Integration with Meetup for non-programmers. Meetup's market power comes from its Facebook-like ability to inform Meetup users of similar Meetups happening in their geographic area or in the user's area of interest; it is superior to Facebook in its ability to organize actual activities. If it were not for these features, Meetup could be ignored by Wild Apricot users. Position Meetup as a feeder market for selling Wild Apricot (WA) services to Meetup groups that have grown to the point of needing more sophisticated member management and website integration, without relying upon programmers.

1) Map WA user logon authentication with Meetup user ids similar to WA’s existing ability with Facebook and Google+.

2) Map WA membership levels and administrative levels to Meetup organizer (i.e. Meetup administrator) levels.

3) Allow Meetup events or proposed events to show up as WA events and vice versa.
a. Map certain WA event registration types to Meetup event registrations (at least free registrations but allowing fee charging registrations should be investigated even if the payment will go through the Meetup group itself) while keeping other WA reservation types exclusive to WA resources. WA event registration types that map to Meetup would be open to event registration to Meetup users, with the registration slots being taken on Meetup showing up as registrants, or at least as slots taken, on WA.
b. WA would need to complete its planned project of allowing members to submit events and map this to the Meetup system for doing the same. Most likely events mapped to Meetup would be created on WA first then mapped to Meetup but the alternate approach of allowing Meetup events to be created and mapping to limited versions of WA events should be considered.
c. Allow WA to have proposed events waiting for confirmation from the event organizer about when and where it will happen. Map this to Meetup events that are waiting for a time. As a part of this allow even mere contacts to propose events even if the event will require an actual member to finally organize the event itself.

4) Add to WA venue booking and allow administrators and members with the right level of access to add these venues to events, then map the venues into the Meetup representation of the WA events. Meetup allows organizers to define a restricted list of venues that a group will use but it does not treat these venues as bookable resources. WA has user proposals for including bookable resources but currently has no such feature. WA could offer administrators and members with the right membership levels to book organization-defined resources (a conference room, a boat, etc.) and then to place those resources as the venue or one of several venues for an event. This could then be mapped into the Meetup equivalent of the WA event.

WA is currently superior to Meetup in terms of overall website design, sub-group creation and management, contact and member search, email blast management, more sophisticated administrator privileges, membership billing and accounting, allowing differing membership levels, allowing differing event registration types, and offering more payment processing options. Meetup is currently superior to WA in terms of publicizing a group’s existence and a group’s events to non-group members, allowing group members or even contacts to self-organize events, and it has a more attractive user interface for some of these functions.

Wild Apricot’s major selling point to us is that it offers a lot of integration without relying upon programmers, however there are powerful social media that organizations need to connect to and do so in an integrated fashion without requiring programming. We cannot ignore them. We are currently investigating using Meetup as a public front end for our organization along with Facebook but integration is a major hurdle with both social media systems.

In terms of the site itself I have noticed one oddity on the desktop version. When viewing the directory, the results to display are defaulted to 1-50, no paging buttons are displayed to allow the user to go to the second page of the directory. If you change the drop down to 50-100 you can then view the second page. Not a serious thing, took me a second to figure it out, but for less technical people perhaps could become problematic. The browser I tested in was IE 11 as well as the latest version of Chrome. Same result on a mobile browser as well.
Not sure I would classify this as a bug, I am just making a note of the unexpected behavior here

we have around 4000 members of various types. We want to add them to the certain group(s). How to add multiple members of various types to selected group.
FYI - I do know on group page you have button call Manage Participants but it gives me the list of all of my 4000 members and I can't go through each of them to add to that group.
When I do advance search and get my list of members - I want to add them to the group.

Wild Apricot ticket # 76023

I agree editing records in bulk is a nice feature to have. Due to our limited resources we have to prioritize this with all the other hundred of requests we have at any given time, so there is no timeline when exactly we will be able to add this feature. In the meantime we would appreciate it if you could add this request in our wishlist forum so we can gauge the need

When using the FieldValues array currently the array has to be iterated to find the proper value you wish to access. It would be better if FieldValues array had properly named keys (maybe the SystemCode?) rather than just indexed keys.

Currently we use this PHP code to iterate an array each time we look for a particular value, and it's not really an ideal or very readable:

// Using ternary operator to test for NULL date values using $condition ? $trueVal : $falseVal

foreach($contactResult[FieldValues] as $x => $x_value) {

// iterate the FieldValues array
// echo "Key=" . $x . ", Value=" . $x_value[SystemCode];

// MemberSince system code is membership initial dade, RenewalDue is membership expiration date
if ($x_value[SystemCode]=='MemberSince'){
$membershipSince = $x_value[Value] ? date("F j, Y",strtotime($x_value[Value])) : 'UNAVAILABLE';

} elseif ($x_value[SystemCode]=='RenewalDue') {
$membershipExpiry = $x_value[Value] ? date("F j, Y",strtotime($x_value[Value])) : 'UNAVAILABLE';
}
}

Accessing FieldValues[SystemCode][Value] would be much nicer so FieldValues['MemberSince'][Value] would be much more preferred.

According to CASL rules, if you are a club, association or voluntary organization and the recipient is one of your members, you have implied consent. For non-members who register for an event, donates or subscribes to receive emails then there is implied consent which is valid for 24 months - after which you will need to obtain express consent.

There needs to be a way to create a saved search that includes contacts that have interacted with the site in the last 24 months. Currently there is no way to select contacts that registered for an event, donated, became lapsed, or subscribed to a newsletter within the last x months (perhaps just a simple"has complied consent" search criteria - there is already one for the express consent).

Ideally, there should also be a way to automate sending out the opt-in email after the 24 month period has passed for each contact.