Migration to WildApricot

Modified on Mon, 05 Feb 2024 at 02:52 PM

A guide for clubs evaluating or planning a migration to the WildApricot membership management platform

1. Purpose of this document

This document is meant to be a high-level overview of the various aspects of migrating an existing website to one provided by WildApricot (WA). The target audience are clubs currently evaluating a move to WA. This is not a detailed plan as there are too many variances in website technology and skill levels.

2. Prerequisites

2.1. Staging website

It is recommended to start building out the WA platform using their free trial version, which can be started at https://register.wildapricot.com/. No content will be lost should the migration take longer than the 30-day trial period.

2.2. Access to domain

cbc.ca and ebay.com are examples of domains. On the Internet there is a service (DNS) that translates this human-friendly name to a computer-required number (IP address). That service gets the required information from domain registrars such as GoDaddy or Ionos. Some web hosting companies provide the domain as part of their service.

WA does not provide domains, but you can bring your own. If you do not want to be limited to a web address like my_club.wildapricot.org, then you need to make changes to your existing domain using the registrar’s website.

Whoever set up the existing website of your club should have relevant knowledge and, hopefully, access to an account with the domain registrar. If the domain is provided by your current web hosting company, then you would need to find out from them how your domain could be transferred to a registrar of your choice. Such transfers typically cost $10 to $20.

At the end of all the migration work there will be a date and time when the domain will need to be changed from old to new website. To make that switch, you will need access to that account. WA provides excellent help on what changes need to be made. You can make these changes directly, or you can work with your domain registrar.

2.3. Access to existing web content

Some websites can be reached via an internal address, for example https://bvpc.wildapricot.org is the same as https://beavervalleyprobus.com. However, others would no longer provide access as soon as the domain is switched from old to new website. In such cases, you would need to migrate all content prior to switching the domain.

Typically, there is an administrative backend to a website, which may contain data or documents not available from the public website. For example, your club may be storing meeting minutes or financial reports in a file repository that requires access via username and password. This data needs to be extracted and copied to the destination before access to the old website is removed.

2.4. Access to existing membership data

Membership data is added to WA by importing a spreadsheet file. Obviously, the team doing the importing needs to get that data in a usable format.

3. Web Design

3.1. Responsive Design

Responsive Design is a technique that changes the display of a web page to adjust for screen size. For example, elements that are displayed side-by-side on a big screen are automatically shown top to bottom on a small screen. WA is very good at this, but we need to help it by following some guidelines:

Use built-in gadgets and editors when creating content. Pasting text from, say, a Word document will then be stripped of unwanted style elements.
Minimize the use of files in PDF or similar format. For example, guidelines and policies should be created using the Content gadget rather than linked to the Files repository.
More detailed information on how to design a mobile-friendly site is available at https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en/articles/45

3.2. Theme

WA has a rich set of features that govern the look and feel of the website. There are a number of themes available to start from, which can be customized further. A word of caution here: when using theme overrides, the theme gets disconnected from its origin. Should WA make a change to the underlying theme, then it is possible (and has happened) that the website stops to function until customer support remedies the issue.

To take advantage of their responsive design, pick from WA’s newest theme sets.

4. Web Content

4.1. Backup of existing website

Few websites offer the ability to extract the information for use in another website. To not solely rely on the manual extraction of existing information, it is recommended to make a complete backup of the public and, where applicable, private website. This can be automated using tools commonly referred to as web crawlers or spiders. One such tool is freely available at https://www.httrack.com/, with a tutorial at https://www.wikihow.com/Use-HTTrack. Once all the files have been extracted, move them to a good place for safekeeping for a decade or so.

4.2. Documents

Whenever possible, migrate application-specific documents (PDF, Word, Excel) to plain web pages. In addition to making your WA website mobile-friendly, this will help you review each document for links it may contain. Links to content on the old website need to be changed to the location where that content will reside in the future. Note that most PDF files can be opened in Microsoft Word, which makes it a lot easier to get into a web page via copy and paste.

