iMIS Engagement Management System vs. WildApricot by Personify

iMIS Engagement Management System is well suited for associations or other non-profits that operate without a lot of bells and whistles. So far in my experience if you want to do more sophisticated operations, marketing in my specific role, then iMIS Engagement Management System may not be the best AMS. It does the basics well but the more high-powered you want to get then the more it's going to cost by having your vendor of choice to work to enhance or upgrade what you have.

Incentivized

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.

• One-stop-shop. I love that we have one system that will track our income, manage membership, email contacts, manage our website and pull reports.
• Response time on support tickets. Whenever I have a problem using iMIS, I can either log into their support site to submit a help ticket or send it directly from my email account. Someone normally responds to me within the hour and then I will get a solution within the day no matter the time of day I submit the ticket.
• Easy to use widgets. I love using widgets to pull a page together. They have slideshow widgets that use on a daily basis. There are also forum widgets and widgets to pull an already created query to a page you choose to display this information on.

Incentivized

• Controls registration through a linked series of events in the new member acceptance process: background check, orientation, and evaluation.
• Provides access to data through the export of membership, invoice, and payment tables for use with Excel, to respond to requests for queries and reporting.
• Generates renewal invoices en masse for email distribution.

Incentivized

• System Performance: iMIS has always seemed to have had performance issues....sluggish specifically. Though some of that may be in part to some of our customizations, but we don’t think so.
• Integrations with 3rd Party Products: we would like to see more integrations with 3rd party apps.

Incentivized

• They could have more interactivity for the contacts (vs members) designation
• Easier way to customize required fields for registration

Incentivized

I think both are great tools. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. I really like the CMS component that comes with iMIS. It is important for an organization to be able to quickly build websites to engage their members. iMIS provides tools to do this out of the box.

Incentivized

When compared to iMIS, Wild Apricot is an order of magnitude easier to implement and use. It is also a tool that can be administered without a considerable amount of outside support and expense. Wild Apricot is also a more fully integrated system that does not require complicated module licensing and the associated costs. iMIS is also much more expense than Wild Apricot Ultimate Membership Pro (UMP) is a WordPress plugin solution for managing association memberships. Since this is an add-on software, the cost is a small faction of the expense associated with Wild Apricot. The feature set of Wild Apricot is more extensive than the capabilities of of UMP, however, Wild Apricot is easier to use and understand that UMP. Being a hosted solution, Wild Apricot is also much more stable and predictable.

• iMIS had a neutral impact on my non-profit organization's overall business objectives. Both the finance and department teams just worked around the limitations that iMIS had.

Incentivized

• Staffing expenses have been kept flat through significant membership growth.
• Operating costs for WildApricot are reasonable, considering the functionality available.
• Managing membership renewals effectively means that we get our revenue into the bank within a predictable, reasonable time.

Incentivized