Put your organization on autopilot. Get your sanity back.

Wild Apricot Newsletter - August 2007

What it Takes to do Effective Fundraising and Advocacy on Social Networking Sites, an interview with Carie Lewis, HSUS

This month we've interviewed Carie Lewis of the Humane Society of the U.S. about using social networking sites for advocacy and fundraising.

Soha El-Borno and Ms. Lewis talk about the Facebook Causes and the Care2 and Change.org applications, how they manage Facebook groups, and the differences between working with the Facebook audience and that of MySpace.

Case Study: Riverplace One Hundred

Riverplace One Hundred is a Condominium Association, made up of 117 unit owners. About 60% of the owners actually live in other states and their Florida condo is a part time residence in the winter. So staying in touch with residents throughout the year is not trivial.

The association has had a website and it seemed to be effective for their audience. However, they did not have control over the advertising on the site and needed to find a web site host that was affordable.

After researching the available solutions, Riverplace One Hundred came across Wild Apricot - they found it to be easy to use, flexible to configure and very affordable.

Here are the ways to reach out via online tools Riverplace One Hundred has found to be of the most use:

Using Events module to inform people of various meetings and then post back the minutes of those meetings.
Online forms where people can request information and file maintenance issues.
Posting updated information that members often ask for about the status of known issues helps us answer our owners questions and keep them up-to-date.

We also asked Jim, who manages the website for the condominium, what the five most important things associations should consider to improve their web presence. He recommends the following:

Interesting/Useful content
Keep your visitors coming back by posting new content on a regular basis
Get the user community engaged in creating that content
Make the site clean to look at
Keep it simple to use

Read full Case Study

Wild Apricot Info Zone

Recent updates

Our most recent update has been released on August 17th.

Highlights:

In the past, you had to choose whether people would pay you online - or manually (mail-in checks etc.). A couple of releases ago we have enabled using both methods at the same time - so you can give your users a choice of paying online or manually - for each transaction. In the latest release we have redesigned the payment workflow to match these changes. Now you can properly track the origin and payment status of each transaction, record manual payments and process cancellations.
Payments report has been released - it provides a summary of event registrations, new, renewed and upgraded memberships as well as donations. Let us know how it works for you as we are already designing further enhancements to it and your feedback will be very valuable. Between this report and the Payments transactions log we hope it will become much easier to do financial reconciliations with your credit card payments and other receipts.
The biggest new function we have released is Wild Apricot widgets. Now you can use Wild Apricot as your back-end system and embed any interactive function into any other website you want - for example a member application form, member directory, member self-service, event registration, donation form. Many of you who use Wild Apricot as a secondary website have been asking for this capability so we hope this will be useful and are looking forward to hear from you.
Table wizard has been added to the website content management system.
Unique member ID is now shown on each member record and included into export file.
Blog module has been enhanced with the ability to set permissions for each member level and allow members to create new posts (in addition to replies/comments as before). With this change Blog module does essentially all the same functions a discussion forum does - so you might consider using it as a forum. Now in one of the next few releases we plan to add a proper discussion forum module which will leverage the underlying functions already available in the blog module.
We have added the same capability to events as we had for web pages for a while - you can now keep an event 'invisible' meaning that only the administrator(s) can access it until it is fully set up.
We are working hard to make Wild Apricot a more open platform - with smart use of its WebDAV functionality and Javascript code experienced web professionals can now implement pretty amazing extensions. For example, our built-in functionality for member pictures will be coming later in the year but we already have a partner who is adding member pictures using Javascript and WebDAV.
Many other minor improvements and enhancements include default view settings for member directory (keyword/advanced search)
For those of you who do not use custom domains, all email bounces and replies are now forwarded to the organization contact email. For custom domains they go directly to admin@<custom.domain>.

As always - go to http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Release+history for more details

What are we working on right now

Redesigning the event registration function to allow more flexibility in pricing. ( And once that is done, we have a slew of other improvements planned for the event registration process, for example limiting the number of event registrants and registering multiple people in one go).
Categorization of events.
Adding functional pages in the same way as regular content pages (this enables many other subsequent improvements, for example multiple blogs and multiple event lists).
Improving compatibility with Safari browser (for public and members. Administrators should still use FireFox on Mac for now).

Next in high priority list:

Monthly membership payments
Group (Corporate/Family) memberships
Discussion forum
Member pictures
Customization of fields in member directory list
Also, we are preparing to combine the currently separate member database, event attendee database and donor database into a single database by the end of this year.

We are doing the detailed analysis and working on visual prototypes for these enhancements to implement them in the next few releases. We are always very thankful for your feedback, especially about the functions listed above - so that we can take your needs into consideration.

Instant Messaging - Engage your Website Members with MeeboMe

Instant messaging tools are becoming extremely common. Most of us are now very familiar and comfortable with regular IM tools like MSN Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo messenger, Skype chat, GTalkr etc. You install them on your computer - and connect directly to the people you know.

This article describes MeeboMe - a new and different application of instant messaging tools, its basic functions and ways you can put it to work on your website as well as offering advice to effectively engage and interact with your members online.

N4P Dose of Humor

How not to ask for a donation!

Subscribe to the Wild Apricot blog today!

The Wild Apricot blog is constantly publishing articles, interviews and case studies on about web technology and social media tools for associations, clubs, charities and other non-profit and member-based organizations. Our focus is on issues relevant to volunteers, administrators, webmasters, and managers. You can subscribe via RSS or email.

For comments, requests, questions and contributions to our newsletter:

support@wildapricot.com

1-877-270-4268
416 - 410-4059

www.wildapricot.com

144 Front St W, Suite 725
Toronto, Ontario
M5J 2L7, Canada