Introduction
The Arabian Association for Early Childhood Education (AAECE) is a one-of-a-kind, non-profit association connecting parents, professionals and policy makers of early childhood education in the United Arab Emirates and the Middle East.
When AAECE first contacted us in the summer of 2010 to help them with a membership and marketing solution for their very young organization, we were thrilled to jump on the opportunity.
“Currently, in the Middle East, everyone is concerned with early childhood work in their own little island, with very little sharing of information and collaboration. We were looking for an online solution that would help us create the link and bring parents, professionals and policy makers together under one umbrella. But because our business idea is all very new, we didn’t know exactly how we would grow, or what features we would need online,” - Mrs. Samia Kazi, AAECE Founder and Managing Director of Arabian Child Daycare.
Background
Mrs. Kazi and her team knew about Wild Apricot, a membership management and event registration software, and wanted to use it for their association. They needed someone with the technical skills and experience to help them setup and customize Wild Apricot to provide the online solution they needed.
“When Mrs. Kazi first contacted us back in June of 2010, she wanted to create AAECE as the first Emirati organization dedicated to improving early childhood education for all children in the UAE, through consultation, services, and training,” said Lamees Abourahma, Webbright Founder and President. “I was very impressed with Samia’s vision and very eager to help her achieve this mission through a Wild Apricot website.”
The Solution
We designed a custom website theme that incorporated AAECE unique characteristics, and setup Wild Apricot to provide the functionality they needed. “Webbright was very understanding of our situation, and flexible, and so was the wild apricot application,” said Mrs. Kazi.
We used the Wild Apricot membership management functionality to automate AAECE membership application and renewal processes and enable online payment for members. This usually requires setting up membership levels and membership fields specific for the organization. AAECE wanted their member directory to be private and we were able to achieve this with Wild Apricot’s restricted access feature.
Another process that we automated for AAECE was their Training Network. Mrs. Kazi wanted to share a listing of childhood education providers in the Middle East on her website. Instead of manually collecting and presenting this data on the website, we used Wild Apricot membership management system to capture providers’ information and present them using Wild Apricot member directory.
AAECE wanted a member-only section on the website that included a member forum, job postings, and a library of childhood education resources. We were able to create all these dynamic features for the website using Wild Apricot functions.
We continue to work with AAECE on improving their website and implementing more features. “We are currently expanding the website based on feedback from our members,” said Mrs. Kazi. Some new features AAECE likes to add to their website include “an online store where [we] could sell child related journals, publications, etc., and the ability for members to store their payment method so they can come back anytime, and pay for other events or purchases with great ease”.
When asked about her favorite features of the Wild Apricot website, Mrs. Kazi said she likes “the easy online registration for the events, quick page editing features, and simple member configurations.” Our membership solution provided many benefits for AAECE. However, the main issue AAECE has with their website was not being able to accept AED currency with online payments.
Lamees: “Wild Apricot enables online payment by integrating with PayPal and other credit processing services. Unfortunately, PayPal [and all other processing services] does not currently support the AED currency. Our recommendation to AAECE was to accept USD with online payments and offer members the option of paying with AED with manual payments. We hope PayPal will add AED to their list of accepted currencies so AAECE can overcome this limitation.”
We also asked Mrs. Kazi about her experience working with the Webbright team and any thoughts she had regarding her experience with us. She said, “Excellent! They are a trustworthy team and that is hard to find. They are experts at what they do and are dedicated to their work and put in the extra mile to get the job done right. I look forward to more new features from Wild Apricot, and I will definitely continue to work with my Webbright team.”
Conclusion
Webbright is very honored and delighted to be working with Mrs. Kazi and her AAECE team to deliver its mission of providing an early childhood community in the Middle East.
Currently, our team is working on creating an Arabic version of the AAECE’s website using Wild Apricot, and continue helping with additional website updates and improvements.