Leaving Wild Apricot: an honest guide for HOA boards

Our HOA used Wild Apricot for years, and this post is not a hit piece. It is a capable membership platform for the thing it was built for: clubs, associations, and nonprofits that run events, collect member dues through its system, and manage sign-ups.

An HOA is a different animal. Membership is not optional, nobody registers for anything, and the work that matters is maintenance, money, and communication. We were paying for an events engine we never used and getting no help with the work orders that filled my weekends.

Before you cancel: export everything

Do this the same day you decide, because access ends faster than you expect:

• The member list. Admin, then Contacts, then Export. Take every field; storage is free and regret is not. This file is your directory's future.
• Financial history, if you used their payments at all.
• Any documents stored in their file area.
• Email templates you want to reference, even as screenshots.

Speaking from experience: the export link in the confirmation email expires, so download the file immediately and put it somewhere the whole board can find. Ours sat quietly in a Downloads folder for five months before we needed it.

What you will miss, and what you will not

You will miss having a directory at all, which is why the export matters. You will not miss paying club prices for club features: event registration, member self-service portals built around renewals, and dues invoicing you probably ran through the bank anyway.

What no membership platform ever gave you: work orders, vendor coordination, board spending approvals, or a budget that tracks itself. Those jobs were always yours, done by hand.

What to look for in the replacement

If your HOA is under 150 homes and self-managed or lightly managed, look for four things: a directory that imports your Wild Apricot CSV cleanly and matches people by email on re-import; community email with unsubscribe handling built in, because deliverability rules got strict; maintenance tracking in the same system, so the directory powers it; and pricing that is one flat number instead of per-member tiers that punish you for being a whole neighborhood.

neighborPOP imports the Wild Apricot member export directly (it is the exact file our importer was built against, quirks included). Sixty days free, no card, and your directory is live the first afternoon. Fair warning that we are the vendor in this story; the export advice stands even if you go elsewhere.