Wild Apricot has everything a non-profit needs

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Wild Apricot helped organize our organization!

Our small, non-profit organization of internationally located English teachers needed a "home" for our members to connect. Nobody on the board was particularly tech savvy; nor were we confident enough to build our own website. So we were thrilled to discover Wild Apricot (WA). The tutorials are fabulous, thankfully using simple English and easily understood, and the structure is intuitive to even the most novice user. The Customer Service team quickly replies anytime I have a question. We initiated a small annual membership fee to cover our cost, and WA's automated system tracks our member renewals with ease. We are still able to offer free memberships to our global and student members, and the general membership fees easily cover our annual costs. Our little site hosts all of our organization's history (past conferences, journals, newsletters, etc.), and we're hoping to soon add a Resources tab where our members can share unpublished curriculum ideas for teaching English language learners. I love that we can have a members-only viewing for some things on our site, and open everything else to the public. Our annual conference registration is so much more organized now, and we love the ease of the Paypal system for payments. Of course, there are changes we'd like to see, particular to our organization's needs and goals. Three times I've made suggestions to WA for site improvement, and the follow-up was quick, respectful, and thorough. Suggestions are taken seriously and are useful to the WA team for making site improvements and upgrades. I am happy to write this recommendation and assure you that anyone, absolutely anyone can create a useful and attractive website with the help of Wild Apricot!

Pros

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

Cons

Some limitations for the structure of the website

Wild Apricot is perfect for recreational clubs

I would definitely recommend Wild Apricot for any organization with a membership and events that require registration. They manage this amazingly well!!. I love the fact that it is so easy for both admins and users to use. Most of my admins and membership are not technical so this is important to us. It's easy to enable blogs, forums, and photo galleries to create community pages -- somewhere that members can connect to the club and each other.

Pros

We are a recreational tennis club with 70 members. I created a great website with a customized membership application form in just one day with no coding required. Within a week, we were live, with online applications and online event registration for tennis tournaments and even electronic payment. I have ALL contact information plus player rankings available when it is time to do the draw; it is so much easier than taking paper entry forms which are not filled out completely or legibly. Thanks to customized event registration forms, I can solicit volunteers at the time that they register. No more calling people at their homes trying to find someone to help!!! I appreciate the security measures too -- I am able to provide club newsletters and photo galleries to club members only. My membership is very pleased with the functionality and everyone says that the club feels more connected this year.

The Wild Apricot support team has been responsive to all questions and problems.

Cons

The finance side of Wild Apricot is a little weak as their reports do not take into account the finance fees that Google Checkout and PayPal deduct. And you can't modify the numbers manually to reflect actual amount received, either due to finance fees or if someone sent in a partial payment. They are aware of these issues and are working on them.

The other enhancement request that we have is to have users be able to see who else is signed up for tournaments. That's because we are a social organization and because we make use of changing volunteers to help with every event. Wild Apricot is working on this but it was not an early priority because professional organizations that were hosting seminars, for example, had no need for participants to see who else was attending and did not necessarily use any volunteers.

We looked for a simple Cloud application to decentralize administration tasks and found it.

Database that is accessible for any of the administrators of the club. Members can self manage accounts. Automatic upgrades and easy to manage Web content. Automatic billing through predefined time periods etc. Ease of use. We were up and running in a few weeks. Data import was easy as well.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Flexible software but needs some tweaking

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Great Service, no hidden costs and love the database

Have been with 3 other companies who promised great things for membership-based software and under-delivered. WA's response time for customer service is faster than any of the other 3. Sometimes takes several tries, but with stay with it and the issue is usually solved. Rather than promising many items before the contract is signed, then revealing that you get rudimentary versions and have to pay for the more robust item that you really need, WA is up front with what you get. They accurately answer questions about this type of issue before you sign on with them. They also have a free version limited to a small number of members, which can let you try everything before you totally commit to a fee-based version for a larger organization with more members. The database is faster than any other we have used. They allow a LOT of fields rather than limiting you to an extra 10 or 29 beyond the basic ones needed for a members-only database. As a result we have been able, for the first time, to keep track online of members, contacts, past members, exhibitors, donors, etc., all online without the need for separate offline databases for some of them. With other companies the limited fields means we could do a lot with members records, but could not adequately add or change anything enough to keep track of advertisers, sponsors, exhibitors for our conference, and had problems with trying to identify prospects for members or to track those who dropped their membership. There are a few areas that still are lacking. We currently use Joomla for content management, and find the Joomla templates, content categorizing, and methods of limiting access to be more useful than WA. There needs to be at least one responsive template, since a large number of our members have become more dependent on tablets and phones for their internet content. The report system gives a nice online report, but results are not printable and when downloaded, give you a spreadsheet including every single field in each record rather than the single items you were looking for in the report. WA makes upgrades about twice a year, usually incorporating the most requested improvements. They also make other smaller upgrades in between the main ones. If you can't wait, tweaks are available for a fee through a third party which is familiar with the WA environment. They are the only organization out there who makes me feel that they really DO care about what a non-profit organization might want.

