Wild Apricot Software

Stay away! This company is falling apart. See cons comments.

Pros

Used to work very well. Lots of features and descent integration. For 2+ years I loved this software. Not anymore.

Cons

After the company was sold and the CEO left the price went up and the quality dropped- a lot! Customer money was being taken and the payment info wasn't propagating through the software. In other words customers were paying and not getting what they paid for. WA tech said the problem was contained to two days only, then to 12 days... here I am a month later and the problem is still occurring! Their best solution was a suggestion to no longer use paypal because their integration with WA was bad. They support paypal integration then say not to use it. Insane. Thousands of dollars wasted and a ton of frustration. I am switching to a word press based platform.

Pros

Functionality and customization were nice. The pricing was not outrageous unlike many other software systems.

Cons

After playing with it for a while we decided we needed to go back to the drawing board. We were not prepared to settle and we wanted something geared more specifically to non-profits.

MailChimp has superior open/ click analytics and easier and more flexible settings to create marketing emails.

Pros

Ability to manage many events at one time. Ease of sending, reminding and reconciling emails. ....

Cons

If you register for a webinar, be prepared to be inundated with emails! I block one and receive another. Immediately after sending feedback about this, i was hit with 3 emails in a row! Leaves a very bad taste and i won't be recommending anymore. Very difficult to set-up and navigate. Not for anyone who won't use regularly.

Pros

Very easy to use in setting up for the membership. Very reliable software and definitely recommended to others.

Cons

I am currently exploring the ''change price structure'' and somehow I am learning how to apply it. It takes a lot of studying it but definitely worth when you fully understand it.

Pros

Wild Apricot's template-based design made it easy for me to set up my membership system for my clients. I was in need of an application that would allow me to distinguish between my clients and those who had been referred to me by others for the same type of assistance. This platform made it easy to do something I initially thought would be very complicated.

Cons

The user interface system is a little challenging to work with. The pricing structure has changed since I opened my initial account and it doesn't seem that the services warrant the increase.

Mostly it's fine, but I feel like Wild Apricot is being left behind by newer competitors that are built to do more and to integrate more fluidly with the many different cloud-based apps people are using these days.

Pros

I like the flexibility you have in defining your membership levels, and like the reporting around member status/renewal status.

Cons

I have one client that is using Wild Apricot, and they have started shopping for new databases. WA just "changed their pricing structure", which means raised the price, for my client, offering a bunch of new bells and whistles they won't use, and justifying the price increase that way. But that's just kind of the final straw - there have been other frustrations.

The website is slow, and I mean really slow. Sometimes it freezes when you're trying to pull reports. When you go to WA-integrated pages on their website, everything slows down. The web page integration doesn't look great, but it's passable. No integration with QuickBooks Online, and the reporting isn't super friendly to do monthly reconciliations between the two applications.

Pros

The ability to automate membership applications and renewals is a big plus for a small nonprofit. The support community for users provides excellent advice and guidance too.

Cons

The website and other functions are not as simple to use as some standalone offerings but the whole package in one place is a hard deal to beat!
Given the complexity of the functionality offered, the learning curve can be a bit steep!

Pros

This site has everything you need to set up a professional membership website. The automated emails, and targeted emails have eased our administrative burden.
The blogs, events, join us, and membership pages are already set up in template form, that you can easily customize to represent your organization. No HTML coding is needed, but you can use code if you'd like to.
The checkout system is very easy to integrate with your card payment system with I wide variety of supported vendors.
We can't wait for the new online store to be added in April, as well as the membership phone app!

So far so good. Give it a try!

Pros

Wild Apricot seems very feature-rich for the cost. Our intention is to use it to replace My Emma for newsletters, Evite for invitations, Excel for contact info and membership status, the existing website, and maybe more. Our club has over 200 members. Administering membership renewal and contact updates are very time-consuming. Wild Apricot will allow us to use a single, user editable, database. Our members will be able to change their own contact information. Lapsed members will be automatically removed from the list active members. The website building tool is fairly good. The included templates are attractive. There is an extensive array of help videos, although I tend to stick with the user manual, which is quite extensive (over 2000 pages). We're hoping that the admin portion of club support will be greatly reduced. Our board members will add events and post articles. Hopefully, the rest will maintain itself, more or less. 30-day free trial. Easy to try. WA has good online reviews. Importing contacts from an Excel file was a snap.

Cons

r us. A little more variety of the templates might be nice. A bit tough getting the webpage to look good both on desktop systems and my iPad. With less experienced users the learning curve might be daunting, but it's near impossible to create a product as feature rich as Wild Apricot without making it a bit more time-consuming to learn.

