Transcript
Jay: And we are now recording. So I'd like to welcome you once again to the Wild Apricot software overview. My name is Jay and I am known as the Noisy Apricot. I am in charge of marketing here at Wild Apricot. And for the bulk of the presentation I'm going to throw it over to Frank, our Fresh Apricot and a member of our support team. So take it away, Frank.
Frank: Thanks, Jay. All right. I think everyone will probably agree we should just get started right away. And so what I'm actually going to be doing today is I'm going to be taking you through Wild Apricot from start to finish so you can just get a big picture view of how everything fits together and maybe how Wild Apricot can work for your organization.
But the three most important things to remember is that if you do want to find out for yourself, Wild Apricot is completely free to try and there's nothing to install. So anyone within your organization can set up a Wild Apricot account and you can all use the same account to test out all these features. And it's also important to keep in mind that all these features were designed specifically for organizations or member-based organizations and associations. So you'll see a lot of really time-saving or headache-reducing features inside Wild Apricot that are going to address a lot of the pains I think you might be currently experiencing. And if you are learning about Wild Apricot, you can always give us a call or send us an e-mail if you need any help or any clarification about how anything works at all.
And also, of course, currently Wild Apricot has over 3,700 organizations that trust Wild Apricot to host their membership data in websites, so you're definitely within good company and there's a lot of people already using Wild Apricot.
Now, we won't have too many charts in this presentation, but I did just want to go over a couple quick things that we do track on a regular basis. We track our reliability, our ease of use, and our technical support. So these are the three sort of core things that we're always on top of to make sure that everyone is getting the best experience out of Wild Apricot.
And so now let's actually take a big picture view of what we're going to be covering during this webinar. So what we're actually going to do is something I think that might be something that everyone is going to go through. You're going to see just how easily you can bring your membership data into Wild Apricot and then the different ways that you can start using that. So what we're going to do is we're going to take an Excel spreadsheet of our current members and contracts. We're going to import that into Wild Apricot. We're going to give a couple different administrators some different access and different roles so that different people have access to different options within inside the Wild Apricot account. And then we're also going to use that same membership and contact list to actually generate an e-mail so that we can send out a newsletter for the demo website that we're creating here.
And then, of course, we're also going to explore how all of this looks and feels from a member's point of view. So we're going to login as a member and maybe change some of our privacy options, as well as update some of the fields because within Wild Apricot all of your members have the option to update their own information, so you're not always having to do that yourself.
And then also we'll look some of the basic setups for events and donations, as well as how even membership management aspect about what Wild Apricot is actually set up so that you can automate some of the most time-consuming tasks that you're currently having to do manually.
And so now without further ado, let's actually just open up a Wild Apricot account right here. So the first time you login to your Wild Apricot account, this is what you'll see. You'll see your dashboard. And always keep in mind that you can always access your Wild Apricot account through the free website address that we give you that you can see in the website address bar here. But this is also something you can customize if you do decide to upgrade to a paid plan, you can actually insert your own custom domain name into your Wild Apricot account.
And so now I'd like to just take a quick overview of the different sections of Wild Apricot. First, here's our dashboard overview, which gives us a summary of some of the different things happening within our account. For instance, our contact totals, some upcoming events that might need some attention, as well as some of the activity from our members and administrators.
And next we have the Contacts tab. And what we can access from here is actually our entire contacts database within Wild Apricot. And I think here is actually a good time to think of an important distinction within Wild Apricot, which is that of contact versus member. Now, in Wild Apricot everyone is actually considered what we call a contact, but some of those contacts also have a membership or a subscription assigned to them, and that's what, in essence, turns them into members in the system.
And from here we could also search for any of our members or any of our contacts quickly and easily, either using a basic search or an advanced search that allows us to add multiple criteria if we're really looking for a specific subsection of our members.
Next, it also has a fully fledged website editor. So instead of having to use a separate program to do all these separate things, for instance, within Wild Apricot, as well as having a database to manage your contacts and members, you also have a built-in website editor so you can publish content immediately to your website.
We also have the ability for you to add and manage events. This includes setting up multiple prices, different access for your members and the public, and we'll explore all those options in just a few moments.
And next we have the Members tab, and here is a list of our contacts again, but in this context it's just to give you the list of those contacts that are also assigned a membership level.
And if you're an association that's accepting donations, we also give you the ability to create a donation form where you can accept donations online. This does include obviously an online paying component as well.
And finally, I think one of the most important aspects of Wild Apricot is because we allow you to do all these things, we allow you to accept online membership applications, we allow you to process events and donations, you definitely want to have some sort of handle on the history of all these things. So we actually have a financial management component within Wild Apricot that will keep a very detailed history of all the different transactions that are going on in your account.
And finally, we also have the Settings tab for all the different settings for actually creating and managing your Wild Apricot account.
But now actually let's get started with perhaps one of the most impressive things, is actually bringing your membership data over from your existing solution. So maybe you might be using something else to manage your members. We find a lot of people are still managing their members with an Excel spreadsheet. But no matter, so long as you can get your current membership or contact list into an Excel spreadsheet, you'll be able to bring that into Wild Apricot very easily.
So, first of all, just under Contacts here, I'll go to Import. Now I'll select the membership or contact list that I want to import. And then select Upload.
