Wild Apricot

Commentaires: I have been a long time client of WA (7 years), but we are unlikely to renew. 3 years they ago they had a 40% price increase, but they allowed you to renew for up to 2 years at the previous rate. That increase was somewhat understandable because they had not raised fees for the previous 4 years we were clients. 2 years later they had another 40% increase but did not offer the same renewal. Neither increase coincided with major functional additions other than normal enhancements to existing functions. Today they announced a new 20% penalty if you don't switch to their payment processing system (US/Canada only). We have no intention to switch from PayPal so this was the last straw. We will be looking for an alternate option. They were acquired by a larger company and subsequently and equity firm. These increases are obviously cash grabs from current clients without considering the impact to the organizations. My suspicion is the company has a major cash flow issue and this is a way to get money now. I would be very leary of the stability of the company as they will lose many clients over this. This is really unfortunate because their tool is excellent!

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.

Commentaires: I began using WA in 2011 for a non-profit managing 90 volunteers and various events and fundraisers. Since then, I have created WA accounts for 3 other non-profits of similar size AND, as of 2017, also created a WA software account to manage my professional association of 1,000 members with great success. I am a huge advocate for Wild Apricot software and how is can effectively manage members/volunteers and manage events/fundraisers/conferences while being a user-friendly, professional platform to market my organizations.

Avantages: The simplicity yet robust nature of this software is awesome. The user-friendly setups and ease-of-use make it an effective tool to help manage various facets of the organization. Many screens are at-a-glance summary overviews while others provide sufficient detail to meet a variety of needs. Many of my volunteers are elderly and they can navigate the system just as ease as a techny-teenager. The system is user-friendly enough that, if you are in it every day, it is not cumbersome and, if you are an infrequent user, it is quite intuitive.

Inconvénients: While I like many things about the software, I only wish there was a way to (1) track volunteer hours within member profiles and (2) have the ability to use more than one payment system (I have a 501c3 and 501c4 organization with different financial needs) so I wish I could manage both within the same software system. So, those are big wish list items that I hope come along in the future but so far those are manageable through other less than ideal means. Otherwise, on a daily basis, there is very little I have issue with within the software.

Commentaires: Our component school district staff members and members of the public who register for programs understand intuitively how to register for our programs. The function most used by staff is the Excel download. Staff are able to easily sort and filter data to invoice schools and other agencies for multiple registrants through our agency finance system as required by law rather than through Wild Apricot's invoicing system. Our Wild Apricot website was once very robust. We have been able to simplify it while using the same template so the site is easier to use and looks much more like our agency site making the flow from one site to another nearly seamless.

Avantages: Our agency hosts many repeated events not only multiple times during the school year but that also repeat year after year. The ease with which events can be duplicated and edited for specific dates allows staff to set up a year's worth of events in just a few hours.

Inconvénients: We have many users creating events and Wild Apricot has only one events manager. We do have a very talented group but there is still a bit of nervousness since events are unable to be compartmentalized by a user or a department. PayPal payments are collected into one bank account and have to be parsed out after receipt by registrant as to which account the funds need to be deposited. We would like to have payments tied to department accounts for each event and pass that info through PayPal to our Fiscal Department.

Commentaires: It is functional and works, but has a lot of room for improvement--especially with the increase in cost.

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.

Commentaires: Every support request has been taken care off super-quickly. It has been a pleasure to work with the WA team since 2015.

Avantages: it covers all needs: membership database mgmt, event mgmt, communications. All in one place

Inconvénients: a bit constrained when it comes to webpage design, but all the functionality behind (database, calendar, etc), it is OK, it is definitely worse working around it.