Full disclosure: YourMembership.com is a sponsor of the Online Community Software Selection Guide and an Online Community Results client, but this post was not written at their request.
If you haven’t noticed, lemme point it out to ya: YourMembership.com is making waves in the association technology market.
In just the past two years, they’ve made three major acquisitions (Affiniscape, a competing AMS; JobTarget, a job board; and Digital Ignite, an LMS with strong peer learning features) to become one of the largest players in the sector. This is all in addition to already offering a robust AMS on its own right, complete with an online community feature baked into the platform.
After presenting at last year’s event, I had the good fortune of being invited back to present at the second annual Xperience User Conference.
What I saw there is impressive. While the prevailing direction in the association technology sector is a move towards connecting disparate “best of breed” technologies by way of APIs and custom development, YourMembership.com (YM) is swimming against the tide by gathering common technologies into one ecosystem. The YM suite of products includes:
- Association Management System
- Member Portal (event registration, dues, certification, eCommerce, member profile updates, etc.)
- Content Management System
- Bulk Email Broadcasting
- Buyers Guide
- Online Community
- Job Board
- Learning Management System
YM’s CEO, JP Guilbault, says that this best of breed approach — creating a patchwork quilt of disparate systems glued together with APIs and back-end integrations — is overly complex, prohibitively expensive for most organizations, and frequently under-delivers on its promise. YM has elected to bear the cost of integrating functionality for its clients. As perhaps the only technology firm offering this breadth of services in the association market, and one of only a few moving in the all-in-one direction, this is a major differentiator for YM.
Even Reggie Henry, ASAE’s CTO, in his keynote address at the conference, introduced a new phrase in tip-of-the-hat to YM’s approach: “Best of Need.” In other words, for many organizations, best of breed isn’t necessary, or even advantageous: rather, give preference to the need.
YM is also helping associations earn ROI in the form of revenue — not just cost savings — on their technology investments through its new Marketing Business Unit, by selling advertising and job ads on behalf of its clients and sending them royalty checks. I’m actually working with YM to bring a new product — which is totally unrelated to community — to market within this business unit. If you’re a YM customer and want to learn more, contact me!
Best of all, I got a sneak peek at a new prototype for YM’s member portal — reminiscent of Facebook and Linkedin — which unites elements from each of YM’s product line into a single newsfeed: Jobs, online courses, certifications, content, advertising… all tailored to what’s known about the member. Very, very, very cool.
We’re excited about the future that YM is creating for the association community. They’ve also just refreshed their brand just in time for the conference, which we love for the green… naturally.
Do you work for an association or nonprofit technology company that would like to have your products or services profiled on the Online Community Results blog? Contact Ben for a chat.
