiency, more feautures and great value with GrowthZone

Commentaires : Our dues processing involved a lot of manual work, with GrowthZone this is no longer an issue. This product has literally saved many man hours for my staff. Throughout my first year using it, I kept finding more functionality that was super helpful and so useful and again time saving.

Avantages :

Dues processing and communications with members are feature rich and yet easy to use. Being able to integrate with three third party vendors not only saves time but is appreciated by members, who expect single sign on across all of our platforms.

Inconvénients :

There is always room for improvement. I'd like to see more robust Committee/Group functionality. I'd like to see the ability to schedule reminder emails to those that have not paid their dues. I'd like to see a search feature in the Cloud function. Recommendations for improvements can be submitted and I have seen some of those come to fruition. I was using PayPal with PayPal Flow for my gateway and was not able to continue to use that. I had better transaction rates with PayPal.