WildApricot

Avantages

Even people with no computer know-how can easily used this app.

Inconvénients

Computer glitches may occur. One need to update the program every now and then to avoid errors in entries.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à WildApricot

Avantages

For our organization, Oregon Potters Association, it has helped to solve a number of our problems. For example, not only do we use the platform to get membership dues, we rely heavily on the directory, and well as having a place to get our members to register for upcoming workshops and sales. It really is great!

We are about to connect Quickbooks to our website, which we really think will help us. We have a big pottery show once a year where sometimes 200 + members sign up to participate, it is always complicated on our end- because they pay a down payment to reserve a booth (like $50), and then we need to collect the remainder of the booth fee (like $300) when it gets close to the show ( about 8% cancel so they don't have to pay the remaining fee but we keep the registration fee)- I spent last year adding invoices manually to each participant, because I don't think WA has a way to do split-payments and it was a bloody nightmare! - but Quickbooks integration will surely help us this year, right!?!?! Please tell me it will 🤣

Inconvénients

I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do newsletters for non OPA members. It seems that a non-member could sign up for a newsletter, and then their email is in our system, but it kind of gets muddy when we want to only send a newsletter out for our members (member only events, get togethers at peoples houses, etc. ) and public events (come to our big pottery show). I also get confused then, when I see all of the numbers in the system - who is a member and who do we just have their email. We sometimes write grants and we like to share our reach for certain events we do - it would just be nice if it was clearer to separate the members/non members in our system. Maybe there is, and I just haven't quite figured it out.

Avantages

It has lots of great features like the forums and all the different letters you can generate and set up dates to have them automatically sent out. It’s also great for setting up events and then attaching all the reminders. It’s just all very difficult to do though.

Inconvénients

It’s not intuitive and very difficult to work with.

Avantages

The promises we were told that we could use our existing wordpress website with WA handling events, gating content, etc.

Inconvénients

That the onboarding and support reps do not having training on how to set up WA with an existing wordpress website. We've wasted 2+ months with email and chat loops without answers and with support reps that provide conflicting information

Avantages

WildApricot provides an excellent platform for the website for our arts and crafts guild. The website development tools are powerful and easy to use and customize. The platform allowed us to build our website ourselves without incurring costs for an outside web developer.

Our organization is membership-based, requiring that all participants in our events and activities be current paid-up members. The Wild Apricot platform ensures that this criteria is met at all times.

Great membership and event management features include customizable membership and registration forms, a helpful mobile app for administrators, easy payment processing, and effective search and reporting tools.

Inconvénients

The main limitation of WildApricot for our organization is the inability for a individual to hold more than one category of membership at a time.

Avantages

Our whole ski club is run using Wild Apricot. It's a very comprehensive system to broadcast events, track registrants and collect payments. As director I found it extremely helpful to oversee event status, and track sales as they occur.

Inconvénients

Admin access needs to be more granular. Giving someone admin access exposes major parts of the system. Our need is to limit admin access to a specific event or event grouping. Considerable computer experience is necessary to manage the system and our volunteers don't all have the same level required. This puts the system at risk of unintended damage.

Avantages

they promoted ease of use, quality of support, ease of launching and transferring data from last provider. None of those were accurate.

Inconvénients

ease of use, technical support, transfer of data, general user interface

Avantages

Most efficient platform. It genuinely supports manhour savings. What takes 100 manhours to achieve, is literally less than 20 manhours to achieve using all features of wild apricot. Imagine an 80% cost savings on manhours!

Inconvénients

Email verification during registration. Unfortunately, some register with an email error. If there were an email verification during registration, it would further save manhours in contacting the registrants to correct email error.

Avantages

It allows me to have a secure place to make tickets to a class I teach for injury prevention.

Inconvénients

I wish there was a way to incorporate more admins at no charge and more geared to classes not fund raising.

Avantages

I have used wild Apricot to build 4 websites since 2008 and several sites are still issue today.
The User Friendliness in Building a website for a non-developer. The COMPLETE features to include e-mail marketing and SaaS. (Members can join and update their details and register for events.

Inconvénients

Storage space can sometimes limit keeping organizational files in the cloud. I would like to set more udpated plug and play web pages.

Avantages

Member management and communications is good.Event management is good.Support is good.

