Happy spring everyone! I hope the weather is getting warmer wherever you are. And you are keeping safe and healthy as well!
Wild Apricot recently announced a price increase for existing customers renewing after June 15, 2021. The 20% increase, the first since 2018, will help fund improving their support teams and adding new features to Wild Apricot. They announced the integration of a jobs board and a learning management system (LMS) based on the Memberclicks acquisition.
We have worked with Wild Apricot as a consulting partner and customer since 2015 and have noticed that most of our customers are professional trade associations that enjoy incredible return on their Wild Apricot investment. We have also noticed that there are many smaller social groups and special-interest clubs who use the platform very effectively.
The revenue models between professional/trade associations and community-based organizations (clubs/social/religious) are quite different.
Small professional/trade associations get membership dues from small businesses usually. They are business-to-business. They usually run one or two large networking/learning events during the year and generate a lot of fundraising at those events. Their average membership dues go on a sliding scale based on member size and range between $100 and several thousand dollars per year! They usually have less than 500 members and use membership bundles almost always to provide benefits to a wider audience (maybe 1000-2000 people).
Community organizations and clubs generate dues from individuals and donations. And they usually run many smaller events during the year, sometimes offering the events for free for members, and paid for the general public. Sport organization flow money for events through the club but sometimes just break even and rarely make a surplus from their events, unfortunately.
The announced price increase will be hitting community organizations and clubs the hardest -- but it is exactly for these organizations that should consider diversification of non-membership dues revenue. And there are some cost-saving measures that can be taken too!
Wild Apricot is building new features to diversify the revenue streams of all their customers. The improved online store functionality, the new jobs board and learning management system will improve the membership benefits that all customers (and their members) will get. This will help to offset the increasing costs of a terrific product, but only if you diversify non-membership dues revenue.
Organizations can also eliminate inactive contacts, and archive them to prune to a lower pricing tier. Since Wild Apricot charges based on contacts in your database, this could be a perfect time to evaluate the size of your database. We have some alternatives that we can recommend if you really need to make a switch now. Our friend Joy Duling has launched JourneyCARE which is another interesting new, affordable alternative.
A word of advice based on our experience: if your organization has not factored in the rising cost of technology (Wild Apricot, Zoom, Gsuite, etc) into your operational budget, you are making a grave error. The time is now to allocate between 5-10% of your annual budget to technology operations. Not doing so will hamper your organization's ability to grow.
The pandemic has been difficult for many organizations and this may seem like a tone-deaf message. But I see it differently. Wild Apricot is providing a clarion call for organizations to re-think their revenue model and closely monitor their costs of doing business. All costs will increase post-pandemic. It's time to factor this into your organization's revenue generation plans.