And, now, before I actually do continue with this upload, let's first take a quick look at our current membership list just to see what the original data looks like and how it's going to get transferred into our Wild Apricot account.
So here we have our current member contact list. What you see is we have some pretty straightforward columns. We have a first name, last name, e-mail, cell phone, and membership level column. And we have rows of data for each of our members, for the members that do have information that relates to any of those specific columns. But if we take a look at some of our records here, what we'll actually notice is some records don't have a membership level assigned to them and some don't even have an e-mail address assigned to them. But what we can actually do with these is we can treat these as just some contacts that we're storing within our Wild Apricot database. And maybe these are people that are just going to subscribe to a newsletter or maybe they're just people who we still need to assign a membership. But this just gives you a quick idea that you can actually bring in both your members and any contacts or newsletter subscribers into your Wild Apricot account.
So now I'll actually go back to Wild Apricot. And the first step of the import, what we need to identify is whether or not the first row of our import file actually contains column headers. And if we actually just pull up our Excel spreadsheet quickly again, we'll see that, yes, our first row does indeed contain column headers. And now, the handy thing that we can do with these, we can actually use these column headers to automatically create labels for all the fields that we're importing.
And so now it'll just be a moment while Wild Apricot actually processes the information in that spreadsheet. And here you'll see, just like we had in our original file, we have our first name column with some sample data from the file that we're importing, as well as last name, e-mail, cell phone, and membership level. So it looks like everything from the file was successfully imported.
Now, of course this is a fairly simple file. Your membership file might actually have a lot more columns of information than this, but that's nothing to worry about because it can -- Wild Apricot can import all the information that you're currently storing inside your Excel spreadsheet.
So first let's actually look at how we process these individual rows. One thing you might notice is when some rows actually already matched with one of the fields that we're asked to map to. That's because by default Wild Apricot also has some system or default fields [inaudible 00:09:27] to each account. So you could just choose, for instance, to map first name to first name, last name to last name. Again, there's not an automatic match and the same is true for e-mail.
Now, this e-mail is also important because for your members, their e-mail is also used as their login. So you want to make sure that you map the e-mail to the current Wild Apricot system e-mail field.
But now here we actually see something different. For our cell phone, it doesn't look like it was able to match it to anything. So we actually have to select that we want to import that. And when we do select import it, it's going to ask us one of two things. Do we want to create a new contact field or do we want to create a new member only field? Now, a good rule of thumb to use here is if the field that you're about to create or the information that you're recording only applies to your members or it's only information you're recording about your members, then you'd select only for members. But if it's a piece of information, like a general phone number or perhaps a first or last name or something that general that you expect to be collecting from everyone - and when I say everyone, I mean your event attendees, people making donations, people subscribing to a newsletter - then you'd select for contacts. But in that context I think we only really want to just collect cell phone information for our members.
And once we have selected what type of field we want to create, we can also choose to name it, but in this case it's used our current name as a default suggestion and that should work fine for us.
And then it will also ask us what type of field you want to create. So, for instance, we could create a text field, a drop-down field, a multiple choice field. These are all options, but in this case it's a simple text field.
And finally, we also do have the option to make it for internal use because many organizations are also tracking a lot of information that they don't need to share with their members but they do need to track about their members. We could choose to have this only be visible to administrators, but I think the members should have access to this and be able to update it, so we'll just leave it as is now.
And finally, we have a membership level field. And, now, this is also another very important system field because this will actually map or create in some instances our membership levels or the different levels of membership you have, the different price points you have for your membership.
Now, when you're actually importing your membership level, you have two options. You have now the option to ignore all the values that are not currently set up as membership levels inside your Wild Apricot account. But I'm going to assume that for whatever reason you haven't used Wild Apricot before and you haven't set up any membership levels yet. So what we actually want to do is we want to add new levels into Wild Apricot for each one that applies.
So, for instance, I'm not sure if you can read this here, but in our import file we've set up a couple different names for our membership levels. We have Bronze, Free, Gold, Silver, and these are just some of the different membership levels we're recording for our members. You might have different names for your membership levels and you can definitely choose whatever you're currently using. So what's actually going to happen here is every time and for every record Wild Apricot is processing, it's going to create a new membership level every time it finds a new value. So, for instance, when it finds the Gold value, it's going to create a new membership level. But if it sees another Gold value, it's just going to use the one that already -- that are just created.
So, now, I think all of our settings here look pretty good, so we'll continue to the next step. And so this is actually the step that's just before actually importing the data. So up until this step, we actually haven't brought any of the data in. We've just told Wild Apricot how we're going to handle it. And also I'll just make a quick note about what the import was.
And now what's actually going to be happening is Wild Apricot is going to be row-by-row processing all this data and actually bringing it into Wild Apricot so you're not having to do any of this yourself manually.
And that just took, I don't even know, maybe four or five seconds, and now we have all of our 25 records imported into Wild Apricot. And it also tells us that we have 20 new member records created. Now, the difference here, if you will remember, is we actually had a few records where we didn't have a membership level assigned to them. So these aren't members. They're just contacts. But they're still imported, but they're just not members because there's no membership level assigned to them.
