Wild Apricot advice
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John Eich
Apr 19, 2017, 2:33:00 PM4/19/17
to milwaukeemakerspace
Hey Milwaukee cousins,
I'm poking around at software solutions to help us deal with dues collection/documentation and membership management. As I recall, you all switched over to Wild Apricot a while ago, and I'd love to talk with people there who use it. Tips and tricks, parts you like or don't like, etc. Help us decide whether it's worth the cache.
Who should I reach out to there about the software?
Thanks!
Ronald J.
Apr 19, 2017, 3:08:21 PM4/19/17
to milwaukee...@googlegroups.com
I believe Dan Jonke is our highly qualified Wild Apricot guy. That'd be d...@vfdworld.com
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Dan Jonke
Apr 19, 2017, 3:44:46 PM4/19/17
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Yup,
On the whole I'm much happier with our current system than its homegrown
predecessor. I'm happy to answer specific questions. In the meanwhile I can give
you the following random brain dump:
Their staff is very communicative with the user base about features and
improvements.
We're using it mostly for member management and dues processing at the
moment.
We have it setup for donations as well, but almost nobody uses it for that,
people have mostly stuck to putting cash in boxes at the space.
We do occasionally use it for membership wide email blasts, it is good at
that, we just don't end up sending many.
We'd like to use the Apricot calendar for tracking space events, but right
now only "Administrator" members can edit it It looks like a future feature
release will broaden that to all members.
They don't have a mechanism for polls or elections, but it is commonly
requested, so I am hopeful for the future.
We aren't using the web site / CMS portion for anything more than a landing
page at the moment:
We aren't using the forum functionality either. It has been discussed as an
alternative to our google groups, but inertia has kept us here for now.
We have integrated wild apricot authentication to our existing wordpress
and doku wiki sites using OAuth, to allow members to have a "single sign on"
across all three.
We accept Credit Card and PayPal payments using their "PayPal - Express
Checkout" integration. There is no base service fee (Only transaction fees), but
it only allows automatic recurring payments for people with a PayPal account. If
you use some of their other payment backends (with higher fees) you can do
recurring credit cards as well. A pain point I would like to see them fix is
that you can only integrate with one electronic payment backend at a time. If we
were to start using an Authorize.Net account to get recurring credit cards, for
instance, we'd have to replace PayPal.
Electronic payments can be fully automated, our cash and check processing
is still manual. They have a pretty good interface for running through multiple
outstanding invoices quickly at the end of the month.
The handling of prepayments of multiple months is clunky, you have to
increment the due date manually and edit the associated invoice. It would be
nice to have a "renew for 'x' months" button.
Handling of family or group memberships is good, we can generate one
invoice linked to the whole "family unit".
We've build several additional features by interacting with their API (They
once told me in an email we're one of the heaviest traffic api users company
wide)
We sync door pin codes and fob codes to our access control system that lets
people into the building. This has the very nice side effect for the treasurer,
that if a member forgets to pay their dues, they can make an electronic payment
online and the building will turn their key back on within 60 seconds. No need
to bother a board member.
We've also build an area funding system that allows members to target a
portion of their dues to specific areas and tools. The users make their funding
selections in Apricot, but the aggregation and accounting is done by external
code that reads the member selections via API. This really helps with paying for
consumables and helping the BoD understand what areas are valued by the
membership.
We're working on a way to automatically sync the google group membership
with apricot, but that isn't built yet.
-Dan
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John Eich
Apr 19, 2017, 5:18:09 PM4/19/17
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Thanks, Ronald for pointing the way, and Dan for the excellent brain dump! Great info there, and I appreciate the time that took you. Glad to hear the API piece works, and the ability to add another e-payer service was one of our top questions. We can add our voices to the call for action on that then.
I'll follow up off-list with an email, if you don't mind. Getting your take on how to configure it for our shared dynamics would be really helpful.
John
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