RATS has used the Wild Apricot membership management platform since around 2018.  Wild Apricot provides automated billing, roster management, event registration and ticketing, web hosting, member email blasts, and more.  It's a great system but it sure is expensive.  When we started using the service we had about twice the number of members and Wild Apricot was less than half as pricey as it is today.

In August, the club's annual charge for the service will increase from $810 to almost $860.  That works out to $8.41 per year, per dues-paying member, with 25% of dues income now going to Wild Apricot.

For several years, the Board of Directors has been shopping around for a replacement service that can do most of the same stuff at a better price.  So far, we keep coming up empty-handed.  Wild Apricot has saved us many hours of administrative work over the years compared to the paper-and-pencil methods it replaced.  But it's getting harder and harder to justify the ever-increasing price tag, and it's becoming clearer that we're going to need to roll out our own solutions.

It's going to be a lot of work to migrate away from Wild Apricot.  This week's change to our web hosting is us ripping off the bandage and getting the process started.

There are two main pieces that need to be addressed:  our web content, and our membership management.  With the web piece mostly completed, the club can turn its attention over the next few months to developing new processes and systems for managing our member roster and electronically collecting annual dues.

Wild Apricot is still with us on the back end for now, handling new member applications, existing member renewals and profile updates, event registrations, email blasts, as well as a few web features like this News feed and our photo galleries that we haven't yet set up a replacement for.  And we may end up extending our Wild Apricot service on a month-to-month basis a bit past August, but we definitely want out.

Our popular DMR Codeplug Project was the first to move into new digs, now at https://codeplugs.rats.net/.  The Frostfest website was also updated along with RATS.net.  Internal websites were also launched to better support the Board of Directors and our various committees and workgroups, with https://intranet.rats.net/ as common web space for our Google Workspace users.

Please bear with us over the next few days while any missing links or quirky content issues are addressed.  If you have feedback about the new website, or suggestions for our membership management needs, contact info@rats.net.