A great all-in-one package for membership management

Excellent all-in-one system for many basic needs of a member-based organization. Terrific support staff and very clear online documentation make implementation straightforward. Very professional look for e-mails. Be aware that you will need to rebuild your website (and/or be satisfied with a patchwork look as you link from your main website into Wild Apricot).

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Bringing our rowing club into the 21st century!

I was asked to "freshen up" the appearance of our club's static HTML website. I conducted user interviews, during which a lengthy list of wished-for functionality emerged, way beyond the site's appearance. The Board and our members wanted an online implementation for the following: up-to-date member directory; a wide range of membership "types" (scullers, sweep rowers, coxes, paddlers, kayakers, dragon boaters...); automated processing of membership applications and renewals; credit card payments; event scheduling; calendaring; email blasts; donations; and on and on. My research into available options within our limited budget yielded one clear winner: WildApricot. The Board agreed, I ported (and freshened up) the existing website content, and implemented all those requested features. The process was easy and straightforward. The WildApricot online help system is terrific, and the technical assistance is always timely and spot on. We have been using WildApricot for about five years now, and it continues to serve us very well.

Pros

Rich funtionality; ease of implementation; terrific customer support

Cons

Complexity of handling our multiple member "types" (but at least we can handle them!); complexity of analyzing financial data

Great software, constantly improving

We are the oldest and largest ski club in the USA, and switched to WA about 6 months ago after a few years with a much smaller and less robust software system. Our new website is beautiful, packed with content and action-oriented images, and up until recently was administered by just one volunteer web editor. We have gotten positive feedback from our members and guests, and also from members of other local ski clubs in our area. They're jealous! Since we offer over 500 events per year, ease of creating and managing events was a prime consideration. WA's flexible Calendars and event registration, notification and payment options provide an effective means for reducing the workload of our event leaders. Membership management is equally effective, and our membership has grown by 10% or so in recent months. After experiencing some problems with Paypal and Stripe, we seamlessly switched to Authorize.net as our payment gateway, and are extremely pleased with the results. The biggest single weakness for us is with regard to invoicing and payment for our ski flight trips. We offer 15+ trips yearly to over 500 participants, at $1500 to $3000 or more per trip. Our members can register for a trip with a $250 deposit, and we then offer a 3-payment installment plan. WA is not set up for such multiple payments, and so the invoicing and automated email functions must be manually manipulated to be effective. WA is aware of the issue, but no solution is yet scheduled. Customer service is truly outstanding, with most questions and issues addressed in-depth by online tutorials, guidelines, and reference materials. Telephone support is equally good.

Gave us control of our web-presence (finally!)

I like this product so much, after setting-up the site for AGO-Milwaukee, I convinced my church to switch from the service supported by our Denomination to WildApricot and it's much easier to use. We're just getting started, but already our site is far better at serving our needs. I would highly recommend WildApricot for any small to medium organization which cannot afford to hire a full-time computer-geek webmaster but needs an attractive and functional website. The learning-curve was gentle and we were operative in a very short time. I am completely satisfied that WildApricot has allowed us to meet and even exceed our goals for our new website.

Pros

Our goal was to maintain a constantly-updated website, but we were working thru a vendor who designed our old site from scratch and one needed to know html to do any updating. Our events calendar was constantly missing events and full of errors which were difficult to correct. WildApricot allowed us to assign people who were only slightly computer-savvy because no coding was needed. The site is incredibly intuitive and easy to use and takes only minutes a day for people to update. We can assign multiple administrators with different duties and everything doesn't need to go thru a webmaster who may or may not get around to meeting our needs. The site looks wonderful and the membership is responding very positively to its features.

Cons

There is almost nothing I don't like. I wish Safari was supported (and I hear they may be working on that) but it is not inconvenient to use FireFox and it's free, so that's just a very minor annoyance. I would like to see a little more flexibility in the forms-templates -- we had trouble getting the membership categories in the order we prefer on the screen, but all-in-all our experience has been trouble-free. There may be some people out there who will feel constrained by the available templates, but there are enough that our problem was more of which to choose, and I understand that even the templates are customizable (if you know how to code). The standard ones met our needs.

Event Scheduling Needs Work

First, I do love the software and feedback from my members has been great. There are some issues with the event Scheduling, in that most of my events are posted at the beginning of the year so that I can track interest and participation from my members. Most of my members sign up for events as soon as they are posted. Sometimes situations arrive through the year, where they are unable to attend. There is currently no way once registered for an event, to cancel the registration if something comes up. In addition, some of my events require certain memberships to pay a fee to attend, If they need to cancel and reschedule for a different event it would be nice if they had a way to do that without having to pay again. We do not give refunds but I'm stuck with the task of keeping track of Cancellations and Rescheduling Manually.

