EcoChapter - An All-in-One, Easy-to-use Web-based Application for Managing Any Organization's Membership, Donations, and Events

How it all began - Cofounders, Paul Rodriguez and Lance Shepard

The story of ecoChapter began when I was working as a volunteer for a local Audubon chapter. I had been tasked with developing a website that could handle things like online membership signups. An event calendar and blogging capability so we could communicate with our members.

At that time the chapter was using paper membership sign-up forms, taking only checks and cash in person, and using a google calendar to post event. The chapter was losing revenue by not having an automated billing system.

I created a new Wordpress site with an event calendar and ticketing system that made it easy for folks see and sign-up for our events, online. A payment system that connected our bank account made it convenient to pay for membership and donations.

Our next step

We realized that we were still having to enter our data into Excel spreadsheets manually, even though we had switched from using paper signup forms and google calendars.

Our next step was to purchase a subscription to a cloud-based customer relation management system (CRM). This system was great for creating donation campaigns and events, and some relevant reports, it wasn’t a great membership platform.

For one thing, getting basic information like how many active members do we have at any given time was difficult to extract. Event integrating events with our calendar was a difficult process. We had to come up with a better way.

In 2019 I was hired by a client do help develop his travel site where I met Lance Shepard. Lance and I quickly became friends and started working on other projects together.

Lance had been building data driven website since the 1990s. He understands data and how an all-volunteer non-profit like our Audubon chapter can use it to grow their organization.

So, we decided to look at some of the pain points and build a Membership platform that could handle most any small organization’s needs. A simple application that anyone can use without having to be overly tech savvy.

Using Pain to Solve Problems

One of the major pain points the Audubon chapter had was lack of integration. We had to create an event or donation campaign, generate a button code and paste that into a 3rd party calendar plugin on one of those drag and drop websites.

We solved this by making the event/donation campaign editor fully integrated with the website. When an event or donation campaign is created it automatically shows on the built-in calendar. Event planning is much easier.

Another problem was managing membership. We were using a platform that wasn’t designed to manage a member database.

EcoChapter is specifically built around membership. Once a person becomes a member, they can manage their own profile and you can manage your member data.

Our biggest problem was getting the data we needed. Data like how many active members did we have at any given time. Data like how many people came to specific events or how many people came to events over a period.

We designed EcoChapter to give you the reports you need to analyze and use the data you collect to grow and continue growing into the future.

Moving Forward

Making EcoChapter better is an ongoing process. We will always listen to you, our customers, take your feedback and strive to make EcoChapter the best Membership Management Software it can be.

~ Lance and Paul