Small World Labs, one of the leading community platforms for the association and nonprofit sector has been acquired by Personify, one of the leading AMS vendors.
This is the second community platform to be acquired by an AMS. In 2011, MemberFuse was acquired by Avectra (which was, in turn, acquired by Abila). I served as Product and Community Manager at Avectra from 2011 to 2013. Avectra decided to stop supporting integrations to any other AMS, effectively firing several MemberFuse customers. Development of the MemberFuse product was scaled back, and there hasn’t been a major release for over two years. Let’s hope Personify doesn’t follow in Avectra’s footsteps. (Full disclosure — about the time that MemberFuse development was scaled back, I was laid off by Avectra. No sour grapes here, though. Getting laid off was the best thing to happen to me as it was the push I needed to start Online Community Results.)
I have multiple clients running Small World Labs but who are not running Personify, and they’re concerned. However, Personify customers who also run Small World Labs are likely to be thrilled by this news.
DISCLAIMER: I’m the Small World Labs CEO
Hey Ben, thanks for covering the news. We are excited about this at Small World Labs. We’ll do our best to learn from the mistakes you describe above from MemberFuse and Abila/Avectra. Online community is central to my heart as you can see from the Our Story part of our website at http://www.smallworldlabs.com/about/our-story.
There are several key differences to this merger that will make this great:
1. OPEN VS. CLOSED. You describe above that Avectra/Abila chose to shut down MemberFuse’s integrations & ability to integrate with other platforms. We will be doing the opposite. Small World Labs has been the most open online community platform in the industry. We were the first to make our full API publicly available to any 3rd party and publish them on our website. We will continue to do that. I also wrote a blog post: http://www.smallworldlabs.com/blogs/33/219 where you can see in bold that I state publicly the sentiment above. The beauty of the Internet is… now it’s out there for posterity’s sake. This tenet was key to the merger deal between Personify & Small World Labs. We integrate with Blackbaud, Salesforce, iMIS, Personify, and many many other systems which you can see on our website. We will continue to invest in and expand those integrations.
2. WHERE WILL THE INVESTMENT GO? Small World Labs has been growing very rapidly and Personify wants to help foster that growth. Rather than “scaling back” on development resources as you describe happened with Avectra/Abila, we will be doubling down and expanding our R&D team.
3. HOW WELL DO THE TWO TEAMS WORK TOGETHER. My understanding is that MemberFuse was based in Florida, Avectra/Abila did not have a primary office there, and there was an incongruence of cultures (flip-flops versus suits). Personify’s executive offices and Small World Labs’ headquarters are in Austin, Texas. That gives us the opportunity to bring the two teams together under one roof and truly work together as a team.
4. WHAT HAPPENS TO THE CEO. Despite all the noise and hopes put forth in press releases and road shows, what happens to the acquired company’s CEO is telling. With MemberFuse, my understanding is that the CEO of MemberFuse was effectively removed from his position and put into a new role with few to zero direct reports. With this acquisition, the CEO of Small World Labs (me) will become the Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer and will have more people reporting to me than before.
5. HOW WILL IT BE FOR OUR CLIENTS? This is the last and most important point I’ll make. Mergers & acquisitions succeed based on how well they help current & future clients. That point was central to the conversations Small World Labs had with Personify (whom had been our partner and knew us well) during the evaluation period. Some organizations want a single vendor for their IT to make things simple. Others want best of breed products that integrate together. This merger enables us to provide both solutions to current & potential clients.
The past few days have been very energizing. Our team is excited to have more resources available to help build the best online community platform in the business. I’d like to thank our employees, customers, and partners. You are the best. You helped us get to we are today and we look forward to being even better for you tomorrow.
For those of you attending our Customer Conference tomorrow on November 12, I look forward to seeing you there and taking your questions up on stage. For anyone else, feel free to call me directly at 512.474.6400 x11.
Michael Wilson
Founder, Small World Labs