VeryConnect

We were looking for a low cost but effective system to move two small societies off of a legacy system, that while out of date still delivered some complicated functionality. We needed a reliable company, and for a number of reasons a UK one was preferable (as it turned out, a very wise choice).
The VC team are very knowledgeable and gave helpful advice through out the process, who focus on customer service and have given a lot to build a long term, trusting and friendly relationship.
The platform is customisable for your branding, has pretty much all the modules you need for running all aspects of your society. There is little we can fault with the system (but note I have been very picky to add something in the cons). The team is quick to implement changes and they are updating the system with new features all the time.
Their licensing is a very strong point compared to many per seat membership/CRM systems. Licensing is based on number of users, which includes all users, to be precise your admins and admin support don't require a separate seat license. e.g. you have up to 500 users, as many of these as you wish can actually administer the system. I'm not suggesting you let all your members in to the back end, but where you may really on volunteers for certain aspects of your societies activities, this can make quite a difference.

So to be picky, and I am confident these will resolve in future releases.
1. I would like to see a more comprehensive in system way of highlighting and balancing off refunds against payments (the way it works, works, but could be improved).
2. I would like to see the ability to save and retrieve your custom built reports in system (the work around is to build templates in excel, I would prefer in system).

We selected VeryConnect to replace an existing solution that went out of business. We were looking for a way to regularly post public content to multiple stakeholder groups that could be tailored to each audience. We were also looking for something to engage work group members in closed groups. VeryConnect met both needs with a public facing landing page and the ability to tag content that is linked from those landing pages. And with a backend to engage registered members.

There is no help documentation. In order to figure out how to use the system, I had to just play around it and ask questions. But it is hard to ask about things you don't know you don't know - such as they can create different role permissions if you need them. But I didn't even know to ask about it to start. Also, with out the help documentation, its hard to know if what I am asking is something the platform is built to do, or if I am asking for something special. In our build out, I would frequently realize later they were building something specific to just us because I asked. However, I would have been happy to find a work around if I just knew that it wasn't a typical feature. The fact that they did build those things was amazing though.

I am especially impressed with our search filter structure that constituted a huge bulk of work, conceptually and development-wise. We are now able to search our database with a highly versatile set of filters, which also (a huge benefit!) work for mailings.

The email module and the comprehensive recipient insights and stats it provides is also one of the key features and my personal favourites.

The user-to-user messenger, the private collaboration spaces for our working groups, the news and twitter feeds makes it an ideal communication solution and provides a real added value to our member community.

Above all, our customer support manager is always there for us and never fails to impress us with her quick replies and her deep understanding of our data structure.

Nothing particular comes to mind, to be frank. The software is in the constant development and even if something is missing at the moment, you can either order a bespoke feature development or wait a bit until the next release that always adds some new options.