Wild Apricot - Avis

Ease of recurring payments
Easy membership management
Great for event planning and management

Customer service can be difficult to deal with
Wish software had more customization features

Software has lots of features that we were not getting from our previous event management software. In addition, we get a member directory and membership management all in one program.

The learning curve for using it is somewhat steep, but once that is conquered you can see the true value of the software

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.

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.

The back end of it is great for non-profits as it is all intergrated. It allows a one stop shop for membership and events which is great! It also allows emails to be targeted to certain groups which is even better. They have great email templates and do offer a myriad of how-tos.

The front end is a mess. The website functions are awful and dated. You can't make it your own unless you're a wiz at html and writing code. What time is saved from the back end is lost trying to keep the front end looking sleek and up to date. You're painted in a corner by only be allotted so many fonts and the worst part, it's not reactive to mobile devices. The emails are the same. They have great templates that you can follow, but the problem is what you think you're sending out and what is actually sent out are two different things and all the hours trying to make an email look professional are lost.

Ease of use for non tech person. Customer support is excellent. Allows for complete automation for events, including taking payments and tracking attendance.

At times it is difficult to change the content of some website pages without changing the template. When new members are onboarded, they have difficulty finding out how to view other members.

It was very nice to have a software to organize our membership. The software was built into the website directly, so members can directly renew their membership while browsing the website. You can build different user permissions into different levels.

The UI of the websites you build with this and the backend feel outdated. I feel like the event tool could be more powerful, especially with how powerful you can easily build websites with Drupal/Wordpress. It would feel more like a membership program if the events could be dynamic with attendees, volunteers, being able to list what is still needed, etc. We found ourselves moving to Facebook or Next Door a lot to interact with our members.

Also, in the span of one year, our plan went up by $20/month, which was an extra $240 a year for our small, local advocacy group.

the ease of building pages and events. I can teach anyone how to use this software and how to build and track events easily.

The limitations on contacts, without paying for upgrades.

I had a charity 5K that I volunteered to help manage and intended on tracking all of the signups manually. I really wasn't looking forward to it. One of my friends recommended Wild Apricot as an option so I checked it out with their free trial. It was tremendously simple to use and juggle all of the event information in one place. There were still a few manual offline items to keep track of, but Wild Apricot was so much better! The ability to check in folks from my Galaxy phone was a Godsend, too.

I was lucky enough to take care of everything I needed within their free trial period, but I'd be happy to pay for their software if I ever had use of it again. I wish there were free options for non-profits, but that only applies for smaller users. Great software overall, though.

I like that it is a one stop shop for association management. It is easy to use and you get so much for the money!

The interface for creating newsletters is not as robust as I would like.

The website walks you through the types of documents you need for the membership, so they not only provide a home but also the documents to lay out your home. It is something I havent seen elsewhere. They want to make sure that you are doing what you need to do in order to serve to the best of your ability and I really appreciate that.

With all that the website does for the users (paid and non-paid), it makes sense that the website can look a little clunky. Things are fairly organized but feel a bit clunky.

Wild Apricot offers ECF an opportunity to create, modify and update our online software when needed, allowing our in-house staff to make necessary adjustments without having to spend association funds to hire programmers to complete the tasks.

There is one item on our "Wish" list that we hope to see in the future. It would be nice to upgrade to a newer version of Excel or Word when exporting information. It's a small thing, but when you are trying to handle multiple lists for conversion to reports, etc., the first move is to save and rename the document based on the compatibility function. On a busy day, it's an added step that's time lost.

A 2nd wish would be for a bit more friendly e-mail design module. It works but can be challenging.

I like how easy it is to keep a consistent looking website using the themes.

I don't like that you don't charge in local currency. It is very had for non-profits to budget when the cost varies so much based on the US dollar.

I also don't like that you can not easily change the default theme colours for a theme so that they show up at the top of the selection box. Instead, we have to constantly use the hex codes for any text etc that doesn't pick up the theme colours automatically instead of picking one of the theme colours because they remain the colours of the original theme.

I was the Secretary for my Chapters well known organization. The Secretarial duties are vast and important to the life of the organization. Wild Apricot appears to have everything a non-profit organization needs. It allows me to do all of the required things necessary.
The membership database allows for custom as well as preset categories with specified access. I can keep track of membership categories, addresses, dues due, and
Quick books is a part of the application. Reports can be easily generated using the information entered into the database. My favorites are the communication sections. I can announce events that all members can quickly view, be registered for or wait listed. Reminders can also be sent to all members or those specified.
Payments can be taken and recorded, invoices and receipts sent. The confirmation emails are customized and can be personalized. Documents that need to be shared can also be done.
I find that Wild Apricot can complete all necessary duties assigned to an organization. While all officers can have premium access to all documents, reports and finances 24/7, it also allows for all shades of transparency to members while keeping confidential information secure.
I haven't run across any application as thorough as Wild Apricot. I've only used the application a few days as they allow a 30 day trial to try it out and show off their goods to potential users.

My only concern is that the way in which things are laid out aren't as intuitive as I would have liked. I would rather have an illustrated manual on the dashboard for when a new user signs in. There is a quick 4 minute video guide that I may find usable later on the opening page. But its definitely not a deal breaker for me.

We are the oldest ski club in the USA, and run hundreds of events each year, including over 20 high-dollar flight trips. WA has excellent features for setting up and managing events. The membership management software is also first-rate.

WA recently implemented an in-house credit card processing feature. Soon afterwards they started charging a 20% processing surcharge for those who do NOT subscribe to their product. Their processing fees are higher than what we are paying with a very large merchant provider, so we don't want to switch. We are waiting for the "other shoe to drop" when WA will drop support for 3rd-party payment processors.

