I hope everyone has had a good start to 2018!
In case you missed December’s Newsletter, one of our biggest updates from last year was that Dmitry Buterin, founder of WildApricot, decided to finish his time at WildApricot after 12 years. I encourage you to read the newsletter, because it also covers our key achievements from 2017.
Going forward, I will be providing you with the monthly newsletter updates. My name is Evgeny Zaritovskiy and I’m the Product Manager here. I’ve been with WildApricot since day one and I work with our development team to provide you with the best membership management software possible. Many of you may already know me from our Wishlist Forum, under the “Apricot Kernel” nickname, where I give updates on our feature requests.
With all that said, let’s get right into the updates for this month!
Our Plans to Simplify WildApricot
Are there features in WildApricot you find difficult to use?
We’ve received a lot of feedback about the difficulty of some features in our software, which is why one of our goals in 2018 is to simplify WildApricot — another way of saying this in more technical terms is that we aim to improve your User Experience (UX).
Here are some of the things we are taking a look at right now:
- Fixing the annoying editor issues
- Improving the contacts import
- Possibly merging the Contacts and Members tabs together
- Introducing a new way to get help about software features (more about this below)
- Make our functionality simpler for new users of our software
To be clear, we do not have exact solutions for everything yet. Our designers will be looking into your feedback, preparing prototypes and testing them throughout the year. Some of these ideas won’t make it into 2018 updates, so 2019 is looking exciting for us as well.
New Features Coming in 2018
Simplification is nice, but not enough. That’s why we plan to continue delivering your top requests from the Wishlist forum.
Here are some upcoming features you can look out for this year:
I’m quite excited to see all these features, and several more, released throughout 2018. Thank you to everyone who voted for them and provided comments — we always appreciate your input.
If you’d like to browse the rest of our requested features and add your votes, please visit our Wishlist forum.
General Data Protection Regulation
At the end of May, the General Data Protection Regulation in the EU (GDPR in short) will come into effect, replacing the existing Data Protection regulations. The idea of this regulation is to protect and empower all EU citizens’ data privacy.
While the majority of our customers are from North America, we do have a significant number from the EU. That’s why we are working to make WildApricot compliant with the GDPR.
I will share a full update on this project in an upcoming newsletter to clarify questions, our status and next steps.
For now, I just wanted to reassure you that WildApricot is taking the GDPR into account and is working on it.
A New Way to Get Help with WildApricot
Over the next few weeks, WildApricot will be launching a new help site, featuring a new way to view help: within the product itself.
Instead of switching back and forth between the admin view and an external help site, you can view help articles within a side panel in the admin view, allowing you to follow the directions as you read them. Here’s a screenshot of how this will work:
If you prefer reading help articles in a larger window, you can click the
icon beside the topic title to view the article full-sized on the external help site.
All the content available from the inproduct help panel is also available from the new external help site, which can be directly accessed at gethelp.wildapricot.com. The old help site – help.wildapricot.com – will still be available while we switch all our internal and external links to the new site. If you’ve bookmarked any pages on the old site, they will still work, but eventually they will be redirected to the corresponding page on the new help site.
We’ve reorganized the content on the new help site, reducing overlap and the need to jump between multiple topics to resolve a single issue. As well, we’ve added a new search engine that does a much better job of directing you to the right topic. It not only anticipates your question as you type, it also understands what you mean when you mistype your question. Here’s an example if you type in “youtube vidoes” (notice the misspelling and how the search bar auto-corrects it?).
The inproduct help panel replaces the Help icon that appeared below the WildApricot logo in the upper right corner of admin view. To display the help panel when it’s closed, click the Help & Support tab on the right side of admin view.
To close the inproduct help panel, just click the X in the upper corner of the panel.
When you first open the inproduct help panel, it will suggest appropriate help topics based on your current location.
If you’re unable to find an answer to your question, you can submit a support request from within the help panel. From the help panel menu – which you can display at any time by clicking the
icon within the top of the help panel – simply click the Support request option and enter the details in the form that appears.
As you enter the subject and details of your request, the search bar will automatically suggest related help topics that might be able to answer your request without waiting for a reply from our support department.
The inproduct help panel will be rolled out as part of the upcoming 5.17 release of WildApricot. The new external help site is already live at gethelp.wildapricot.com, if you want to check it out.
Free Webinar: 21 Tech Tools Membership Managers Use to Save Lots and Lots of Time
How are some membership managers able to get everything done and still have a life? The quick answer is that they use tech tools to do as much of their work as possible. In this webinar, our very own nonprofit tech expert Terry Ibele will show you 21 tech tools to save you hours and hours each week.
In this free webinar, Terry will show you:
- 9 tech tools the most productive people use to save time working with others
- 7 tools to cut down the time you spend creating website and social media content
- 5 tools you can use each day to save an hour in administrative work
Sign up now and we'll see you on January 30, at 2:00 PM (ET) / 11:00 AM (PT).
Monthly Blog Update
Does your organization need to raise more funds? Member dues and fundraising aren’t the only ways nonprofits are earning their bread and butter. To find out how they’re doing it, and to start generating revenue in new ways yourself, take a look at our recent post on The 5 Best Ways to Generate Earned Income for Your Nonprofit.
Here are the rest of this month’s posts: