StarChapter Reviews

StarChapter offers a comprehensive solution for chapter management, making it a go-to for association leaders. The membership management features are robust, providing seamless tracking of member data, event registrations, and communication.

Customization options for the website design could be more extensive. While the provided templates are functional, more flexibility in design elements would be appreciated.

It allows us to post our events and classes; it pulls data from our HQ; Templates are manageable

Setting up templates are not always intuitive; Should offer credit card swipes like hotels so purchases are held until a date we designate. (e.g. offer a class on Jan. 1st. all registrations before Jan. 1st are verified credit, but not charged till Jan. 1st)

For an affordable price, your association can host their website and manage it easily. It has all of the features needed where you don't have to have 1000 platforms and systems to manage and keep track of logins for.

The biggest complaint I hear is that the meeting registration has one to two too many pages to click through vs. being a one page sign up. That would be a great feature to enhance.

First, StarChapter has a solid value proposition for a small organization -- competitive with Wild Apricot and similar "value" options. However, biggest selling point is its customer support. Unlike Wild Apricot, StarChapter doesn't outsource set up and has an in-house design team that walks you through the process. (start up cost 1/3rd of what I was quoted to set up a Wild Apricot site!). They were very accommodating and worked hard to create a web layout that replicated our branding image, and were able to integrate some external features. The final product exceeded expectations at launch, and was handled seamlessly.

The steep, steep learning curve and the absence of an on-call service line. Although the set up was excellent, I was not ready to manage the system on my own when we launched. As a result, I really struggled to complete basic tasks, and made lots of errors that resulted in member frustration or confusion. I was able to send in support tickets and get responses - usually within 24 hours, but the damage was often done by the time I got an answer. I think a comprehensive user manual - whether on-line or downloadable, would be really helpful. The knowledge base is very segmented and it's not easy to get step by step instructions when you need them.

It's nice to have everything in one place and have a nice looking website.

It is very confusing and not intuitive. There is no way to send a link that you get from a separate company. I just want to forward emails from vendors and I cannot do that easily.

StarChapter makes it very easy to track registration and payments for our monthly meetings. Our previous process was for attendees to email one specific person, and all payments were handled on-site at the meeting. We were able to reduce the time commitment for our Registration chair significantly by switching to StarChapter, and we've been able to open up pre-payment for meetings through online credit card payments. This helps to ensure more turnout, since people are more likely to show up when they've already paid.

It is also much easier to enable multiple people to work on the site, and those people don't need a background in web development to do important tasks that keep the Chapter running, like posting new meetings and newsletters, and keeping our calendar updated.

My least favorite part of the platform is the text editor, which isn't terribly surprising. If you want to include more than simple text for an event or mailing, you are better off creating the content outside StarChapter and importing an image or attaching a PDF with your content. I think this is a pretty typical complaint with text editors, but it would streamline our processes if we could do everything in one place.

Event management is a game changer for our chapter. It is clear StarChapter put a lot of thought into managing events from registration, order processing, reporting and payment processing.

With the success of using Star Chapter for our events we are finding areas where different events have a few customization needs such as, different distribution list for invoices and receipts, refund policy, member/non-member registration, and registration wizard instructions.

It's a total package for our membership organization. It allows one program that can be easily transferred to the new board each year. No need to have separate files.

Some of the areas for managing the website are not easy to find, but once you have done it a few times, it starts to get easier. It would be nice to see what the regular member sees when adding items.It's hard to get everyone on the board together to train. Individual training is fine, but it is more beneficial together.It would be nice to have a calendar that members could pull up by month and see the upcoming events. And allow us to add events to the calendar that aren't specific to our chapter but interest our members.