At a minimum, at least make it easier to clean out non-member contacts since WA software forces creation of anyone who attends a meeting as a guest. If we don't convert them to a member right away, we drop them out of the database immediately vs. paying to have a "prospect" affecting our pricing. The only way to clean these people out is to do an advanced search for non-members and delete them individually, which you can't even do without archiving first. I don't even want these in the archive since we'll likely never interact with them again, and if we do, they can create a new record.

There are in general two groups of contacts:

- Paying contacts, that add to the association's income, such as members, donors, etc.
- Not paying contacts - prospects.

During the times of Covid-19, when it is not advisable to have in-person meetings, it is important to do prospect management online, using webinars and other forms of events.

Sound prospect management benefits the association by helping it grow, and helps Wild Apricot when its member associations grow and upgrade to higher priced contracts.

To win one new member, an association has to manage 10 prospects or even more.

The current pricing system of Wild Apricot, however, makes it impossible to manage numbers of prospects in the system. These are considered contacts just like members and get very expensive.

On the first glance, this may look like good business for WA, but I would consider not supporting growth of associations rather a revenue blocker for WA.

I recommend to have a billing system that differs between prospect management and the management of paying contacts, such as members.

My organisation is currently evaluating WA. I have made a recommendation for this with the caveat of licensing. We like the platform, but the licensing structure of incorporating contacts is prohibitive and we now have to evaluate other products.

Our organization can't afford the plan that allows for the number of people who sign up to recieve a newsletter. Therefore, we can't use your newsletter/email function. It would be nice if you would allow orgs to have a larger contact list just for receiving newsletters, but still only charge us for the number of members we have.

The software is great. The apricot tech team does a great job with enhancements and support.

You do need to change licensing to only qualify members not contacts. do you really think organizations have 100-250 emails for marketing? if they do they cant afford you... Mailchimp is free for up to 2,000 contact distributions. you should at least match that since you sell eliminating this part. maybe tier it some way to compliment member sizing. or as Add on plan.

Licensing model as is just forces every organization with IT resources (or when someone with IT knowledge gets added) to use mailchimp again and keep cleaning up WA database. you are creating a ton of manual work for the IT people that champion on your behalf. They help sell you to organizations.... :)

Please consider revising that license structure.

To add what I posted earlier. This is what I would very much like to be able to do. Say I'm looking to run some events to attract members. I import a import a bunch of contacts who I hope will attend and become members, mailshot them with an invite, and then export them.

Perhaps there could be another category of prospectice contacts, or prospective members.

To explain where I'm coming from. I'm only just getting started, have less than 50 contacts, and would qualify for free. Yet I'm paying for the Community plan 500 contacts at $90 month in order to be able to mail out and try to get more members.

Walt, we did not do anything, all part of standard behaviour for years. No changes on our part.

Over the years, we've slid over our contact limit a few times due to non-member event registrations. Used to be, nothing happened. When I asked, WA support said that if it became a problem, I would be contacted. And of course I deleted contacts and got back under the limit.

But the last time - since Personify took over WA - we received a brusque email threatening that functions creating contacts could "be temporarily deactivated (online member application, event registrations, adding members manually, online donations etc.)" No deadline was given - I didn't know whether I had two weeks to deal with it or two minutes.

So that makes this change even more necessary.

Same here. I have thousands of non-paying contacts that I'm looking to convert into paying members. Importing the contacts into here would kill me financially. Having to import them a chunk at a time, to keep within the price plan, and invite them to events is painful.

Ditto. The first price increase pushed us back to the very basic tier and now the 20$ penalty for not using Wild Apricot payment system will likely push us away from WA all together. We are now having to handle most of our business with Airtable, Mailchimp, Google lists, etc because we can't afford to put anyone but our members in WA.

We purchased WA to increase our membership. We were losing members because of our membership management. We have a contact list of over 600 because we've been around for 20 years. If WA had a general contact limit (for people and businesses) that will never log into the WA system we should be able to solve this problem.
Now I need to look for another solution to fix this problem. Anyone have any suggestions? I know Member Planet has a plan with a limit for email campaigns at 10,000.

I agree , it's why i leave WA for other solutions. We have 120 business members but near 5000 contacts. It's a non sense to pay fee basis on contact

Same request. Please base your account plans on the number of members rather than contacts, or provide different limits for members and contacts to help us grow without such large price step-ups.

Charge for number of members, not number of contacts

I think your pricing structure is horrible jumping from a limit of 500 to 2000. I wish there was an option to maybe have the 500 limit, then say $5 or $10 per 100 more contacts.

We're in the same position. The current price point is good for us to manage our members and number of contacts registered for upcoming and recent events although I'm not sure we could afford much more.

Outside of WA, we have a mailing list with e-mail list service provide with hundreds of subscribers which we use for e-mail announcements and our newsletter. Our organization is less than 100 members and recent event registrants but our e-mail list has hundreds of addresses. If our plan had say 250 current/recent members active event registrants some option say 1000 other un-engaged, cold-call, e-mail list-only contacts it would be really nice for us. Right now, I feel we're missing out on some great WA features to communicate with our members simply because of cost.

As Ed T. said, we want to increase our membership and people coming to our non-free events but for our conversion rates the current Wild Apricot pricing is cost prohibitive. I think we'd be more effective if we could manage all our e-mail list contacts in Wild Apricot at a more affordable price.

I think that the limit is based off of contacts because many clubs/organizations would simply just not make the site member oriented in order to avoid having to pay the fee level that they should be at. That I get, but I guess that I wish that there were more options.

I agree that hand deleting contacts is a pain.
I am also confused as to the purpose and need to email a contact logon information.

Combine this with https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist/suggestions/11104800-increase-contact-allowance .

The problem is that contacts are added willy-nilly when, most commonly, a non-member registers for an event. So the number can balloon and they have to be deleted by hand to stay under the limit.

But unless I'm missing something, the only loads that a non-member contact places on the system are to register for events and receive emails. And they are less likely to do that than members.

So the request to have a higher contact limit than membership limit makes sense to me.

Contacts can set a password and log in. Is there any use to that?

It would be nice to have be able to have a greater number of contacts, rather than being limited. We are a non-profit that contains over 2000 contacts, but have a much smaller membership base (350). Our membership is very unlikely to ever go above the limits of our account level but it is frustrating to think that we may have to keep our contacts in a separate data base to accommodate them all.