So now let's actually take from this screen right here, let's just click on the link to our 20 new members just to see what this actually looks like in Wild Apricot. So just like in perhaps in the Excel spreadsheet program, you have your rows and columns of all your information. And here if we take a quick look, we can actually see that everything has been successfully imported, and we also have the option actually to click on and view individual member records so we can start to understand how the information is really stored in Wild Apricot.
And you'll also note that that custom information that wasn't available yet in the Wild Apricot account was actually already created, too. So we have our custom cell phone field here with the correct cell phone for that member already loaded. But, now, the great thing about Wild Apricot is you'll actually have different pieces of information that you can keep -- that you can record for each member within one area. So for this member if I wanted to see what his current membership status was, when his next renewal was due, any events that he attended, any donations, any of his e-mail subscriptions, his current privacy settings for the website, as well as any maybe photos that he's added, I can see all this just from one area quickly and easily, and make any adjustments if I need to.
And so I think that touches on the first aspect of actually bringing members into Wild Apricot. Now let's actually dig a little deeper into how we set up our membership within Wild Apricot. So if we jump over to Settings, the first thing we can actually do is we can set up our membership levels. And so, for instance, the first thing we see is that we have some of the different membership levels that we created during the import, for instance, Gold, Free, Silver, and Bronze. Those are all membership levels that came from our import file, much like yours might. So let's actually take a look at our Gold members just to see how we can actually set up the different price points and renewal policies for these members.
So here we see we have our Gold members. And currently we've set them to individual membership level. Now, what this means is in Wild Apricot you have the distinction to offer either individual memberships, where one person is signing up and that's the membership that they're joining, or you can create what are called bundle memberships, or what you might think of as corporate or family memberships where there's actually more than one person who's included in that membership. But in this case our Gold members are just for individuals. And we'll set a membership fee of $500. Now, you might be asking 500 what? Is this 500 per month, 500 per year? These are all options that you can set up in your renewal policy. So, for instance, first of all, you could set up a renewal policy where the membership never renews. So it's an indefinite membership. But of course most people are operating on either a monthly or quarterly or annual membership. And so for each of these options you can set up whether or not you want to base this membership on the join date or when that member joins, and then it may be, you know, that they can go for 12 months up until that point, or from a specific date if you prefer to track your membership on a specific date, like the 1st or the 15th of the month. And the same options are also -- those are also the same options that we have for both quarterly and our yearly or annual membership. You can choose join date or a specific date. And, again, you can do that for either one year or multiple years, depending on how your current membership is set up and how you can map that into Wild Apricot.
And so that's sort of the general settings for setting up your membership that I think you might find in other solutions as well, but I think something that really differentiates us from others is our automation. So there's a lot of -- there's just a lot of work involved in running an organization and sometimes everyone's a bit stressed for time. So anything you can use that can really save you time can be really helpful.
So, for instance, let's say that you wanted to stay on top of all your members and you want to make sure they all get reminders to renew their membership so it will increase the likelihood of them renewing. You can set all these up automatically one time in Wild Apricot and you don't have to worry about them again.
So now for our Gold members, for instance, we could say 14 days before the renewal date we want to send them this custom e-mail. Now, this e-mail that I'm highlighting here is actually something you can customize and insert your own images and pictures and text so that your members are getting a really nice looking e-mail that reminds them to renew their membership.
Now, that's 14 days before their membership. What if you want to send them another reminder if they still hadn't renewed? And that's an important point here is that these reminders will only be sent if they haven't renewed yet. So you won't be bothering your members either with e-mails that aren't really relevant to them. But so, yeah, if they still haven't moved -- or they still haven't renewed, then we can choose to send them another e-mail, and again we can customize that e-mail as well.
And finally, now let's actually look at the flip side. Let's say unfortunately for whatever reason our multiple reminders haven't convinced them or haven't motivated them to renew. You can also decide what should happen if they don't renew by the time of their renewal date. For instance, you could change their renewal period. You could change their membership level. Maybe you want to downgrade them to a free level. And you can also choose to send them an e-mail to let them know that this has happened and why it's happened. And of course, even if it's past a renewal date, they can still login in and actually process their renewal. So it's not like they'll be locked out unless that's what you choose to do.
And so that's actually how we handle renewals. We should also definitely look into how it actually handles first-time members or member applications or new applications.
First of all, we actually have options for prorating membership. So maybe depending on when someone joins, you want to give them a little bit of savings with their current membership. And you may also decide whether or not you want to automatically approve memberships or should an administrator first approve all membership applications before the members are actually given access to their member-only content, like their profiles and other content.
And that's sort of your quick run through of how you actually set up all your -- each of all your individual membership levels. So you could actually go through and do this for all your membership levels and just do it once and then you wouldn't actually have to do it again because it would just keep running with whatever the settings that you created.
And, now, during our import, we actually did create a custom field, our cell phone field, but now let's actually take a look at all the options that are available to us when we're creating fields. So to do that I go to Settings and then Membership Fields. And here we have a list of all the current fields. Now, you could remove these or add your own as you see fit, but let's actually just take a look at some of the options we have. And to do that I'll just click on the Add New Field button. And the first thing you'll see is that we actually have multiple types to work with. So you can really collect a diverse amount of information from your members, but you can also keep consistent so that you don't have one person entering in a full state name and another person entering an abbreviation. You can keep all the information very consistent. We have multiple options. As you can see, multiple choice, multiline text, radio options. There are also two special options, which are Extra Charges multiple choice and Extra Charges radio buttons. What they actually allow you to do is to add on additional fees to your membership. So when someone is applying, they could actually also check off to get a free -- to get a t-shirt for $5 or to get something else for a cost that you define.