Documents you want to retain in their original format are stored in the Files tool, described at https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en/articles/177. You will need to create a hierarchy that best serves your club’s needs. Here is an example:

4.3. Photos

Your current website may have functionality to display photos in various forms, e.g. as albums or as a slideshow. WA has equivalent features (called gadgets), but the migration is likely to require careful planning. You may need to create an inventory first where each photo is described by its filename, date, event, and possibly by some caption. The ins and outs of WA photo albums are described at https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en/articles/422 and photo galleries at https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en/articles/1729-photo-gallery-gadget.

There are two main ways to display a series of photos in WA. The "Photo Album" gadget and the "Slideshow" gadget. The Slideshow gadget is recommended if you have a lot of photos to migrate, because it allows you to create and name a file folder to point to, and all photos in the folder will be picked up automatically and appear sequentially in the slideshow. For example an administrator can create a folder for each year, and subfolders according to event or special interest group, then drag and drop all the photos into the subfolder. The upside is hundreds of photos can be quickly migrated. One downside to this method is that the name of the photos controls the order. It is recommended to prepare the photos before moving them to WA; preface file names with a number, such that the lowest number is the most recent file and first to appear in the slideshow. Example 100_hike_ann, 099_hike_joan, 098_hike_group. The group photo will appear first. To apply captions to the photos in the slideshow, this method requires using the “Add link to images” option, which is easy enough, but not at all obvious. Once you input the caption in the description you can no longer rename the file without losing the caption.

With the Photo Album gadget, the system creates a file folder with an obscure name, (that you can not rename or move) and requires one-by-one uploading from a user interface menu. If you only have a few photos to migrate, this might be a suitable option. The Photo Album gadget does have some advantages, as it has slightly more control over the photo order and it allows any member to upload photos. It also has a more obvious way to input captions. However these advantages may not outweigh the efficiency and naming control of the Slideshow gadget.

4.4. Moving content

There is no easy way to recreate the content of your current website on your WA site.

Every page needs to be created in WA and added to the menu structure
All text needs to be pasted into those new pages
All text formatting needs to be reviewed and potentially corrected
Every picture or photo residing on the current website needs to be moved to the WA Files repository
Every link to said pictures and photos needs to be re-linked to the new repository

On the positive side, this is an excellent opportunity to do housecleaning and streamlining of your web content!

4.5. Access levels

You should design the website for 2 audiences: the general public and members, only. For example, having an online membership directory is awesome, but for privacy reasons it must not be exposed to the Internet at large. Your newsletter should probably be public (it can be considered a marketing tool for future members) while meeting minutes should probably be for members only.

These settings are done for each webpage as per https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en/articles/189. The respective navigation bar adds a nice lock symbol to help you identify restricted pages.

5. Membership

5.1. Defining Membership Levels

Before importing your membership data, you need to create various types of membership, which WA calls Levels. Clubs might have 5 Levels:

Membership for individuals
Membership for couples
Lifetime membership
Wait-list for Membership for individuals
Wait-list for Membership for couples

Detailed instructions on how to set up membership levels are provided at https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en/articles/132.

For the annual renewals, you’ll need to review and probably customize the templates for the emails sent out at various stages. This needs to be done for every membership level. Note that an open renewal policy will add a respective button to your member profiles. If you do not want this to show throughout the year, then set the Renewal period to Never.

5.1.1. Using bundles for couples

WA uses the concept of membership bundles to manage multiple people under one account. For a couple, the bundle would consist of 1 Bundle Administrator and 1 Bundle Member. It is the former who will receive important email, such as the notices for membership renewal. Hopefully you know who is the go-to person in a couple to make him or her the Bundle Administrator. Detailed instructions on how to import couples using this bundle concept are provided at https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en/articles/510.

5.1.2. Couples sharing one email address

While it is not mandatory that each member in WA has their own email address, much headache can be avoided if you insist on it! In our club we had to manually correct when she signed up for our ROMEO activity (Retired Old Men Dining Out) while he apparently signed up for Stitch & Bitch! It’s also quite cumbersome, although not impossible, to have both register for an event. In case that shared email addresses will persist, you may take a look at these guidelines on how to best cope with this.

5.2. Importing your data

Importing membership data into WA is easy, see https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en/articles/19. What is not easy is to have the import file so well prepared that no manual corrections are necessary. To help with this process, it is recommended that you manually add a small number of contacts (Admin -> Contacts -> List-> Add contact) and then export these to a file. After opening the exported file in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, you can see how the data is organized. You can then add your own data accordingly and use the Import feature to load it into WA.