Inconvénients

Financial management needs work - only shows income not expenditure so no P&L view.Some permissions for admins need to be more fine-grained (e.g. FOH in event management with the app.)The contact-based pricing hurts organisations like us... the value is in our 300 members, the cost is in our 1000 other contacts.

Avantages

Time saver, gives back valuable man-hours to service the program cause

Inconvénients

Limited to the users creativity.

Avantages

Fairly easy to use. It was relatively easy to move over our existing member data base and website.

Inconvénients

Technical support is available only by chat and email, and not nights or weekends. System is inflexible in a number of areas, particularly with event management. Reports are few and not useful. Admin UI clumsy in places. Once we added some event reporting using the API, we were able to make it work for our organization. Polishing in response to user requests would help, but feature development and enhancement are no longer happening.

Avantages

Great for membership management. Simple and easy to use. Great for email communication and scheduling with members. I like the events feature.

Inconvénients

Customer support needs help. Still learning the software so will report later if more comes up.

Avantages

Event management and the updated email formatting

Inconvénients

Price rise in 2022 is not commensurate with the level of improvements and the lack of support from human beings

Avantages

I like the fact that the software includes a membership area and an event area. Members are already contacts within the system, so they find it easy to register for conferences. We're also able to send emails to all contacts or to just our members.

Inconvénients

I'd like to see a way to set up sessions and a conference schedule in the system with each session having a QR code in order to keep up with session attendance.

Avantages

WA has a great feature set that includes a lot of the functionality we need to completely manage our membership, communication, and payment collection. I especially like that we can have bundle memberships and can create saved searches for email distribution or member management.

Inconvénients

There are occasionally issues with some of the search fields that can only be resolved by logging off and back in. I would like to have group texting capabilities.

Avantages

It was very nice to have a software to organize our membership. The software was built into the website directly, so members can directly renew their membership while browsing the website. You can build different user permissions into different levels.

Inconvénients

The UI of the websites you build with this and the backend feel outdated. I feel like the event tool could be more powerful, especially with how powerful you can easily build websites with Drupal/Wordpress. It would feel more like a membership program if the events could be dynamic with attendees, volunteers, being able to list what is still needed, etc. We found ourselves moving to Facebook or Next Door a lot to interact with our members.

Also, in the span of one year, our plan went up by $20/month, which was an extra $240 a year for our small, local advocacy group.

Avantages

I like how easy it is to keep a consistent looking website using the themes.

Inconvénients

I don't like that you don't charge in local currency. It is very had for non-profits to budget when the cost varies so much based on the US dollar.

I also don't like that you can not easily change the default theme colours for a theme so that they show up at the top of the selection box. Instead, we have to constantly use the hex codes for any text etc that doesn't pick up the theme colours automatically instead of picking one of the theme colours because they remain the colours of the original theme.

Avantages

Not much. It does have some features built in that are easy to use, like the member forum. It also has some customizable features in the membership rules...if they work. Sadly, you can't rely on them and the support staff is less than supportive.

Inconvénients

Where to start. Support is only available via chat or email, and only Monday through Friday from 10:00 - 5:00.

Next, the system is full of bugs. Members renew and it doesn't advance their renewal date. Members try to log in and it won't let them establish a password. Members can't log in so they create a whole new account, and there is not duplicate warning, so we just have to stumble on the duplicates. There were several member files that had the wrong renewal date but we couldn't change them manually. The system would give us error messages. The system would also randomly change information that we entered into the fields. The search features are less than reliable and do not show all the information unless you export the file to a spreadsheet. If changing member levels it will automatically revert someone to the current member year. You should be able to set that option or create a rule where if the member price is the same it keeps the already paid for years. We have an extremely high rate of payments that go unprocessed, for various reasons. Recaptcha not working, card declined because the payer used auto-fill on the form, card declined because the website is in Canada, and more.

I have spent almost every day in some sort of chat session with the support staff, and you cannot interact with the higher tier support, only the base level. Plus, there have been times where it was a week or more before we received a response.

Avantages

I manage the memberships for a club that has over 15 teams and 240 members, so it is not the easiest thing to manage. I went through a few different programs and Wild Apricot seems to be the best fit for the numerous needs the Club has! It is easy to track payments - overpaid balances and balance due, I can enter manual payments, add extra line items to keep track of fundraising credits, and easily email families or certain individuals from the software. There are workarounds for some of the limitations that the software has, which has been helpful.