And, of course, we also have a picture field, which will allow your members to either upload photos or logos or any other images that you'd like them to add. And we also do actually have some other features that allow them to create their own personal photo albums if that's something you want to offer. Again, this is all customizable and you decide what you want your membership to do.
And then for each of your fields you can also specify whether or not it's mandatory. So there's some information, I think, that you definitely need, like a first and last name and a phone number perhaps or an e-mail, and there might be some other information specific to your organization that you want to collect and you can do that for each field. But even better, because I think you actually have a couple different things here. There might be information that you really absolutely need and want to get during the membership application, and then there might be other information that's nice to have, but you don't necessarily want to bother them during the membership application. So you can actually decide this on your member access. You can say whether or not a field should be included during the membership application or if it should only be included in their profile. So when they login to their profile, they're making updates, they might see some extra fields that you've added for some information that you'd optionally like to have for them but isn't necessary during the membership application. Or you could also decide that this field is actually something that maybe you yourself are editing, but you don't want them to have access to edit, but you want them to be able to see it. You could choose to have a view-only field, which would only give them access to view the information but not edit it. And, of course, you could also be creating some information that you don't want them to see, it's truly for your own personal records for your organization and maybe you want other administrators to be able to see it, but it's not for them. You can choose what's called an Internal Use field.
And then you can also decide who else can access this field. Can other members see it, can no one see it, or can anybody see it. You can set this for each and every one of your fields. So, again, you're in full control of what gets shared, where and with whom.
And then finally, you can also decide which membership levels this field should be available for. So there might be some information that you really want from your Gold members and there might be other information that really isn't relevant to them. It might only be relevant to your free members. You can decide and make the best form for everyone so you're not having to give everyone the same generic form. You can customize it for everybody.
And that's essentially it. That's how all of our fields work. They're really powerful and they should allow you to pretty much collect any information that you're looking to collect from your members.
And so now let's just recap what we've done so far. We've brought all of our contacts in, our members into our Wild Apricot database. We've also set up some of our membership levels to find our prices and renewal policy. And we also added some custom new fields for our membership forms. So now actually let's put all of this together and start actually working on the website to create some of the pieces that can display this information.
And so where we can work on our website, we always go to the Webpages tab. And so now, for instance, let's say I want to get started with my membership application page. What I could do is I could go to Page Management, click on Add New Page, and you can call your pages anything you want. You don't have to worry about any extensions or special file names. You can just name it whatever you'd like to have appear in the menu. And then we'll select the type for that page. And as you can see, we have a lot of different options here. We have the option to create a discussion forum, a member directory, an events calendar, a blog, a forum, a subscription forum, a lot of different things. But right now we're actually going to focus on the member application. And we want anyone to have access to this, so we'll just mark off anybody for access. And now we'll save all our changes. And that's actually it. That's all we needed to do to create that page.
So now actually let's go and edit that page to see what options we have. So we'll click Edit Settings. And here we see you could add some basic content. Well, we could also choose which membership levels we want to appear on this membership application. And so here, for instance, we only see two options. Now, the reason for that is that for all of our membership levels we can also define if the public can apply or not. And so in this case we only have two membership levels where the public can actually apply, the premium and regular membership. So we'll just leave all levels selected.
And that's all we actually need to do to set up our membership application. But now let's actually take a look and see what that membership application looks like for public visitors or perhaps even our potential members.
So here we see, if I clicked on the Join Today page I've created, here we have the two options, premium membership and regular membership. I'm definitely interested in the premium membership. And so [inaudible 00:26:19] form, that form with all those fields that we created. So I could just quickly fill this out.
And here you see also that your members have the option to create their own password during signup. And so now you'll notice those are all the mandatory fields and here are all the optional ones, like a personal photo, job title, address. This is all the information that you could be collecting from your members. And now we'll just enter the security code.
And now, just like your members, they would see a confirmation screen to see all the information is correct. And if they needed to, they could go back and edit anything that was incorrect. But in this case everything looks good, so I'll just continue with Confirm.
So now, see, because our membership level requires administrators to first accept in and approve memberships, it's still -- my membership application is still pending approval. And as soon as that's approved, I would receive an e-mail saying that my membership has been approved, along with the links to access things like my profile.
So there we actually had a membership application. Let's take a look to see what that looks like from the administrator's point of view. So we'll log back into our administrative panel. Now, the great thing about Wild Apricot, you'll notice what I did there, is you can actually login from the same place as your members. So your administrators, your members are all logging in from the same place. So there's no special URLs or anything you need to memorize.
So now we'll go over to our Members tab and what we'll see here is we actually have one new membership application, and that was the one that I just completed. So let's actually take a quick look at that. And, now, in this case, this was actually a manual membership application. And when I say manual, what I mean is it's a membership application that didn't include online payment. So we're actually waiting for this payment to come in so that we can continue to process it. And sort of to exemplify or to explain this plan a little more, I'm actually just going to jump back to our slides quickly and show you the difference between what happens when someone does an online payment versus what happens when someone does an offline payment.
