NetForum Benefits and Insights

Why use NetForum?

Key differentiators & advantages of NetForum

Enhanced Customer Experience: Users can ensure a better customer experience with a 360-degree profile view of members, prospects and donors. They can control parent/child account relationships, enabling parent users to manage contact information and membership status for child accounts. It also provides interaction tracking between constituents and can document questions to be answered by appropriate staff.
Time Savings: Automated workflows help simplify and streamline operations so that users can focus on core business activities. They can ensure efficient processes by using a graphical workflow builder, create forms with conditional logic, and control field labels, form design, widgets and dashboards.
Robust Event Tools: Users can drive attendee engagement and boost revenue using the system’s event features. It helps create, manage and track event details like early bird deals, multiple registration types, promotional or complementary pricing, booth purchases, unique pricing structures and special fees for sponsored activities. It offers milestone billing and centralized accounts to enable tracking of cash receipts.
E-Commerce Capabilities: The platform helps diversify revenue streams by managing event registrations, donations, dues and store items. Users can configure shipping methods based on purchase and shipment data, set up pricing structures based on membership status or demographic criteria, and calculate tax rates based on shipping address and a customizable tax table.
Improved Customer Interactions: The A-Score module offers scoring capabilities that help users personalize and improve member experience. Users can drive incremental revenue through personalized re-engagement campaigns, configure scoring to meet business needs and understand members with advanced engagement reporting.

Industry Expertise

The NetForum product suite serves nonprofit organizations, associations, faith-based groups and K-12 schools.

Key Features

Association Management

Membership Management: Complete visibility into members’ engagement helps users build valuable relationships. Users can configure multiple membership models such as for organizations or individuals, as well as automate and personalize the entire member journey. Pricing rules let users structure membership dues based on profile data or membership level.
Award and Abstract Management:; With custom workflows for submission, review and acceptance, users can manage awards and abstract submissions efficiently. Standardized requirements ensure accurate abstract submissions. The module also allows users to calculate scores for each phase, track stages of judging to determine final award recipients, and manage requests for abstracts, including online submissions.
Dashboards and Reporting: This feature helps users identify membership data trends. They can modify standard reports using a query tool and monitor the complete membership lifecycle. Customizable dashboards provide a view of renewal rates, lapsed members and new members.
Sales Management: Users can manage their sales process and pipeline with complete visibility, including win probability rates for each stage and pipeline reports that enable revenue projections. They can review activity and assignments, coordinate contacts and follow-ups to avoid duplicating efforts, and set up formal sales processes.
Committee Management: The system supports building active communities to keep track of what’s going on at all levels. This feature enables users to manage sub-committees and task forces and track their relationship to the parent committee. They can check the participation of individual committee members as well as the history of previous committee members, and publish and distribute committee minutes and documents.

Fundraising Management

Accounting: This feature simplifies the process of compiling and analyzing financial data. Capabilities include pro-forma invoices, payment processing, late charges and discounts, and multi-currency support. Users can maintain tax tables and reverse posted transactions back to third-party payment systems or credit cards.
Data Management: Users can integrate financial data with a third-party accounting package and communicate seamlessly with other financial software. It helps pinpoint deferred revenues according to user-defined schedules.
Self-Service Portal: Prospects and donors can manage contact information, saved payment methods, profiles and recurring gifts.
Moves Management: With this module, users can track, predict and analyze the movement of donors and prospects. They can then seamlessly assign appropriate tasks based on donor behavior.

Credential Management

Credentialing: The credentialing engine helps streamline processes and empowers learners to have more participation and visibility into the process. Applicants can self-monitor their requirements and progress.
Certifications: Through credentialing and certification programs, companies can diversify their revenue stream and engage members actively. They can track certification and exam fees, and ensure recertification as required.
Renewal Management: The system helps boost customer engagement, acquisition and retention by providing tools to manage renewal requirements based on completion of the latest round of certification.
Customized Workflow: This feature streamlines the member lifecycle by handling the process from application to retirement. It lets users view credit history, including test date, test type, credits issued, score, result and rank.

Limitations

At the time of this review, these are some of the limitations of NetForum according to user feedback:

Reporting lacks cross-channel functionalities.
Reporting doesn’t display payment information and doesn’t allow adding notes to member records.
It’s challenging to set up events with detailed information.

Suite Support

NetForum offers support documentation in a knowledge base and wiki. Users can also find product knowledge as well as generic information about the industry via webinars, whitepapers, case studies, tool kits and infographics in its dedicated resource section.

They also have a platform called Users Group where users can network to solve problems and share resources and information via in-person meetings and a community site. It also serves as the repository of knowledge and contains a membership directory, meeting agendas, minutes and other important documents.

Email: No support email is listed. Live chat support is available Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. CST, except for holidays.

Phone: Agents can be reached at 703.506.7000, Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. EST.

Training: NetForum offers training through Abila University courses and in-person seminars on fundraising, accounting and different elements of the platform.

Tickets: Users can register through the support portal and raise tickets about queries.

NetForum Reviews & Pricing

What is NetForum?

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