In my last note, I talked about how a potential client went with Wild Apricot as member management tool because it was better than standing still. That’s true. It was not sustainable to do nothing. But it also comes with a catch that most nonprofits don’t see until they’re in it: recurring payments vendor lock-in.
If you want to use these with them, you’re forced to use Wild Apricot’s own payment processor. Well I should say “highly nudged,” as as the nonprofit leader relayed to me that they essentially penalize you if you don’t use theirs with a higher processing fee.
That means your donor data and revenue stream are tied to their system, not yours. Leave the platform, and that will cut off contributions to your nonprofit. Of course, no Development Director will ever stop recurring donation so you stay and suck it up.
But this is what a proprietary system does. They have professionals that think up these kind of schemes to generate easy profit…they want to put hooks in you so it’s damn hard to leave.
I’ve seen this play out. Back in 2020, I had a client who first went with Wild Apricot for membership management. When they decided to move to CiviCRM, they had to keep paying well after the migration until they dropped under the free tier they had at the time—about 40 recurring memberships. They had more than 200 members. The only way out was to personally contact each member and migrate them to the new system. It worked, but it was slow, painful, and exactly the kind of distraction a nonprofit leader doesn’t need.
And that’s not the only issue. More contacts, more dollars. Once you cross 2,000 contacts, your monthly fee almost doubles. Growth becomes a penalizes. Like the government, they want a piece of the action.
Here’s the deal:
Wild Apricot works as a stopgap, but you may not want to build your future on a system that locks down your payments and punishes you for growing.
CiviCRM works in the opposite way. Starting out is the hardest part, either building it out properly or knowing how to use it well. You need to define your goals and what you want out of it. In this case, the LMS integration and other parts need some clarity, so I’m proposing a discovery budget to uncover and help build a CRM strategy for this particular case.