So now let's say you've gone ahead and either inserted PayPal Authorize Net, or Google Checkout as your payment processor inside Wild Apricot. What would actually happen is if you had a member apply, they would fill out all the forms and all the fields like they do regularly. They would select the option to pay online, which would become visible once you add your online payments. And then what would happen is the payment processor would process their payment. And if it's -- if they manage to process it successfully, then they'll be returned to your site with a thank you message saying their membership application and payment have been received. And then depending on what your settings are, it would either automatically approve that member or you would have to approve it in the administrative panel.
But what actually also is happening when this happens is as soon as they submit that membership application a contact record would be created for them and their current membership status would be marked as in progress. But the instant that that payment is actually received and processed through your contract, that "in progress" would be changed to "active", but at the same time you will also automatically generate an invoice for this so that you'll have a complete financial history for this member.
And so now I'll just give you a brief moment to look at that. And now let's compare what actually happens when someone is doing a manual payment or the type of payment that I just did where I didn't actually do any online payments.
So, much like the previous step, we have a new member, perhaps John here. He fills out the form, but during the final stage he actually selects Manual as his option. What he'll see, he'll still see a thank you message saying that his membership application has been received and you may include your own payment instructions, but now what's going to happen with his record is it's going to stay "in progress." And then you might wait a couple weeks for his cheque to arrive. You'd get his get. And then what you will do is you will look up his record. You'll look up this invoice that was generated. But unlike the online one, his invoice will actually have a "Total due" on it. So you can actually record a payment against this outstanding balance. If it was a partial payment, you could record a partial payment. But in this case he paid his full membership dues. You could record it as fully paid. And once it was recorded, you could activate his membership, and then he would be an active member just like that online member was active automatically.
And so, again, that's exactly what we see here. So let's say that, yeah, we got his cheque. So we want to go ahead and record his payment. And we can keep any notes that we wanted here, but for now we'll just record the tender or the type of payment that it was. In this case it was a cheque. And then we'll save, and then we'll see that he's also fully paid.
And the final step, once again, is to actually approve him and now this member is actually active.
So that was sort of a quick walkthrough of how both a membership application works, as well as how you actually process and approve your members once they have completed a membership application.
But now that we have all these members loaded into our account, how do we actually display them and start to get members to get to know each other? So to do that we could actually first set up a member directory. So, again, we'll go to Webpages and go to Page Management, Add New Page. And, again, we'll select what type of page it is. In this case it's a member directory. Again, it will give access to anybody. But keep in mind actually that as well as being able to set up all these public pages, you can actually also set up pages that are restricted to certain membership levels or certain groups. And this actually allows you to, for instance, correct a private member directory, you can create a Gold member directory where only Gold members can have access to that directory. So you can really split it up between the groups and the different membership levels in any way that you want. So you'll actually be able to offer quite a diverse set of content for all your different members. So again we'll save all changes.
And let's go ahead and take a look at that page. So we'll just use this quick link here to go to the page, but we could also browse to it using Site Pages. Let's actually take a look at how we do that just so you can see. So, again, the Site Pages and here I have my live preview, my website. Now let's click on Directory. And I'm actually going to Edit Settings at the top here.
And so, now, there's actually quite a few settings for your member directory because we know how important it is for everyone to actually be able to customize and control what information is displayed about their members. So you'll see we have quite a few options. First of all, we could select which membership levels are actually displayed. So maybe your free members actually don't get displayed on the member directory. Maybe only your Gold ones do. Maybe your Gold members only get displayed on your private member directories. These are all options that you can customize to really fit the needs of your organization.
But in this case let's keep it simple and we'll say that all members are going to be displayed here. And you could also enable browsing. Now, what browsing is it's actually the option to select different fields to browse by. So, for instance, you have a state option where they can click through different states to browse through different members of different states within the U.S. These are all options that you can set up yourself.
Next we also have the option of simple or advanced search. Now, basically what this is is Simple Search just allows you to use a keyword search. Where if the keyword matches any of the information displayed in the member directory, they'll actually pull up those records that match that search. But maybe you have so many members or so much information that you want to give your members a little more advanced tools, and the Advanced Search actually allows them to add in criteria where they could say show me all the members who are Gold members and are also in Alaska, for instance.
But in this case we'll just keep it to a Simple Search. And here we can actually customize all the different columns of information that you're displaying within your member directory. So, for instance, maybe you just want to display the first name and last name, but not the e-mail or not the phone. Maybe just the organization. Maybe you want to display a logo or their profile picture within the member directory, but you don't want to display, say, their current job title or something like that. You can customize exactly which fields are displayed here and it's completely under your control.
But I think for now we'll just leave the default. So we see here we have first name, last name, organization. I think those defaults are [inaudible 00:35:07] for now. But, again, you can customize this at any time.
So here we see it. Here we see our full member directory. And, again, here we do have our Simple Search enabled. So, for instance, even if I just started typing a name, you would see the results change instantly. So for someone who's just looking for someone by name, they could do so really quickly. And then just click on that link and that would take them to that member's profile.
And so there we go. I think in just under 30 minutes we've actually already learned how we can import our members into our membership database, how we can customize our different membership levels, and then how we can customize the actual fields of information we're recording for our members. And then back again to how we can actually display those members in a member directory. Now, that's by no means all the features in Wild Apricot, but I think it's a pretty good overview of the Members section. So now let's actually start exploring some of the other fun sections in Wild Apricot that actually help you to promote your organization.
