Wicket

We heard about Wicket nearly two years ago and decided to investigate. In late 2019, we were about to go down the "Salesforce + add-on" road, but as a small association with a very small staff, we determined it was too much for us to swallow. But Wicket has been a good fit for us.We converted from YourMembership to Wicket last month.

What we like about Wicket

• Their pitch is to be a member data platform that integrates with your preferred systems, and we were attracted to that model.
• The website interface is clean and fast. Searching and opening records is incredibly quick.
• Tracking employment relationships and other roles with start/end dates is vital to our org, and Wicket handles this very well.
• Our old AMS did not support organization-based membership very well, but Wicket does.
• We love seeing all of the member engagement activities coming in as touchpoints into Wicket, and we can easily add more via file import or as a manual action.
• Annual cost is reasonable
• The people at Wicket are great

What we don't like but hope will improve over time

• Currently, only the Wicket development staff can create custom fields for you. There can be a delay of many days before they have a chance to act on those requests.
• You can't merge duplicate customer records yet, but you can transfer touchpoints which is helpful and is an okay workaround for now.
• Wicket supports several 3rd party reporting tools and data visualization systems. We're currently new to Tableau, and most of the data that feeds into that tool is usually from the previous night (not real time), so that's a minor annoyance.

 

 

 

Our organization is small (<25 employees), and our membership, we are proud to say, is a robust 15000+.

As a voluntary association membership, we operate under the unofficial association motto of 'Do more, with less!'.

We have a diverse membership structure which spans across the country and is structured with several components, all of which need to access the membership data in some form or another.

Our old CRM/AMS was clunky, no ability to integrate, and up-time was substantially hindered (especially around renewal period which occurs once per calendar year). When emailing our members, it was a requirement to build them in HTML (requiring an HTML trained staff out of a team of <25, not ideal). With many components requiring access, licensing costs made up a substantial portion of our monthly expenses.

We required a change, and so, undertook an introspective look at what would our ideal CRM/AMS look like. No fibbing here, we constructed a diagram of a 'core' which would house our members integral data, and this 'core' would then speak to best-in-business applications. Our search began, and led us to some of the biggest names in the business, that was accompanied by the biggest fees in the business, not an option.

We then happened upon Wicket, the diagram we had in our boardroom, looked eerily similar to the Wicket structure. I won't bore you with all the back and forth, but Wicket was our answer.

We were supported througout the entire process at an engagement level only seen with an excited, and bright, team. The Wicket team took all of our needs and though every need could not be covered immediately, our very 'core' needs were met, and then some. The platform performs at an exceptional level, and continuous improvements only better the experience (heard directly from our members, which is the ultimate satisfaction). With no limits (re: licenses) on accessing the data, we are able to configure access for our components so they see the information they need, and nothing more. The interface is extremely friendly, and I even had new staff comment that they had never engaged with an AMS that was this easy to use (another bonus). Onboarding a new member into the environment takes minutes, and that involves many options to navigate, and is literally as quick as you are able to process the order. 

When looking at the best-in-business applications we wanted to integrate with our number one priority, email. The vast majority of our membership (confirmed by a recent survey, 95%) want notifications, and communication in email format. We needed Wicket to speak with Mailchimp (what we believe to be best-in-business) seamlessly. This is what we achieved with Wicket, not only providing our national office access, but all of our components as well. The integration has provided us with an enormous jump in efficiency, and ability to react quickly for communications when required. This may not be new to many of you reading this, but to see an email address change done within the Wicket platform, and immdiately access Mailchimp and see the change within seconds, was a great leap forward for our organization. The next step was how well it integrated with our website, and again with our components (on differing platforms). To again see a member onboarded, and immediately be provided members-only access as well as single sign on abilities with our components sites,  provided an unparalleled experience for our members.

We encourage you to reach out to Wicket if you are looking for a postive change to your organization. The team is exceptional to work with, the AMS platform is user-friendly, the ability to use other best-in-service applications, has resulted in improved processes, better staff engagement, and ultimately, more satisfied members.

Best of luck in your search.