If you need to make bulk changes later on, make sure to have WA’s User ID in your file. This is a unique number for every person. Doing so will update existing fields rather than create new records. Since it can be a bit nerve wracking to make bulk updates (there is no undo), you may want to consider using another trial site first, particularly after your site went live.

5.3. Usernames and passwords

Many of WA’s benefits to your club will only become reality if your members log on. The member’s account name is whatever you import as their email address. When a member enrolls using WA’s onboarding flow, then they would receive an email with a randomly generated password. However, if you import the membership data into WA then no such email with password is generated.

The need for passwords is surprisingly low! When the system sends out event invitations or asks for membership renewal payment, it does so with a special link that automatically logs the member into the system, provided that this link is clicked within 7 days. This doesn't work for administrators who still have to log on using username/password but we do expect our admins to know how to log on.

There are different methods of getting a password to your member.

You can direct members to follow the password reset process as per https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en/articles/22#resetting. They would need to use their email address on file.
You can import passwords into the Password field and share those outside of the WA system with each member, e.g. by using MailChimp.
Similar to above, you can create a custom field and import passwords into both the Password field as well as the custom field. Using WA’s bulk email feature, you can use the custom field’s macro to include the password in the message. Once delivered, delete the custom field to protect your member accounts.
You can go to each member’s profile and click on the button to Email new password. This is not really a solution for a large number of password resets.
In the Log in form gadget, you can toggle on Option to log in via social networks. This option allows members who are already logged in to Google or Facebook to get authenticated without a password that is specific for WildApricot.

6. Payment System

6.1. Setting up an account with AffiniPay

To enable your WA site to take payments from Visa and MasterCard, you need to establish an account with their broker, AffiniPay, using instructions at https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en/articles/1642.

7. Email

7.1. Outbound templates

To send email from your club with a consistent look and feel, create at least one template as per instructions at https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en/articles/56.

7.2. Inbound mailboxes, if required

WA does not provide email accounts. If you currently have a club email address using the same domain as your website, then this will no longer work unless you involve a third party, i.e. an email hosting provider.

An example scenario is where your current website is hosted at www.my_club.com and you have a club email address of something@my_club.com.

If you need to maintain such an email address, then you can use services like Zoho.That particular service provider offers a free package for up to 5 email addresses. Here again you need to have access to the domain account, where you’d point the respective MX records to the email provider of choice. The provider should have instructions on how to do that.

Note that WA outbound email does not need an email address with the website’s domain name. You have control over the Reply-To address that is injected automatically into every outgoing email. That Reply-To address can be any valid email address, e.g. my_club@gmail.com. Potentially causing confusion is the fact that WA sends outgoing email claiming to be coming from your web domain. To make it clear that this is a non-functional address it is recommended to use no-reply as the email account. Here is an example of the settings that can be found under Global Settings -> Organization:

8. Administration & Support

8.1. Web domain and SSL Certificate

In addition to the abovementioned migration of your domain from old to new website, you will want to secure traffic to your WA website by enabling the SSL protocol (website link starting with https://…). To get this working, your WA website will need to have a security certificate issued by a recognized certificate authority (CA). Luckily, WA makes this easy by integrating the setup of a custom domain with the auto-renewal of your SSL certificate using the Let’s Encrypt CA, as per https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en/articles/555.

8.2. Tracking website traffic

If you want to learn how your website visitors use your WA website, you could use the free Google Analytics tool. The setup is described at https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en/articles/221.

9. Support

9.1. Administrators

WildApricot provides exemplary online documentation at https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en
Administrators can take advantage of the Live Chat feature to get answers from their support organization. Live Chat is available on weekdays from 10 AM to 5 PM EST.
Tickets can be submitted at https://support.wildapricot.com/hc/en-us/requests/new#technical_support
Feature requests and discussion of workarounds are available at https://forums.wildapricot.com/forums/308932-wishlist

9.2. Members

Take a look at what help pages various clubs have put together for their members:

10. Communication

10.1. Rollout Plan

Don’t forget to make and communicate a project plan. In broad terms, you would probably need to plan around the following phases:

Trial period
Management approval
Content migration
Membership setup
Admin/support training
Switch-over
Member training