So, for instance, I think it's all well and nice to be collecting membership applications and be displaying information about your members, but I think you really want to do some things to engage your members into your organization. So let's actually take a look at our Events feature within Wild Apricot.
So what this actually allows you to do is to create any event. And I think, first off, if we just take a look at the form here, you'll see some of the things that you'd expect, but I think I'll show you some things that you might not expect right away. So, for instance, you definitely see things like an Event Title. So you could have a member and public lunch. Now, we could give it some tags. We won't really worry about these tags just yet, but we will explore them a little bit later because they do allow you to do some really interesting things. We'll select a start date. So what we'll do is we'll select March 30th. So you could even see if I really needed to set up an event for even today, I could definitely do that. And because it is a lunch -- actually we'll set it for tomorrow. And because it's a lunch, we'll let it start at around 11:00 and we'll say that it runs until about 2:00 just to give our members enough time to chitchat.
And so now we can actually also edit the description of what people will see for this event and we can obviously format it however we'd like, including bullets and tables and [inaudible 00:37:47]. We could also include a picture if we wanted to. We would just select a picture icon. Now, we could either choose a picture that we've already added to our website or we could actually browse our computer to add our own picture. And then if we need to resize that image, we could do that quickly just using the built-in tools here. And then we just choose Insert Picture and that's it. In just a couple seconds I took a picture from my computer and added it to the event description.
Now let's actually look at the event setup that we can do within Wild Apricot. So, first of all, we can customize the registration form. Just like we customize our membership application form, we can you customize the event registration form. We could add additional fields with all those options, but actually let's just take a quick look at one of the fields already here. We'll just call it "Meal choice." And here you can see that we could have different options for different meal choices for our attendees, and we could also assign a price, a separate price for those meal choices if you wanted to add to the cost or the membership. But for now we'll just leave it as it is. But obviously you could add any specific information that you need to collect for your event.
Next we have registration types. And on the sample of that, we already have a couple added here, but let's actually just add another -- one of our own registration types. So, for instance, let's say we wanted to add an early bird registration price. So we want to give people a little incentive or a little push to actually register for this event as soon as possible. So we could say that this early bird registration is available until the 30th. And we could set the price and whether or not this person can also bring guests or not. But for now we'll just say that, no, this is only available to one registration.
And so there we have actually our three different registration types, but let's take a look at some of the options for each of them. So you'll notice there's quite the incentive here at $5 to join a hundred dollar event, but you can definitely just to -- that's definitely really just to serve an example of just how customized you could make all the different registration options.
So now, for instance, when I click on the member registration type and also when people see these is when they first click on the event and click to register, they'll actually see the different options that apply to them. If they're a member, they'll see this member registration option. But the great thing is that each registration type doesn't necessarily apply to all your members. So maybe you want to give your gold members a lower price than maybe your free members or your corporate members. It's completely up to you. And for all of them you can choose whether or not they're allowed to bring a guest. And if they are allowed to bring a guest, should you charge the same price as you charged the person registering for that guest or do you charge a special price. Perhaps free. Maybe you don't want to charge for your guest. It's completely up to you how you set up your event registrations.
And so next we'll actually look at the different e-mails that we can set up. And, again, I think this is actually one of the more powerful things that you'll see in Wild Apricot that you won't probably find everywhere else is with all your events you can choose when people should be sent reminders and when you should actually send out announcements for the event, any of the different e-mails that you should send once they've either started the registration for the event or they've actually paid for the registration for the event. You can customize all these e-mails, and we will look at the e-mails specifically in a moment, but this just gives you a different idea of all the different announcements and reminders you can actually send.
And finally, once people actually are registering for the event, what you'll notice is you get a great breakdown of the different types of registrations that you have. For instance, you could view all your completed registrations. You could view all your registrations that require some attention. So perhaps maybe it's a manual registration you've recorded but haven't confirmed yet. Or maybe there's some registrations that are still in progress and maybe there are some that are cancelled. So if anyone calls you and says, you know, oh, I processed my registration but [inaudible 00:41:53] finish, you could see all those records and help them out really quickly.
And so, again, that's actually how you set up your events and set all the different settings. Let's actually take a quick look at how you -- what that looks like from the point of view of the visitor or the member. So, again, here we have this Events page. And here we go. Here we see that event that we just created a few moments ago. And you can also choose which type of view is displayed. So you could have it displayed as an actual event. And, again, they could just click on that event there and start their registration just like you did the membership application and fill out all the information and be registered in just a few moments.
And, now, finally, what I'll actually do is I'll give you a quick overview of some of the other functions or features that you might like within Wild Apricot. Specifically, once you have all this information set up, you can also set up different routing instructions. What I mean by routing instructions is Wild Apricot also generates a lot of notifications or a lot of e-mail notifications. So you can actually set out which e-mail notifications get sent to which of your administrators.
And, of course, when you're actually getting ready to get your account fully set up, you can also set up your payment settings. And, again, this is where you actually add in your payment processor. So you'll have to get an account with PayPal and -- or Authorize Net or Google Checkout. And you'll simply add it here and then that's all you need to do to start accepting online payments through your Wild Apricot account.
