NetForum Customer Town Hall April 2021 – three takeaways for anyone interested in association management software

If youā€™re familiar with NetForum Enterprise, you know itā€™s been a trusted and innovative association management software (AMS) for large and mid-sized organizations for more than two decades. On April 7th, Community Brands conducted a NetForum Enterprise Customer Town Hall featuring Tim Ward, the new NetForum Enterprise General Manager.

Highlights of the Town Hall included:

The NetForum Team leader has come home.

Tim Ward has returned to NetForum Enterprise as General Manager.Ā  Tim was the original product architect of NetForum at Avectra (the original parent company for NetForum Enterprise) from 1999-2007, and he then founded Gravitate Solutions (originally known as Old Town IT) to provide NetForum implementation and customization services. He and his teams have been enhancing NetForum for association clients ever since, and Gravitate became part of the Community Brands family in December 2020. Today, Tim is using his deep knowledge of and affection for NetForum Enterprise to lead the NetForum Enterprise team and further shape this flagship product.

NetForum has been rearchitected and reimagined for the modern cloud.

NetForum Enterprise was the first cloud-based AMS and it now takes advantage of the latest cutting-edge cloud capabilities through a complete overhaul of its foundational architecture. Itā€™s been reimagined and rearchitected for Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, which offers customers all of the premium enterprise association management functionality that NetForum Enterprise has delivered for years with the added benefits of Microsoft Azure (which is used by 95% of the Fortune 500). This next generation of NetForum Enterprise (called NetForum Cloud) offers the following benefits:

  • Convenience ā€“ the Community Brands team manages the NetForum Cloud environment, removing the burden of maintaining hardware and software updates.
  • Scalability ā€“ Customers can employ auto-scaling within Microsoft Azureā€™s infrastructure to scale servers up or down depending on organizational demand and computing needs.
  • Security and reliability ā€“ NetForum Cloud delivers state of the art security controls out of the box, as well as data backup and disaster recovery.
  • Enhanced integration capabilities ā€“ with NetForum Cloud, organizations can connect other cloud services and apps more easily and efficiently than ever.
NetForum customers now have state of the art analytics capabilities.

Nucleus, the first data analytics solution developed specifically for associations, was architected by Tim Ward at Gravitate to meet the analytic and reporting needs of member-based organizations. Itā€™s now a Community Brands product. As you might expect, it works beautifully with NetForum to provide association staff, leadership, chapters, members, and boards with the insights they need to make more informed decisions. Nucleus provides customers with:

  • Data analytics using all the valuable member data in their NetForum system as well as all other member-facing systems: marketing automation/email, events, learning/certification, online community, and more.
  • First-class data visualizations in the form of dashboards tailored for each functional area in the organization, including membership, marketing, events, learning management, certification, fundraising, advocacy, and more.
  • More comprehensive (and thus more accurate) engagement scoring and documentation of total member value.
Learn more

If you havenā€™t seen NetForum Enterprise in a while, itā€™s time to take a look. Find out how NetForum Cloud represents the best of both worlds: comprehensive, tried-and-true enterprise AMS functionality, now with the most modern technological foundation of any system on the market. Register for our May 26th webinar or attend AMS Fest starting June 15th!

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