Much of my career has been spent working in membership or association nonprofits so I’ve been exposed to a variety of platforms. Of all I’ve worked with, I can honestly say Wild Apricot is my favorite and here’s why:
- It includes pretty much everything you need to effectively run an organization in one platform: website, event registration and tracking, membership database, donor management, CRM, and file storage.
- It’s easy for non-tech people to setup and manage. I’m pretty tech savvy and other platforms I’ve used have been much more time consuming to setup and administer and didn’t have as many features.
- Pricing is based on number of contacts. This can be simultaneously a positive and a negative. It’s positive for smaller organizations as you get a robust software platform on a sliding scale. For larger organizations or those who have a large email (nonmember) list, this can be a drawback especially if you use an email newsletter to keep in touch with those contacts. One of my organizations skirts this problem by archiving all nonmembers so they don’t count towards the WA pricing and then using a 3rd party CRM (Hubspot) to create a specific email newsletter which always links back to the main WA membership, donation, and other website pages.
- Wild Apricot automates many of the tedious tasks associated with member services. It’s easy to setup an online member application with any helpful fields as well as automated renewal reminders, customized invoicing, and more.
- The same is true of donor management. Wild Apricot has a robust donor setup where you can setup varying online donation types or amounts, enter donations manually, and have custom donation receipts sent automatically for online entries or click a button to send a receipt for a manual donor entry.
- The event management system can accommodate a wide variety of event types and sizes. I’ve used it for everything from large conferences to exhibitor registrations to camping wait lists. The system allows for any types of fields necessary including file uploads, Terms of Conditions agreements, file downloads, as well as online and offline payment options. Events can be set for members only, for specific member levels, and many other registration settings.
Wild Apricot is a robust system that can give your organization a professional image and provide a great infrastructure to grow with your organization while providing excellent daily operations support.
Try a free trial of Wild Apricot and see how it can change how effectively you run your organization. If you are ready to purchase, you can use this link. Note this is my affiliate link but I only partner with organizations that I use myself and am comfortable recommending to others.
Want to get great content – and much more – delivered right to your inbox every two weeks? Join the Email List