In this day and age, almost every association needs a website. Prospective members check out the association by visiting the website. Members use the website as their source of information about the association. Association management communicates to the members, and to the public, through the website. For all but the smallest associations, there’s no getting away from the need for a website.
Getting a website doesn’t need to be an inordinately expensive proposition, but someone needs to put it together, someone needs to maintain the content, and someone needs to maintain the technology. The hosting service on which the website resides can be inexpensive, with multiple choices costing less than $100 per year. It’s the people and the work they need to do that can get expensive.
There’s no limit on the amount that an association could spend. How much it needs to spend depends on the available volunteers and the online presence that the association wants to establish. Online presence can be roughly grouped into three categories:
- Online Brochure - The association wants to publish a “brochure” and put it online. This would describe the association and what it has to offer, but provide no real interactive service to site visitors. The site would be updated on an occasional basis.
- Membership & Events - The association wants its events to be available online, and wants to allow visitors to register for events online. Further, the association wants membership application and renewal to be available online.
- Complex Interactions - This could cover a wide range of options, from an online store, to certification for members who meet appropriate conditions, to job boards, to ... There is no limit to what an association might offer online.
There are a number of solutions for the association that only needs an Online Brochure website. One approach is for the webmaster to assemble, edit, and maintain the site on her or his desktop computer. When a “good” version has emerged on the webmaster’s desktop, it can be simply uploaded to the service that’s hosting the site. It’s a modest cost, modest demand, approach and can effectively put an easy to edit brochure on the association’s website.
Critical to this approach is that very little interaction is offered to users. At the other end of the user interaction spectrum is the Complex Interaction level. At this level, the association would face a serious challenge to develop and then to maintain their website. In most cases, the association would need to retain a professional services firm to build and then to support their website. It’s not a task for amateurs, or for volunteers.
Many associations would elect to fall into the middle category, offering relatively simple online membership and online event registration. There are a number of Content Management Systems (CRM) that could be used to build such websites. My personal preference would be to use a combination of Durpal and CiviCRM. The great virtue of this approach is that it’s possible to start with a fairly simple site and then grow it to provide a wide and rich array of online services, all within the same framework.
The challenge is maintaining such a site. Drupal sites do get hacked (as do all popular CMS sites), installing security patches is a practical requirement, as is upgrading to the successive Drupal releases. Someone has to do this work, and the commitment is ongoing. Few volunteers will be able to provide that commitment. Most associations will need to retain a firm (or individual) to undertake this work. This ongoing human time commitment is what inevitably raises the cost of maintaining such a site.
Wild Apricot (
www.wildapricot.com) has an interesting alternative for the association that wants a relatively simple online Membership & Events website. Everything happens out in the “cloud”. Wild Apricot provides an online service where a website can be developed and maintained. From my perspective, their alternative has a number of appealing features. First, they provide automatic support for the technology. The process of installing patches, fixes, and upgrades is automatic and happens without user intervention.
That’s a significant advantage for many associations. They don’t have the resources to do this work on their own, and hiring a firm to assume this responsibility can be expensive. Wild Apricot can be a very cost-effective alternative. Further, the Wild Apricot solution doesn’t support the sometimes unrealistic expectations of associations. It may sound good for your association to have an online store, but putting in place an effective distribution network is beyond what most volunteer organizations can manage. Wild Apricot doesn’t support online stores, nor does it support a number of often over ambitious uses of web technology.
Wild Apricot isn’t perfect - there are problems that can arise with the solution. There’s the good problem of outgrowing the capabilities of what they offer. That’s the kind of problem that many associations would like to have. And then there’s the not so good problem of trying to force the Wild Apricot solution to provide services it was never intended to support. Without some care, the association can find itself fighting Wild Apricot. For example, Wild Apricot allows a site to sell a limited range of items, typically offered at renewal time. But Wild Apricot was never intended to provide all of the features required to support a full online store. Attempting to go there will cause the association nothing but trouble.
What should the interested association do? There’s the critically important up front question about whether the features supported by Wild Apricot will cover everything the association deems to be essential. The adventuresome association can take advantage of Wild Apricot’s limited free service, build an initial version of their site, and see whether there appears to be a good fit. Reasonably enough, Wild Apricot reserves some of its more interesting features for paying customers. It needn’t cost an arm and a leg - paying sites can be charged as little as $50 a month, with no minimum contract period. An early, paid trial often makes sense.
Next, it’s normally wise for volunteer builders to seek an experienced second opinion. It doesn’t require much technical knowledge or previous experience to populate a site (to put words and pictures on the site’s pages), but previous web experience helps in getting the architecture right. And it’s the architecture that could most benefit from an experienced second opinion. The right architecture will see the association living in harmony with Wild Apricot; with the wrong architecture the association faces a constant struggle to get Wild Apricot to do what they want.
Wild Apricot offers a practical and cost-effective alternative for many associations. If your association has needs that are covered by what they offer, you owe it to your association to consider the Wild Apricot alternative.