Best solution for small to medium sized associations

WildApricot is an excellent solution for managing association memberships and websites. The solution includes basic eCommerce and the ability to build a website with the Wild Apricot CMS - you can also connect easily to other website tools. Members love the easy of managing their own profiles and the other features for member communications.

Pros

Easy of use, ability to customize the member database easily and the integrated content management system for a professional website.

Cons

The software does not allow you to determine the membership ID within he system. This creates a challenge for any organization that already has a member number schema.

An Out of the Box Solution for Membership Management

Other than the issues described above with the payment gateway, we have been extremely pleased with our Wild Apricot experience.

Pros

Wild Apricot is a single source for nearly everything needed to manage a membership organization. It has revolutionized our database, taking it into the cloud, it has streamlined our renewal process, given us greater visibility into our email marketing, and overall allowed us to function more efficiently as an organization. Since its deployment, we've been able to replace the work of up to 2 FTE because of how Wild Apricot has allowed us to streamline our operations.

Cons

Their payment gateway, Wild Apricot Payments, does have some unique challenges that we are working through. It has errored out a number of times and there was no intuitive alert to let us know we were missing out on authorized donations. Their customer support team has been slower than we'd like to respond to these issues and have yet to provide a clear reason for them and any timeline for resolution.

Repeat Customer

I have set up numerous associations with this software and still manage the website for 2. It is logical and has all of the necessary features (which are many). I know I can teach it to others and walk away when I am tired of volunteering as Web Master.

Pros

Wild Apricot is a full-feature membership management program. It handles every problem I have encountered since I stated using it in 2014. It has steady grown more powerful and they have developed solutions to almost every issue.

Cons

It is sometimes easy to skip a step in the financial part of the software, and cause trouble later - such as not settling a payment before voiding an invoice. It works great if you know what you are doing, but you use one of the functions rarely, it is important to review the steps carefully.

Not Customer Friendly

Our non-profit has approximately 1500 members we are managing and this was our first attempt at using a membership management tool. The implementation went well and our first year was generally positive. The features they offer are functional but pale in comparison to standalone services. For example the newsletter tool is extremely limited compared to our previous service, MailChimp, to the point where we are considering going back to MailChimp. After the company switched owners recently, the customer service quality has dropped dramatically. A recent forced change of payment systems resulted in our members' automatic subscriptions being canceled without warning, which was not expected or documented. We tried to engage customer support prior to the change but they were not helpful at all. This will likely result in a loss of members and thus income.

Pros

It offers a large selection of features and can be a one stop shop for membership tools. Although most of the features are not nearly comparable to equivalent stand-alone services, they are functional.

Cons

Customer support has been quite poor. They dropped telephone support in the last year and did not provide any guidance or assistance to us when they forced a payment system change that affected our members.

Cost Effective Website and Database

Overall Wild Apricot is a great tool for associations and/or others who need to process dues payments, event registrations and keep up with your clients.

Pros

Wild Apricot makes it easy to process registrations for events, dues payments and store purchases in addition to being a website. It is very easy to use. There are user groups that you can join to get help from other users. Also, it is very easy to create a manual invoice for things that I might need a product for or a registration. There is also an app for administrators which is super convenient when to try to look up open invoices, etc. when away from the office.

Cons

There are several features that should be available that are not. First and foremost there should be the availability within in the software to create a pdf and email it to contacts. The store does not appear to be integrated with the mail database and there are not a lot of reports. When I have orders from my store I have to constantly watch for duplicates. There is also not an email report to run that will search for possible duplicates in the system.