And finally, just like I mentioned at the beginning of the webinar, let's actually take a look at how we format and start working with e-mails.
Now, when working with e-mails, we actually have a couple different options. We can either edit the system e-mails or the ones that are sent out automatically based on your settings. So, for instance, maybe the member reminder e-mails or the renewal reminder e-mails. So, for instance, we have the application initiation. We have the member activation e-mail. We have a reminder one, reminder two. These are all the different e-mails that you have within the system. And when we're actually editing these e-mails, what you see is we have all the same tools that you'd expect in a current modern e-mail editor. You can insert pictures, links, links to documents, insert tables, and format all this content just in the way that you would like to customize that e-mail for whoever it's getting sent to.
So those are all the automatic e-mails. So the event reminder e-mails, the renewal reminder e-mails. Let's finally take a look at how you actually manually send an e-mail, perhaps a newsletter to all your members.
So the first thing you would do is you would go to Contacts. And then the first thing you want to do is define who you want to send this to. So, for instance, let's say that I only wanted to send this e-mail to my Gold members. I'd first go to Advanced Search, select membership level from the criteria. And then I can start defining who I want to send this to. So, for instance, if I just wanted to send it to my Gold members, I would select Gold. You click Search. And here are my eight Gold members. And now all I have to do is just click E-mail Contacts and then I can start to compose my e-mail, insert my pictures, and, finally, send that e-mail out. The one thing you will notice for sure is I actually have these special tokens here, what we call macros. And this is what actually allows you to customize your e-mail when you're sending it out to multiple people. So instead of it being "Dear John Smith," you would always format your e-mails using these macros that you find in this list because it'll actually allow you to customize them. So, for instance, we say it's "Dear contact first name, contact last name." And then we can insert some more macros or some more text and images here to finally compose that e-mail and send it out.
And then once it's sent, you'd also get a confirmation within the e-mail Sent folder to say which e-mails have been sent and which haven't been sent. So you can -- you could get a quick record of all the e-mails that are going out of your system.
And now with that, I think I'll actually turn it over to Jay to see if we have any questions from this webinar.
Jay: Great. Thanks, Frank.
I got a question early on and it might be worth reviewing a little further. Can you talk about incorporating Wild Apricot into an existing website?
Frank: Okay.
Jay: So I guess using...
Frank: So we actually do have two options for when --
Jay: Mm-hmm.
Frank: Yeah. So we have two options within Wild Apricot. You can either use it as sort of an all-in-one solution where you're building a website inside Wild Apricot and hosting your contacts as well, or you can use what we call widgets, which allow you to just more or less cut and paste pieces of Wild Apricot into an existing website. So, for instance, let's say you just wanted your membership application or you just wanted the event calendar. You could just grab this little bit of code here and then insert it into your website. And you would have just that piece without any of the menus, without any of the header or anything like that.
Jay: Okay. So when you import your contacts from your existing membership list, how would you give them passwords and let them know that they have an account?
Frank: Okay, yeah, so you have a couple of options there. When you do your initial import, you can define a password. So if you had a column of data in your import file with the password, you could actually define the password there. And then when you're sending out those activation e-mails, it'll actually include the password in there. Or you could actually just include a link to allow them to set their own password in your member activation e-mail so that you're not actually having to set it for them. They can set it for themselves.
Jay: Great. Is it possible to accept payments online for events at the time they register for the event?
Frank: Absolutely, yes. So once you've added an online payment processor, either PayPal, Authorize Net, or Google Checkout, you can enable online payments for everything. You can enable it for your membership application, for your event registrations, your donations, anything, any of the transactions that are going through Wild Apricot.
Jay: Great. Okay. I don't have any more questions right at the moment, but we'll wait a few seconds to see if anyone else has questions. Just a reminder that if you do have questions, you can type them in and I will read them obviously to Frank. Or if yoiu are feeling brave and you have your microphone or you dialled in with the telephone, you can raise your hand, we'll un-mute you, and you can ask your questions that way.
Frank: While we do wait for some questions, I'll actually just go over a couple more features that you might enjoy while you're using Wild Apricot. For instance, if you're ever on a page or ever within a section within Wild Apricot where you're not sure what to do, just hover over the Help icon here and you'll see some default help items suggested or you can do your own search. So, for instance, if I wanted to learn more about the import, I could just type "import," and then it'll actually take me to some more Help documents. So, for instance, if I wanted to go through the Import Guide, I could learn all about the Import just by doing a quick and simple search from the website.
Jay: Yeah, thanks, Frank, that integrated Help is really handy. I do have a couple more questions. Do e-mails always come through as Wild Apricot or can that be customized?
Frank: That can be customized. So you can set actually where these e-mails are coming from and who your administrative contact is. So you can customize this.
Jay: Right. So you can see there you can change the name to whatever you wanted and change the contact information, right?
Frank: Yeah.
Jay: There you go.
Are there safeguards to prevent multiple users from logging into one account?
Frank: Currently if multiple users have the same -- have no -- an e-mail address and a password for an account, there's no sort of -- there's no way that we're currently detecting that. So they would be able to share that, but, again, that would require them to share that access.
Jay: All right. Can you mask the URL so that you can't see the "Wild Apricot" in the URL? And I guess a related question would be having -- using your own domain name.
