Wild Apricot membership management

[jmdh]

Hello,

 

I am on the committee of an amateur theatre group with around 150 members, and it has been suggested that we switch from the rather ad-hoc use of spreadsheets, cheque, bank transfers, paypal and mailing software to this suite:

 

http://www.wildapricot.com/membership-management

 

This looks like quite nice integrated solution for managing membership records, taking payments and communicating with members, but it's relatively expensive (in the sense that anything which costs money is for a small group like us) - USD40/months for up to 250 members (with some annoying limitations at that level, like not being able to deal with recurring membership - one of the prime benefits of such a systems, surely...)

 

I'm also a bit wary about putting personal data about all our members in a hosted database which is presumably outside the EU - although I suspect in practice it's no worse than those details being shared by email as they already are.

 

Has anyone had any experience with Wild Apricot, or any similar systems, that they're able to share? Something which is open-source and self-hosted would be attractive if it does the job, since we have the expertise to manage that.

 

It looks like there is a decent enough list at http://blog.capterra.com/top-7-free-open-source-membership-management-software-products/ which I will look through in some more detail, but I'd be particularly interested to hear theatre-related experiences.

 

Thanks!

Dominic.

[Shez]

Have you looked at Groupspaces? The free version might do enough for you; it's working well for an organisation I'm involved with running.

[paulears]

Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.

I'm not quite sure what this means, but seems a bit tricky to guarantee?

[bruce]

Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.

I'm not quite sure what this means, but seems a bit tricky to guarantee?

 

(not sure where you found that statement, but I’ll reply anyway...)

 

It’s all related to data protection legislation and the European Data Protection directive. long and complicated, but basically the privacy regulations in place within the EU are significantly more rigorous than in some other areas of the world. EU-based companies are not allowed to store or process personal data in juristrictions outwith the EU, unless the processor can guarantee that their data will be managed to the same standards that apply in the EU.

 

Specifically, the baseline for privacy within the US is less demanding than in the EU. When UK companies are signing up for cloud-based services, it’s not uncommon for there to be a clause requiring the data to be held only in european data centres.

 

To partially alleviate this, there is a scheme known as “Safe Harbor”, which allows US-based companies to certify that they conform to the enhanced European standards.

[Jivemaster]

It may have advantages but most web systems will be less secure than book systems. Assume it's hosted in China or America where all data will be held against you at some point.

[jmdh]

Thanks for the replies. We're going to look seriously at CiviCRM which has the advantages of being free/open source software, and working with our existing CMS (Wordpress). It looks very powerful, but we'll need to spend some time playing with it to be sure.