Wild Apricot - A Medium-Sized Solution for Membership Management
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I consult with multiple organizations to implement Wild Apricot for membership management and association website creation/management. For most clients, Wild Apricot has been implemented to streamline membership management, renewal, donations and basic online sales. Each company uses the integrated content management system to also build and maintain a website for the association. Wild Apricot solves a variety of management issues including member communications, simplified tracking of member dues and renewal periods and event registration management
Pros
- Automate member renewals and provide reminders for members with automatic renewal
- Tracking of member donations and the ability for a member to retrieve detailed donation receipt/acknowledgement for a variety fo donation types (in-kind, cash, etc)
- Provide integration between membership records and the association's website - using either the integrated CMS or code snippets
- Track member financials - open invoices, paid invoices
- Enable event management for both free and paid events
Cons
- The store functions are very basic - while suitable for small organizations with simple sales objectives, the function lacks some mainstream tools including coupons.
- PayPal integration is grossly inadequate and results in considerable frustration for members who try to pay via that platform.
- Recently (last three months), the system seems to have some difficulties maintaining availability of the admin backend. While users and site visitors do not notice downtime, it is not unusual to encounter difficulties logging in as an admin.
- The email marketing function is not as robust as separate commercial systems like MailChimp.
Likelihood to Recommend
Wild Apricot is well-suited for medium-size membership organizations with technically competent staff members. The cost of the platform (which is increasing) makes justification/ROI difficult for small organizations of non-profit associations with limited or sporadic income. The system is effective for organizations with 1200 or more active member and where the organization needs a website with a basic store. Wild Apricot will not satisfy organizations that are accustomed to robust e-commerce platforms or that operate with complicated workflows and/or complicated membership options or requirements.