Frank: Absolutely. So this address that you see here, the Wild Apricot.member.org [00:50:27] or it might be different when you actually create your account, is just the free one that we give you. If you actually upgrade, you can customize this to your own domain name. So your organization .com or .org or whatever your website address is. You can customize that and add actually as many as you want to your account.
Jay: Right. And we should say that "Wild Apricot" being in the URL for your demo is because you called it that. That's actually --
Frank: Yeah.
Jay: Most of the URLs, they might -- they can include "Wild Apricot." We have a free Wild Apricot domain name, but you can use -- there's different ones that you can use that don't include the word "Wild Apricot," right?
Frank: Absolutely. So you can even actually customize this at any time. So you could change it to whatever you wanted it to be --
Jay: Mm-hmm.
Frank: -- while you're just setting up your account.
Jay: Right. Can you add additional storage capacity for images?
Frank: We do. We do have the option for you to add an additional storage if you need it. That being said, we actually find most of our clients never request us for that because even the amount of space you get, even when you're adding images and things like that, it really doesn't take up that much space. But ultimately, yes, if you do need more space, we can add that to your account.
Jay: Yeah, and I guess if you want to do that, you just contact support and they can organize that for you, right?
Frank: Exactly.
Jay: Great. Our association has about 800 members, which is more than your $50 membership and far less than the $100 level. Is it possible to institute a $75 level for a thousand?
Frank: Jay, do you want to answer that?
Jay: Yeah, you know, it's a question we've received multiple times. We are looking at revising our pricing structure and we would very likely consider a level for a thousand because we know it's a pretty big jump for a lot of organizations to go from the 500 to 2,000 and we know that there's lots kind of in that thousand-ish range. So I'll be really honest, it's probably not something we're going to do anytime soon because of the 3,500 existing customers that we'd have to revise their pricing if we were going to go forward with a new level, but it is something we're looking into and hopefully we will be adding another level.
I -- excuse me. I just noticed that we have someone with a hand up and so I'll un-mute. Anne. Anne, are you there? Hello, Anne? We're not hearing you, Anne, sorry. If you do still have a question, you can type it in and I will be happy to read it.
A couple more questions. Are there -- are the PowerPoint slides available for view, download to share with board members as education about the values of Wild Apricot? Yeah, there's a PowerPoint presentation that we have that you can link to. It's on wildapricot.com in the right-hand sidebar. It's right here. And, in fact, the version that's there, I think we've actually just recently updated it. That might be the older version, but I think within the next couple days actually we'll be putting up a new version of that. The one that's there is fine, but we are revising it. We've just been working on a new version of that. So hopefully that has all the information that you need if want to share with board members and others as far as the value of Wild Apricot goes.
Some more questions. Sorry, I'm just losing track of where I was here. Is there an option to have a database larger than 15,000?
Frank: No. Currently this isn't an option. It's kind of a fixed limit for us. But the great thing is if at any time you do need to expand beyond that, you can actually export all your members and all your contacts at any point. So it's not like you're ever locked into Wild Apricot. So if it's something where you think that's going to happen, you can use us up until that point. And then if you do really need to move on to something that does support that, then you can definitely do that. Or who knows, maybe by that point we might also support more than 15,000.
Jay: Right. And that's also on our -- along with the pricing changes, that's also something that we're considering is a technical capability and a pricing structure for larger amounts.
Oh, I like this question. A question, if I choose Wild Apricot, I have to sell it to a 15-person board, do you have a 30 minute or so overview video explaining the features? And, in fact, we just finished a brand new video. It's about 15 minutes long actually. But for the person who's asking this, I think it's Nathan, Nathan, if you could send me a direct e-mail. We've literally, like, just finished this in the last couple days. So I can send you a direct link to that and we'll be posting it on the site very shortly. But it's a YouTube video and, yeah, it's hopefully exactly what you're looking for. It's about 15 minutes and it's a complete overview of -- at a very high level, of course, of all the features of Wild Apricot.
When members are logged in, does it show who is on to the other members?
Frank: No. So we don't have, like, a who's online sort of feature yet. I think that is one of the things that has been suggested before. Actually, I'll also take this opportunity to introduce you to our feature forum, where I think unlike maybe many other software providers, we actually discuss all of our plans and all the little things that we're currently working on with everyone. So you'll definitely find that feature actually in one of these posts here. And you can contribute your thoughts and then we can see maybe how we can incorporate your ideas into maybe creating something like that.
Jay: Great. Well, it's coming up on the top of the hour and we don't have any more questions at this time. So what I'm going to ask you to do is if you do think of questions and invariably as soon as we end the webinar a lot of people will think of questions, please make a point of e-mailing them to support@wildapricot.com. Frank or one of his colleagues will be more than happy to answer your questions during your trial period. And just to mention that -- one more thing is if you haven't already signed up for your free trial, please make sure to go to wildapricot.com, click on the nice friendly Free Trial link that Frank is showing there and sign up for your trial. It's 30 days. It's absolutely free. We don't take any credit card information. It's just an e-mail and that's all you need.
So thanks once again for joining us, and thank you, Frank. And thanks, everyone, for joining us.
Frank: Thanks, Jay. Thanks, everyone. I hope, yeah, everyone enjoyed it.