Pros

It is so easy to communicate with my members, notify them of events and remind them of events.

Cons

Too Much Administrative Emails every time an action is performed by a member. It would be nice if instead (1) email came in Weekly or Monthly to summarize activity especially Event registrations, why can't there be an email option to receive a list of registrants for each event instead of notification every time someone registers. I want to turn this feature off, but I also want to at least be updated- Very Annoying

Wild Apricot - best website and event manager choice for organizations.

I have moved dozens of clients over to Wild Apricot and often sound like a salesperson for them. Overall, an awesome product that is worth the money.

Pros

The Wild Apricot service is entirely online and updates are automatic to the system. Constant upgrades and improvements are noted and over the past few years have seen this service become the very best in class. It has become the single management tool for dozens of membership organizations that I have worked with and even a couple groups that just wanted to manage their events and online presence easier.

Cons

The price has been raised twice in the past year or so but it was very reasonable before that. The cost is still reasonable when you consider all that you get (membership management, event management, online store, online newsletters, a great website tool, etc) but a few of my clients have complained about the costs lately for renewals... so will want to watch this.

Perfect Software for Small and Not So Small Associations

I have all of my clients using this software. I have very small associations on it and one not so small organization. New versions appear to come fully tested. No system is 100% perfect unless you design and deploy one that the organization builds from scratch. However, there is a flexibility to WA that lets us make it work for you. The support both online and in person is superb. Once you get your members to interact with the system you will most likely hear or see comments as "It is really easy to use" or "Even I feel comfortable being online with it". From a technical point of view the application is well integrated and it make navigating the site almost a no brainer. Having said all there are things that can further make the system more effective and efficient. The WA staff is very open to user suggestions and they have a short, medium and long range plan for system improvements and enhancements. Most associations I am familiar with can make this system work for them without an enormous outlay of capital and human resources. Keep up the good all of you Apricots. Lawrence E. Rosenthal, PhD Principal & Owner The Kaleidoscope Associates (TKA)

An inexpensive, easy-to-use, ever-growing association/member management software solution

I have used other software to manage our association's membership, and Wild Apricot is far ahead of the curve as far as functionality, customization, and ease of use. But probably the best feature is Wild Apricot's team of wonderful customer-focused developers and support personnel who respond quickly, efficiently, and reliably to all support requests...at no extra charge!

Pros

Wild Apricot's team is extremely customer service savvy and quick to respond to problems (of which there have been very few). They also are always making product enhancements (on nearly a monthly basis) based upon their customers'/users' requests, suggestions, recommendations, and needs. The functionality is as simple or as complex as needed, based upon the size, structure, and budget of an organization. Online registration has made keeping track of events a breeze; although we have not yet instituted online payment, several options are available. Automatic reminders of membership renewals are easily programmed and customized, as well as event reminders; membership blast e-mails; opt-out feature; advanced search and filtering of member records; back-end administration rights can be customized; importing and exporting records; viewing and editing member records and privacy settings; CSS and Javascript customization; saved e-mail drafts. Pricing is based upon number of active records.

Cons

I have very few complaints. I have requested several features that have been incorporated into the software's functionality. I have made a request that is in the queue for consideration: because our association is for public relations professionals, we have a lot of news, and it would be nice to be able to set news posting dates and archiving dates with individual articles with a library of past news stories. The WYSIWYG formatting for pages is a little clunky, but there is a wealth of documentation for customizing pages as well as support materials.

Great Software for Membership Management

I had reviewed a couple of different options, but opted to use Wild Apricot for our small cultural organization this past summer. So far, we haven't regretted the decision. Previously our site was managed in WordPress but it was designed by a local web hosting company and the old site didn't have any built in membership management and communication features. If we continued to use WordPress we were expected the dish out a lot of service fees to the company to implement additional features to our site. Instead, we moved to Wild Apricot. I was happy with the web design template solutions, and realized with a few minor changes I could achieve the look I wanted for our organization. I am a somewhat savvy computer user but I an in no way a professional web designer or a programmer. I didn't want to dabble too much with completely customizing the themes and style sheets. Wild Apricot's customer service reps were very kind to share with me a few quick tips which allowed me to achieve the perfect look. Membership sign up process has been very easy, and we have just implemented the standard PayPal payment option which appears to be working great. There are only two major limitations with the product for my organization: One is the multi-language support (There is no easy way to create a version of the site in a different language). We opted to list everything in both languages in our links, and repeat content in both languages on the same page. This is actually working OK for us. Second limitation is the inability to create recurring events. One can replicate events easily, by using an existing event... but the simple functionality that's available in Google or Outlook Calendars is lacking. The company does provide frequent updates to the software, though. I was pleasantly surprised to see them incorporate features I hadn't thought of but may come in handy. They allow users to submit items to a public wishlist and seem to listening (at least the easier to implement features are making the update roadmap). Overall, I am happy about the choice. A little bit more flexible pricing may be necessary. I may exceed the 250 members list soon, but my organization will never be getting too big.. If I have to move to the next price range, our Board may feel it's a little too expensive.