I manage the memberships for a club that has over 15 teams and 240 members, so it is not the easiest thing to manage. I went through a few different programs and Wild Apricot seems to be the best fit for the numerous needs the Club has! It is easy to track payments - overpaid balances and balance due, I can enter manual payments, add extra line items to keep track of fundraising credits, and easily email families or certain individuals from the software. There are workarounds for some of the limitations that the software has, which has been helpful.

There are a few issues that I have with this software: 1) it does not allow group invoicing so if I need to add an invoice to all members on one team, I have to go into each account and manually create; 2) it is not intuitive when it comes to families with 2 or more players, as it does not allow two different memberships to be linked to one account - I end up having to create a unique account for those families; 3) it does not allow partial payments. As with most membership sites, I have found the website portion to be somewhat clunky and limited, so I have the actual website on a different platform, which is unfortunate.

Easy, quick, and efficient transition over to Wild Apricot from other website types such as WordPress, Weebly, and other member platforms. Excellent for small to mid-size organizations to consolidate all needed features and tracking/reporting in one place.

The only weakness is the choice of new "themes" to help speed up a new website. You can certainly do almost anything you want with the templates... but the ready-made themes make it so much better (and easier). Just need to keep the sample themes up-to-date and competitive with WordPress... so the organizations are happy with the basic choices available when they are deciding to move to Wild Apricot.

Our goal was to maintain a constantly-updated website, but we were working thru a vendor who designed our old site from scratch and one needed to know html to do any updating. Our events calendar was constantly missing events and full of errors which were difficult to correct. WildApricot allowed us to assign people who were only slightly computer-savvy because no coding was needed. The site is incredibly intuitive and easy to use and takes only minutes a day for people to update. We can assign multiple administrators with different duties and everything doesn't need to go thru a webmaster who may or may not get around to meeting our needs. The site looks wonderful and the membership is responding very positively to its features.

There is almost nothing I don't like. I wish Safari was supported (and I hear they may be working on that) but it is not inconvenient to use FireFox and it's free, so that's just a very minor annoyance. I would like to see a little more flexibility in the forms-templates -- we had trouble getting the membership categories in the order we prefer on the screen, but all-in-all our experience has been trouble-free. There may be some people out there who will feel constrained by the available templates, but there are enough that our problem was more of which to choose, and I understand that even the templates are customizable (if you know how to code). The standard ones met our needs.

It manages membership, collects payments, sends and tracks emails and also provides all of this in the administrative side of our website. We used to have a self-built website that was a mess. After moving to Wild Apricot, we increased membership by almost 50%. We have a professional looking website now and the bonus of managing our membership, email blasts, payments invoicing and collections. Now they have just added a store front for those who need it. They have built two smart phone apps (one for ADMINS and one for Members) which make it easier.

It tracks your current members and is up the moment accurate of who is a current member. But I cannot answer the question: "How many members did we have on this date last year?" It takes a slew of special search criteria to even get close to being able to answer that question. I've taken to doing a export of the member list quarterly into a spreadsheet so I can answer such a basic question.

Searches, ability to edit fields and event creation and tracking.

No ability to set up specific payment plans (i.e. 5 payments, 4 payments). No option to send regrets for an event.

The software has a good integration of features, but those features are fast becoming dated with limited to no upgrades.

With the acquisition by a private equity firm, the company has totally changed. Price increases are frequent with very limited time for a no-profit to adjust budgets. They force you to use their in-house payment processor or face very stiff price penalties (20%). Their in-house processor has many shortfalls and simply will no work for certain non-profits.

The database and event management tools are excellent, and the website construction is very good as well. I pretty much love just about everything about the software.

While the software makes it easy to create, maintain, and update the website, there are limitations when compared to other platforms for site creation, but that is the trade-off for getting everything packaged together, and I have been able to do everything I needed to do. On the back end, sometimes things can be a little idiosyncratic or unclear, but the important thing is that whenever I haven't been able to figure out how to do something, the online help guide has made it easy to find the answer, and when I needed to talk to someone, the live chat and phone service has been absolutely outstanding.

Membership management, Easy of posting to website, Albums for our members (their art work is getting attention), Donation and payments, Just about everything is great....Oh email in one system and don't have to do constant contact.

Need help with members directory....not responding to changes very easily .... had to rebuild several times to get it working. Also, would love to see a flag or way to highlight members who are using their albums. I did figure out a work around by adding a yes/no button to the members questionnaire. Once the member click yes they are using their photo album, I have a saved search that pulls that member to a special membership directory "Members Ark Work to Review". This allowed me to direct viewers to this list instead of the membership directory to view art work. We only had 35 members of 204 using their albums. Now the public doesn't have to hunt and peck and get frustrated trying to see members art work in albums.

Supports organizations with a few members up to 15,000 (large size range); template-based website design gives the user numerous options. Great customer support/help videos. Perfect for storing information on members, communication and billing of dues. Easy to import spreadsheets. On a tight budget, this is a great all-in-one tool. Minimizes the use of error-prone excel sheets and runs great reports.

The user interface is a little bit dated and can be confusing. Does not integrate with social media. There are some other membership software that are a little bit more modern.

It seems like it would work well for organizations where individuals are the members. It was cloud based making it easy to access from anywhere.

We are a membership organization where businesses are our members. Wild Apricot is set up to support individual membership. Linking individuals to their member companies is a headache and has caused all of our staff to revert back to managing all of our data in spreadsheets. There is little to no support online and it is extreamely difficult to learn to use.