This month we celebrated the ten year anniversary of WildApricot. It’s been a tremendous journey from the start.
In the first few years I had many friends and fellow entrepreneurs express concerns whether we could make it in this market and build a long-term sustainable business. I have always believed that we would, even if it took a long time and a lot of effort (and it did!).
We celebrated the event by taking a relaxing evening dinner cruise around Lake Ontario.
I am very proud of what our team has achieved over ten years. We are now helping thousands of small organizations to fulfill their core purpose, through simplifying and automating their mundane (but critically important) core administrative functions.
I believe WildApricot will still make an even bigger impact in this world. It’s my dream to help as many organizations as I can achieve their dreams and also to help the people on our team to keep growing and developing.
Thanks for ten fantastic years!
-Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot
Four New Email Templates Released
Looking to refresh the look of your email templates? If so, our Email Developers (called the Husky Crew) have designed and released four new themed email templates for your use this month:
- 4th of July
- Happy Independence Day
- Golf green
- Clubhouse
These email templates come ready to use with beautiful images, stylized text, and clean layouts.
To choose one of these templates to work with, go to your Admin View, then click Emails > Email Templates
A New Way to Accept Payments on your Phone
Would you like the ability to receive membership and event payments by swiping a member’s credit card on your phone? If so, you’ll be excited to learn about one of our latest projects in development. Our Mobile Crew is currently testing out the ability to receive payments on your phone using
SquareUp.
In fact, this feature was
recommended by our users, who created the suggestion on our WishList Forum.
SquareUp does charge fees per use: 2.75% for swiped entries and 3.5% + 15 cents for manual entries. WildApricot does not charge any fees for the use of SquareUp.
To learn more about how you can implement Square for your organization, visit squareup.com
If you’d like to see what other features are in the works, take a look at our Product Roadmap.
Free Webinar: Why Most Content on Social Media Fails and How to Create a Winning Strategy
Not seeing the engagement you’d like on your social media channels? If so, we recommend watching the recording of the webinar we ran last week on this topic, hosted by Amy Sample Ward. Amy is the CEO of the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (NTEN), and in her presentation, she shows you the unique—and simplified—approach she has used to grow NTEN into a leader in its space using social media.
Access this webinar recording now to learn:
- The 3 things to focus on if you only have 30 minutes a week
- The number one reason why most content fails on social media
- What types of content engage your following on Facebook the most
Watch the webinar.
Our Downtime This Month and What We’re Doing About It
If you were affected by our downtime on July 4th, we’d like to apologize for any problems you might have experienced because of it. We'd also like to provide you with some more context on what happened and what we’re doing about it.
On July 4th, from approximately 8:00 PM (ET) to 2:45 AM (ET), all WildApricot sites and services were unavailable.
The reason this happened was due to a network issue from our internet service provider (ISP). We weren’t able to get everything up and running until our ISP was able to solve the problem on their end.
One downfall on our part was that we were slow to react in updating you about what was going on. Minutes into the downtime, many of you tweeted, emailed, called and Facebooked us, however we did not post any status updates until approximately 1:00 AM (ET). This is a big failure on our part and we are working to develop a better process for updating all our channels as soon as we experience downtime so that you aren’t left in the dark.
From the ISP side of things, we find outages such as the one you experienced unacceptable and have taken time to research other ISPs which we believe will meet our standards of reliability. We have chosen Amazon Web Services (AMS) as our new provider and have already begun migrating some of our assets over. This project will still take some time to complete, but I want to let you know that we are taking this situation very seriously.
An Update on Solution Splitting
This is a brief update for everyone who’s been following along with our Solution Splitting project first mentioned in our
March Newsletter this year. In short, the Solution Splitting projects will “split” the code that runs WildApricot into smaller, more manageable segments. This will make it easier for our developers to release new features faster.
Stage 1 is well underway. As a reminder, Stage 1 entails everything that is visible to you (the public and admin sides of your accounts). So far 12,127 accounts (paid and free) have been moved over to the new code. The remaining 7,000 accounts (paid, free, and trials) are scheduled to be moved over in the coming month.
One thing we didn’t quite expect was the amount of bugs we encountered through this process. We have identified over 70 bugs during Stage 1, about 30 of which were client reported (thank you!). Fixing these bugs has caused some delay in our progress, but no major concerns have arisen because of them and we are planning on implementing Stage 2 in September. Stage 2 entails switching over the “invisible” features of WildApricot that the public cannot see (Imports, Exports, Payments, Emailing, Public API, etc.).
Throughout this process, you won’t see any immediate changes to your platform. Everything about Solution Splitting is internal, but it will pave the way to improvements, benefits and large scale projects in the near future such as:
- Faster feature development speed, meaning we can work on more of your requests
- Fewer bugs and a more robust system, so you won’t need to call our support team
- More frequent, faster and smoother releases to improve performance of our platform
- Faster reaction on user feedback to product changes to give you a better experience
- Improvements to our main features (membership, events, payments, CMS, emailing, mobile etc.)
That's all for this month's update. Thanks for ten fantastic years!