Next Monday is the start of our Membership Growth Online Summit. It's going to be the biggest webinar event we've ever held. I know we’ve been talking about this event for a while, but I really think it’s a fantastic opportunity for any organization looking to grow their membership.
Along with a mobile release and some new email themes, I'd also like to bring attention to the last item in this update. Our Chief Architect, Igor Subbotin, shares an update about a big internal project that we’ve been working on for the last two years, called Solution Splitting. Scroll down to find out more.
Membership Growth Online Summit
As I mentioned, the Membership Growth Online Summit starts next week! Over 3,000 Nonprofit Professionals have signed up and there's still space left!
From Monday, April 4th to Friday April 5th, there will be a FREE webinar everyday! See the full agenda here.
Attend and learn everything on how to:
- Set up an Online Marketing Funnel to make the best use of email marketing
- Build effective Google and Facebook Ads
- Use Social Media to grow your community
- Engage Millennials
- Build an Effective Membership Model
- and more!
SIGN UP
Or, if you've already signed up, invite a friend!
We’re Ramping Up Our Blog
This past year we had 851,261 visitors to our Blog & Knowledge Articles.
We think that's amazing and as part of our promise to bring you more educational value, we're going to ramp up our blog contributions to deliver more relevant content on topics you care about.
Terry Ibele, our Content Manager is going to tackle this. He’s already collected hundreds of your questions from surveys, webinars, and emails, and he’s going to use them as fuel to revitalize our blog.
So, if you have a specific topic that you’d like to see Terry write about (Volunteers, Board Turnover, Events, etc.), email him at tibele@wildapricot.com.
Mobile App Update
For those of you who use our mobile app (available for Android or iOS), you'll notice some changes next week.
Our app is great for checking in guests at your events, or searching through your contact database.
The latest version of our app features a complete redesign and improved appearance on tablets. We've also included a number of user-requested features including:
- Multi-session event details on event lists and within event details
- The ability to delete an existing event registration
- An improved workflow for adding event registrations
- Guest registration details within the main registration details
- Event description appearing when you tap the event title from the event details
As with all our software, we continue to review suggestions for future enhancements on our
WishList forum. Some of the new features in our app update came right from your suggestions. So, if you have an idea, please contribute and vote on our
WishList forum.
New Email Themes
Late last year we analyzed our database to get a better idea of the types of organizations that use WildApricot so that we could start creating more personalized experiences for the more common ones.
As a small step to accomplishing this, we just launched some new email themes that will delight a few different types of organizations.
When you log into your Admin View, then navigate to Emails > Email Templates, you'll notice a number of brand new themes:
- 2 Motorcycle themes: Black lightning, Blue cruiser
- 1 Tennis theme: Baseline
- 1 theme for Lawyers: Boardroom
- 1 Patriotic theme: Red white and blue
Coming up we also have planned:
- 2 Golf themes: Golf green, Clubhouse
- Another theme for Lawyers: Cityscape
Be on the lookout for more organization-specific themes!
Solution Splitting
This update is from our Chief Architect, Igor Subbotin
We want WildApricot to be the best tool for you to manage your membership online.That’s why we’re continuously improving its functionality and launching new features.
Every month we spend over $250,000 and have 57 people working on software development. Since inception, we’ve launched over 60 releases and our system receives thousands of requests per second (that’s a billion hits a month!). Plus, we have hundreds of servers that run day and night to keep WildApricot live.
This June WildApricot turns 10 years old, and you can imagine the amount of coding that we’ve built over that time. It’s MASSIVE! It’s over 1,000,000 lines long!
Unfortunately with MASSIVE amounts of code, our developers have run into a very typical software problem. They’ve built up a lot of technical debt (a wonderful metaphor developed by a famous computer programmer Ward Cunningham). In other words, with each new feature we launch, we have to keep writing more lines of code on top of our existing code, creating one gigantic beast of code. With a lot of technical debt, a number of issues have arisen for us including:
- Slower progress delivering on your feature requests
- Delayed release dates which stalls better product performance
- An increase in bugs with our platform, meaning you contact our support team more often
- Performance issues which may cause you downtime
- Plus a number of other issues for our developers that slow down their progress
All of this deteriorates your WildApricot experience, which is exactly the opposite of what we want. We can improve your experience by cleaning up our code and that’s what Solution Splitting is all about.
Solution Splitting will “split” up our code into smaller, more manageable, “cleaner” segments instead of the one gigantic beast it’s grown to become.
Now, it’s worth noting that you can still have a great product, but also have technical debt. However, improving and maintaining the product is slow, costly, and painful.
Two years ago it became obvious to us fix our technical debt, in order to keep giving you the best experience you can have with our software.
Since then, we’ve had up to 30 developers working on this project, which I was a technical lead on. It’s been tough balancing this initiative with launching new features, which is why our product development has been slow for a while.
But now I’m glad to tell you that Solution Splitting is nearly done! Soon, our developers will be able to devote more time to launching the features that you request in our UserVoice WishList forums.
Of course, we are still taking caution to minimize the risks of launching Solution Splitting, so we decided to split the release into two phases (with the possibility to rollback changes quickly):
- Stage 1 - The main application will be gradually rolled out in small account bunches with the 5.7.5 release
- Free accounts first
- Paid accounts after
- Stage 2 - All other services will be gradually rolled out (Import, Export, Payments, Emailing, Public API etc.) with the 5.8 release
Not to let you down, but after the release of Solution Splitting you won't see any immediate changes to our 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 be calling 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.)
We believe that Solution Splitting will lead us to a better client experience and so we are very excited to be nearly done this project!
That's all for this month's update.
Here's to your success!