Best software for nonprofit clubs

We previously used a small website provider that lacked essential features such as online payment processing. Their technical support was also lacking, and it took months for software fixes to be implemented. When we switched to Wild Apricot, membership levels stabilized, and our cash flow was greatly improved.

Pros

Wild Apricot has all of the essential features that are needed by small nonprofit clubs like ours. It provides a membership directory, supports different types of memberships and durations, and automated renewal reminder emails. Our club offers over 500 events a year, so setting up event applications, registrations and payments is important to us. The software supports several different online payment gateways, allowing our members to submit credit card payments without ever leaving our website.

Cons

There are some missing features that would be helpful. One is the ability to track membership trends over time.

Make life easier for your volunteers

We centralized everything, gone are excel, mailchimp, calendar, printed newsletter and the subsequent coordination and updating of the different systems. Members go online, read about the latest events, check the calendar, register for events, pay their dues and their event fees, get reminders for the dues. The volunteers' workload has been reduced by a lot. Just wish there was a magic wand to familiarize all "administrators" with WA.

Pros

The software encompasses everything a small sports organization needs:
-website creation
- membership database and dues,: all dues related correspondence
- events: setup, related communications and attendance control,
- finance application
- a store application for gear
- posts about past events

Cons

With the software being so flexible, it also has a lot of options and controls, which makes it difficult to train our event leaders to use the site. But we would not want to miss the flexibility, so the training just takes time.

Improved our Web Site and Membership Management

Wild Apricot gave us a professional looking web site and automated most of our membership database and maintenance functions. We moved over from an obsolescent, hand-crafted site with minimal hitches and no outside help. Our membership database was in an Excel spreadsheet, which we were able to import with a modest amount of massaging. WA gives us features we really needed, like online event management and credit card prepayment. For credit cards, WA just hooked up to our PayPal account, with no added fees, although there are other options. Like any complex system, there were some features we had to wrestle with in order to do what we wanted, and a few things it just won't do yet. There is an active "Wishlist" forum and features requested by the user community are steadily being added. But email support is fast and competent and in many cases we were told how to do something or work around a limitation. Switching to any organization management and website platform is a big job and comes with plusses and minuses. Our experience with WA was that the job was easier than we had thought, and there were a bunch of plusses and very few minuses.

Pros

Ease of migration. Ability to easily create professional website with lots of functionality and gadgets.

Cons

Nothing serious enough to mention.

Our professional organization moved to Wild Apricot because it does a complete job of helping us.

If you manage an organization with members and need a full service product that will help you build and manage your website, this is it. It also does all of the back-end things necessary and integrates mail, payments, event management, blogs and many other features all in one product. We LOVE Wild Apricot

Pros

It manages membership, collects payments, sends and tracks emails and also provides all of this in the administrative side of our website. We used to have a self-built website that was a mess. After moving to Wild Apricot, we increased membership by almost 50%. We have a professional looking website now and the bonus of managing our membership, email blasts, payments invoicing and collections. Now they have just added a store front for those who need it. They have built two smart phone apps (one for ADMINS and one for Members) which make it easier.

Cons

It tracks your current members and is up the moment accurate of who is a current member. But I cannot answer the question: "How many members did we have on this date last year?" It takes a slew of special search criteria to even get close to being able to answer that question. I've taken to doing a export of the member list quarterly into a spreadsheet so I can answer such a basic question.

I have been with Wild Apricot for 2 years now, all I can say is THANK YOU!

As a small non-profit and an all volunteer board, we do not have the capability to run our membership sign ups and training registrations, by hand. We now have automated payments, registrations, renewals and are able to communicate in an instant with our membership. It is also very nice to have all of this with a user-friendly website in one place!

Pros

As a small non-profit, this software has made organizing and communicating with our membership SO much easier. Membership is now automatic and registering for our events is easy for our guests and much less work for us. The website is easy to manage, and our financials are much more organized. I think what I like the most about this company is that they are CONSTANTLY improving according to a "wish list". It is very obvious that they care about their customers (US!) and continually work hard to improve. I love Wild Apricot!

Cons

The software is missing just a few things that would be great for us personally, but with 1000's of wishes, I understand that not all of mine will be granted :)

As far as function, I have no complaints.