Inconvénients

There are a few issues that I have with this software: 1) it does not allow group invoicing so if I need to add an invoice to all members on one team, I have to go into each account and manually create; 2) it is not intuitive when it comes to families with 2 or more players, as it does not allow two different memberships to be linked to one account - I end up having to create a unique account for those families; 3) it does not allow partial payments. As with most membership sites, I have found the website portion to be somewhat clunky and limited, so I have the actual website on a different platform, which is unfortunate.

Avantages

Ease of use for general public, ability to create an attractive, efficient website, Paypal link for easy registration for memberships and conference fees, great customer support

Inconvénients

Some limitations for the structure of the website

Avantages

I was the Secretary for my Chapters well known organization. The Secretarial duties are vast and important to the life of the organization. Wild Apricot appears to have everything a non-profit organization needs. It allows me to do all of the required things necessary.
The membership database allows for custom as well as preset categories with specified access. I can keep track of membership categories, addresses, dues due, and
Quick books is a part of the application. Reports can be easily generated using the information entered into the database. My favorites are the communication sections. I can announce events that all members can quickly view, be registered for or wait listed. Reminders can also be sent to all members or those specified.
Payments can be taken and recorded, invoices and receipts sent. The confirmation emails are customized and can be personalized. Documents that need to be shared can also be done.
I find that Wild Apricot can complete all necessary duties assigned to an organization. While all officers can have premium access to all documents, reports and finances 24/7, it also allows for all shades of transparency to members while keeping confidential information secure.
I haven't run across any application as thorough as Wild Apricot. I've only used the application a few days as they allow a 30 day trial to try it out and show off their goods to potential users.

Inconvénients

My only concern is that the way in which things are laid out aren't as intuitive as I would have liked. I would rather have an illustrated manual on the dashboard for when a new user signs in. There is a quick 4 minute video guide that I may find usable later on the opening page. But its definitely not a deal breaker for me.

Avantages

The primary driver was to find something that was intuitive to use. Our staff are all part time volunteers and needed to be able to use the software with minimal instructions from their homes. Wild Apricot provided this by making the import of data simple as well as creating a new Web site that had same look and feel of existing site. Also migrating the DNS was easy.

There are plenty of tutorial and FAQ pages to guide you along. Once you under stand the basic concept everything else becomes easy. Best part is being able to grant limited admin access to certain pages for updates and changes. Also by letting users update their own information we saved a lot of time updating Membership data. Creating Events proved very popular as well with Members now being to sign up on line and also remit payments. Integration with PayPal was easy as well.

The application packs enough features to make it much easier to manage the Swim Club without making it too complicated to use. Everything beforehand was Excel driven and therefore never synchronized or up to date.

I also like the mobile app a lot. Easy to take a look if new members signed up, paid or if member are delinquent without going online.

Inconvénients

We have encountered some minor issues we wished were a little different but nothing to deter from the overall functionality. I think that would be the case with any software packages. So no major cons to report. We like the software. It is easy to use and has powerful reporting etc capabilities.

Avantages

We use the software to host our website and manage our membership database/contact system (emails to members and potential members). Before moving to this system, we were using separate tools for these three functions and it was extremely cumbersome. The consolidation was straightforward, their online help documentation is superb, and their technical support is astoundingly prompt and thorough. Seriously. It rarely takes more than 3 hours to get an extremely high quality response, and during one interaction the support staff proactively suggested a completely different approach that had advantages over what we were trying.
The contact management system (emails) is beautiful. It has given us a much more professional look and feel for our user base and many of our members have told us they feel it is impressive.
We are not using all the features (in particular, photo albums, user forums), but may want to use them some day, it is good to know we have these options for expansion.

Inconvénients

I gave it a three star rating on ease of implementation only because they do not have the ability to easily import your old website into their system. This frankly is not a big problem for us, we wanted (and needed) to overhaul our website anyway, but it means that as of today (three months after go live on the member database and contact management system), we are still transitioning our website. We are all-volunteer with no staff, it is truly not difficult to re-do the website, but if a user is satisfied with their existing website, the effort to transition over should be part of consideration.