Wild Apricot - A Medium-Sized Solution for Membership Management
Rating: 10 out of 10
March 03, 2023
MM
Vetted Review
Verified User
3 years of experience
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
- 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.
- Membership records management with detailed financial and donation tracking
- Integrated content management system
- Easy to use email management system
- Wild Apricot has enabled the organization to have a much higher level of confidence in the accuracy of membership data including growth/loss by membership type.
- Wild Apricot's poor implementation of PayPal has resulted in a loss of donations, membership/renewals and product sales.
- Wild Apricot has enabled the association to present and maintain a professional website without the cost of high-end development and maintenance.
- Wild Apricot has enamel the association to sell digital assets (eBooks and online classes) without the need to create a separate store.
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.
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.