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.

Complete ripoff. Company has no idea what it's doing in website development and membership support. Company refused to issue refund. Representatives lied to me on 3 different occasions that they fixed the website, but they have not.

Pros

Easy to set up. Ready to launch website in less than a few hours. But that's where it stops. They'll take your money, but there is no technical or customer support.

Cons

Terrible customer support, they have no experience in website design whatsoever. There was a security issue with the website. Rather than refunding the money, they lied to me that they fixed it. Months later, same problem persists.

Excellent tool

Pros

Auto-enrollment and auto announcement of renewal of membership works great and saves me a lot of time

Divest of wild apricot partners and own up to providing good tech support.

Pros

Enormous capability, without any real tech support. Email support from Russia is not helping. We could assist.

Cons

Very difficult to learn .Poor WordPress integration.Wild Apricot partners not a substitute for tech support deficiencies.

The small museum I work at just started using this in the last year, and it has really helped us with many of the things we do. We don't have to have as many applications or services with Wild Apricot, since they provide many, like the membership management and event registration.

Pros

Provides many services. Website creator is relatively easy to use and looks nice. Event registration works well for us.

Cons

A few things have been slightly confusing, we've had a little trouble with some of the registration types. And in the website editor, I can't get embedded videos to center onto the page.

Likes Best

The website management, membership management, events, and email sending are seamless, so logins, directories, members areas and events are taken care of without exporting or re-keying. Also caters for associations where one membership covers multiple people - and the main contact can self-maintain the others. Caters for UK currency and tax (but not multi-currency). Support is excellent.

Likes Least

All contacts on the database have to have a unique email address. Printing labels or badges involves exporting to Excel and mail merge.

Recommendations

There are huge advantages to being web-based: access from anywhere (including mobile), online payments, front-end/back-end integration, easy pricing plans, and biggest of all, user self-service. Downside is that reporting usually suffers, and you need to be convinced about security.

Likes Best

We've been using WA for several years. There was no WordPress membership site available when we created our site and WA was one of the only membership sites available. If I had it to do over again, would not use it./

Likes Least

Not intuitive, difficult to figure out. After many years, I still don't have it completely figured out.

Recommendations

Give yourself lots of time to learn it. You should have some ability to manage a website. Would not recommend this to a novice.

Likes Best

The product is rather easy to use for my role as web-pages and journal editor and de-facto co-webmaster, especially compared to the high-priced-brand from which we switched (in stages) last year. WA staff have been quite helpful as I asked a lot of questions, some of them later seen to have been kinda dumb. They do strive to improve. Example: When we started, the "Files" function loaded quite slowly via Mac Safari. I beefed and they fixed. Every tool I now use regularly is usually fast and consistent. I cannot speak to the membership-management and money matters that others handle.

Likes Least

Several small points of inconvenient usability. I did an online survey and mentioned several. The only one I remember clearly was a little thing, having to mouse-click then type then click again when entering anchor names, for example. Fixing that will save about 100 switches from keyboard to mouse and back in an editing session. In text, Ctrl/Cmd-A-X-C-V do work, but Ctrl/Cmd-B-I-U do not. WA staff said they are working on these things. They face real challenges in the way HTML and Word documents afflict text handling, especially links and hidden format code, but those gremlins are probably Internet-wide, certainly on other sites I edit.

Recommendations

Do an intensive month-long free test, getting ordinary users' feedback and keeping good notes that will help you build your "real" site cleanly. We are a small nonprofit with only a few hours of a larger nonprofit's staff time, so allocation of tasks kinda just-happened and so far has been OK. Better, early on, agree among yourselves who will do what tasks, who will be back-up to each of them, what level of admin rights each needs, and write it.

Likes Best

We have found Wild Apricot to answer just about all of our membership organization's needs, and it constantly evolves to keep up with technology without making it harder to use.

Likes Least

Lately I have had trouble accessing through Firefox.

Recommendations

I like best that all of our interactions with members are automatically recorded. I also like that each of our memberships have multiple contacts, and this system keeps them linked.

Likes Best

I like the ease of use with user support available. Customer support is available.

Likes Least

When changing to a newer version, not all upgrades carry over properly.

Recommendations

Review the user comments and go through tutorials. Make sure all functionality you need is available.

Likes Best

This product is easy to use, and if I become puzzled about how to do a certain task, I can either find the answer via the offered videos or through support. Their support folks are the best! They speak in easy-to-understand layman's terms and respond quite quickly.

Likes Least

I would like to be able to add animations to emails sent out to our membership.

Recommendations

Compare what Wild Apricot offers compared to other companies. Their prices are very competitive.