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.

Best Bang For Your Buck

Wild Apricot allows us to schedule classes, have members enroll in activities, and hosts our web site simply.

Pros

It's universality, it works well on every device, giving us instant functionality. I can find members, schedule events and make adjustments instantly, anywhere.

Cons

Sometimes I get lost doing certain operations.

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.

Use with Multiple Organizations - A True Advocate

Eight years ago I went through a selection process and chose Wild Apricot and then implemented it. A HUGE step up from disparate systems on Excel, a separate website, and email. This year I led the selection and implantation process for a different organization and Wild Apricot came out on top again. Processing a new member went from one hour to minutes. Renewals from 30 minutes to zero. Sending out emails used to be a huge process. Now it's simple. One thing I've noticed is that Wild Apricot continues to add and improve features. The website builder has gotten easier to use. And adding responsive themes and an easy-to-implement app is a huge plus.

Pros

Integrated features for membership management, communications, event management, and website development. Great coaching services during implementation and then support after.

Cons

Nothing that would stop me from selecting it again. Some of the newer features like polls can use some development, and formatting is sometimes challenging. But the tradeoff for a fully integrated system is well worth it.