Wild Apricot

Best solution for small to medium sized associations

Comments: 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.

Alternatives Considered: MemberClicks and Membee

Reasons for Choosing Wild Apricot: The database was antiquated and difficult to manage.

Reasons for Switching to Wild Apricot: Wild Apricot was the most cost effective tool for overall membership management and the creation of a members’ website. The cost of the solution and the costs of transactions was best with Wild Apricot and the system offered the currently needed features as well as a host of features that will be used in the future.

Cost Effective Website and Database

Comments: 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.

Alternatives Considered: MemberClicks and StarChapter

Reasons for Switching to Wild Apricot: StarChapter is very dated software and not at all user friendly. I also felt like my questions were not heard or they were determined to do things their way. MemberClick was outside of our budget.

Not Customer Friendly

Comments: 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.

Alternatives Considered: ClubRunner and Join It

Reasons for Switching to Wild Apricot: Combination of price and features.

An Out of the Box Solution for Membership Management

Comments: 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.

Alternatives Considered: Neon CRM, Salesforce Sales Cloud and HubSpot CRM

Reasons for Choosing Wild Apricot: Goldmine was server based and their cloud-based option was cost prohibitive when we considered switching to that solution.

Switched From: GoldMine Premium Edition

Reasons for Switching to Wild Apricot: Overall, it provided the best set of tools for the price as well as providing a quality out of the box solution.

Use with Multiple Organizations - A True Advocate

Comments: 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.

Alternatives Considered: Neon CRM and Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Switching to Wild Apricot: Value for money, ease of implementation, ease of management, previous experience with the product and support team.