Wild ApricotReviews of wildapricot.com

I have been a webmaster on Wild Apricot for two non-profits for close to a decade. The advantage is that its built in tools allow a non-professional to build and maintain a website and membership database. While I have quibbles, those key processes are excellent. I think the worst aspect of Wild Apricot is their ability to handle text editing. As a webmaster who needs to create and maintain a lot of pages, text is where I spend most of my time. I waste so much time dealing with the idiosyncrasies of this process. My big concern is that after the buy-out a few years ago there seems to be an emphasis on improving profitability. Customer service has gone to hell. New products are all focused on generating additional revenue for the company and haven't been of value to us. Subscription prices are increasing at high rates. The organizations I support are looking for alternatives.

Wild Apricot used to be a nimble, technically savvy company oriented toward constant platform improvement and customer response. Since being taken over by Personify in 2018, it has turned into a cash cow with a user wishlist whose top requests, including several simple changes needed for good member communication, have languished for years. In the last six years prices have gone up three times, a total of 118%, plus introduction of a 20% surcharge if you don't use their credit card processing system. Account pricing is based not on number of members but on contacts, which includes each person in a family and any nonmembers who ever registered for an event, unless removed by hand. Wide gaps between price levels can lead to a price shock as your organization grows. It was easy to move over to. We depend on it for running our club, particularly events and membership renewal. It's given us a good-looking website, easy to edit and expand, although a lot of time is spent in working around quirks in line spacing that have been a source of constant complaints for many years yet have never been fixed. But frequent price increases and almost nonexistent feature improvement have turned a decent platform into one in decline. It's often necessary to fight its limitations, particularly in event creation and registration. It assumes that memberships are individuals and bundles of individuals, each with their own record. This makes it a challenge to maintain, communicate with and register for events couples and families. Reports are limited in flexibility and not particularly useful - it's usually necessary to export data to Excel and format your own. Any complex platform is going to have situations where you need to wrestle it into doing what's needed. A well maintained platform will have a program of smoothing and eliminating these as time goes on. Wild Apricot no longer tries.

Features are not intuitive and difficult to find how they work. An example; An organization is late on their annual dues but pays for an event. It appears to put the money for the event toward their late dues.

It’s designed by techies with all that implies I.e. it works fine but not particularly user-friendly with jargon / design to match.

I've set up two non-profits using this software based on Wild Apricots published prices. ArWild dot org & whiteriverrefuge dot org. Once set up Wild Apricot slammed us with two significant prices increases... not the usual inflationary prices increase but two prices increases that were on the order of 20-30% each. Sadly I would like to recommend the software but can't due to the over the top "bait and switch pricing" practices exhibited. Feeling gouged!