StarChapter is an AMS from the company of the same name in Maryland, featuring a configurable website with ecommerce, role based permissions and access, and finally member management with dues tracking and collection, and event registration.
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WildApricot by Personify
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Wild Apricot is an association management platform that emphasizes automation of member lifecycle management (i.e. attract, engage, renew), and also assists with receiving online payments and payment processing, and website content and engagement.
Wild Apricot was acquired by Personify Corp in 2017.
Once you understand how to use the system, it is pretty useful. But it has some definite areas where it could be brought up to speed with other modern tools. It is basic and could be better.
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.
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.
They create these long chains of responses. So for everything you write in they repeat what you wrote and then respond to it. It gets very confusing trying to figure out where the conversation is sometimes especially on a long trail of back and forth.
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.
