ToucanTech vs Fonteva for Associations: Which is a better fit?

Roger: Hi, my name's Roger. I'm the voluntary lead admin for the Liverpool College Alumni organization, and we use ToucanTech as a way of communicating and interacting with our alumni database. It's a great product and I would give it five stars out of five for ToucanTech. Before we decided upon ToucanTech, our records were in a real mess. The best description we could possibly use is that we used spreadsheets to try and manage our alumni organization. We realized this wasn't satisfactory, and I spent a lot of time trolling across the net looking at various softwares which might fulfill our needs. Frankly, they just didn't tick all the boxes in the same way that the ToucanTech products did. The main reasons that we decided to go with ToucanTech, having researched the market and spoken to various other companies, probably falls into four main categories. The first was customer service. Absolutely outstanding. A real speedy response when we made our initial inquiries to them. The second one was that at that time, ToucanTech were in the same time zone as us. Now I know they have other time zones that they work within, but at the time, that was desperately important because you're bound to have problems. And it was just nice to be able to get an answer the same day because we and they were working in the same time zone. The final reason was that even though we were perhaps a smaller organization compared to what they were used to working with, at no time did we ever feel that we got a second class service. It was a first class service from day one. We found it very easy to onboard with ToucanTech. The first thing was they told us to send our data through to them, and they did the initial uploading of our database so we didn't have to worry about importing it in the incorrect way or it not presenting in the correct way. And the other thing that they really, really helped us with was they came and trained us at no extra cost. So the initial users of the system all got trained on day one, so we knew what we were dealing with rather than having a brand new shiny toy, but not knowing how it worked. I'd like to make some suggestions and recommendations as to why you might want to consider ToucanTech as your preferred software partnership company for alumni databases. The first reason is that perhaps on the face of it, ToucanTech looks an expensive product, but it isn't. The price is what you see is what you pay. There's no hidden extras within it. And that's important, as I found during my research, that some companies want to give you a headline price, but then there is far more to pay later on down the line. My second recommendation is that they're a very patient company as you go through the process of deciding who you wish to work with. We ultimately ended up speaking to them five or six times before we actually committed to it. And during that process, they were extremely patient with us and happy to answer questions, some of which had probably already been answered before. The final thing I'd like to say to recommend them is that they're a very patient company. Things will go wrong and you will ultimately make mistakes, but they are there for you and they will go through and correct your errors. And at no time did I ever feel that I was being belittled or that they were impatient with the mistakes that I were making. They wanted to make sure that I got it right. So those are some of the reasons why I would recommend ToucanTech to anybody else.