WildApricot vs The Signup Place: Which is a better fit?

Caryn: Hello, my name's Caryn. I'm the Communications Director for the Off Campus Writers' Workshop. We're an organization of about 300 and 5,400 members, using Wild Apricot for our event management and membership management. My level of satisfaction, I'm afraid to say is a one. I am not a satisfied customer of Wild Apricot. Before adapting to Wild Apricot, and I believe it was 2015, our organization was on a manual system of personal emails, storing things in folders and Outlook, keeping lists of our email addresses in an Excel sheet. It was a totally manual system, and as we added more members and needed more functionality, it just was not working out for us at all. So at that point, we went to this all in one solution, Wild Apricot. In all honesty, we didn't vet a bunch of systems. I'm sorry that we didn't. We got a recommendation from somebody whose expertise we trusted said, this is a platform that you can get everything under one umbrella that'll solve your problems. And we went for it without doing a great deal of research, basically on recommendation. Getting started was tedious. It was a lot of work that very few people had to do in a short timeframe, so it was not a pleasant experience. As far as difficulty in grasping the functions, I don't think it was over our heads. It was just the amount of tedium involved in getting up and running. I would take a test run. They do offer the opportunity to test the product before you buy. I would pay very close attention to any recommendations that you could get of customers that use Wild Apricot, and I don't know that they would ever supply those names. And I would look at 4, 5, 6 other systems, compare them all. Because once you get on one of these systems, it's very difficult to get off. So you better be happy about the choice you've made from the get-go. And for that reason, I suggest that whoever's looking at it take the time to compare it to several different alternatives that all offer the same functionality, but may have updated their system a lot more readily than the Wild Apricot owners seem to be willing to.