Thinking about the platform for a good membership management system?
We often have chats in the offices and passions run high, fragile objects are thrown, words are said and peace is made, I'm guess it's all part of a healthy and sparky office and, well, it's quite fun to take part...
One topic which comes up from time to time is whether to use Dynamics as the core platform for our membership management system or not, being Microsoft Partners is might be a sensible route and while Word drives us mad, we do have Microsoft to thank for the serious software tools we use as a business.
So, fundamentally we are 'on side' already and we hear lots of great things from Microsoft and competitors about how amazing their membership systems are and being a big Formula 1 and Lotus fan (although the Lotus team is now Renault), we are grateful for Microsoft Dynamics' sponsorship of that team...
Many choices to look at
As you will know, the answer is not so simple and clever companies offering membership management systems, much like us, say they have the best system and not all of them use Dynamics. As a slight digression, going back some years, we were regularly asked if our platform was open source and some Associations required the solution to be open source because people thought it was sensible to have solutions coded by lots of online enthusiasts i.e.. the community.
Fortunately that trend has stopped, presumably because people realise that they should judge the system they are getting on what it can do, not on what nice people in the community can do and how good those nice people might be at coding and whether or not their conflicts with the coding you have already. In other words, the perceived benefit of community created systems and the overall ethos of this being a lovely approach have now been superceded by the actual needs of the membership organisation. This is especially significant for Membership Management systems for Associations and Societies as they need to have a good quality system to support and grow the membership for a large number of members such as the 500 to 10,000+ Association members we specialise in. Phew, now you see why we have debates in the office!
Have I got a solution?
You may have understood by now that my view about the fit of a system needs to be based on your members and their requirements and no matter what system you have, it's only as good as the people coding, implementing and supporting it.
That said, you knew a catch was coming, inevitably, within that approach, there will be positive and negative points, and seeing as you're still reading, I figure you'd like to know what an insider thinks.
It's a trade off between flexibility, reliability and cost.
Here is the conundrum, we have tried big systems in the past, they have features galore and while they're not as bug free as you'd imagine, or expect, they have been tested by lots of different people so are certainly a good place to start. However, the more features you have, probably, the more difficult it is for us to learn fully and so the less likely it is that we understand the code well enough to predict the likely side effects of changes we make so the more likely it is that you will struggle with the user experience and we will deliver the tweaks within the expected time frame. Less is more...
Conversely, an entirely bespoke system will take a long time to create and have less testing and is therefore more likely to have less functionality and more bugs, although any functionality you specify will obviously be included. A bespoke system will however be exactly what you want and is likely to be less expensive than the blue ribbon systems like Dynamic and importantly, cheaper to run and enhance in the future.
For me, a big system is suited better to a big client/budget because of the increased amount of testing and the assurance a big name brings. Bigger associations usually have more resources to ensure the system is implemented with their own testing and staff have more pressure to get it right first time and they are more likely to require integration with more third parties, bigger systems will have such integrations in place already.
As time goes on, the systems built on both sides of this divide will get better and better, as they do the line gets more and more blurred.
So, what is big? For me, a big budget starts at £70k, the biggest we've been involved with is £350K. The most important points is to roll your sleeves up and use the system (demo) properly, almost no one does this and I don't really understand why. With the amount of time you spend creating the spec and running the selection process, once you've narrowed it down to a couple, surely it's worth you spending a morning actually doing some of the work and running around the system you are about to buy.
A demo system won't do exactly what you need from the outset but hopefully a supplier can tweak it so it's close and you can cherry pick some key functions you'd like to play around with so it should be good enough for you to get a feel for the approach.
Also, why not ask your potential suppliers to cost up a few example tweaks so you have an idea of the cost of changes for the future.
So, maybe one day we'll jump to use Microsoft Dynamics, who knows, but, for now our clients tend to have sub £70K-£350 budgets so don't feel the solution fits. It goes without saying that we will always to challenge and debate our approach, so long as fragile objects are around to be thrown...
If you'd like to join in, let me know...