Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center

So for a decade or more, we’ve been hosting avalanche education courses here in southwest Montana. Since 2012 we have used Eventgroove for managing our education program. We needed a platform to help us: advertise courses, allow people to register for courses and take payments,  and then use it as a means of doing check-in at courses. 

It took us from zero, i.e. no option to communicate with the community to having an ability and seamless effort to reach out. 

We offer free courses or very low-cost courses. We have mostly volunteer organizers and educators at the program and so we didn’t want a ton of training involved and we wanted something that was pretty seamless, uploading photos, managing user lists, taking payments, etc. That was really a key component of it.

We had initially started with only offering one class a year through ASMSU in Bozeman. We’ve now expanded to about a dozen different courses ranging from ten people to up to 300 is our largest. Implementation on a small-scale felt the same as at a large-scale. 

So we do a lot of courses year-over-year-over year, month-over-month-over-month, so we can take a course that we taught in January and copy/paste to do the same thing in February. That’s pretty handy especially when we’ve got volunteer organizers who are doing this, it just takes one step out of the equation. 

The ease-of-use has been pretty critical so that when we implement a new course or a new class or new educator, we don’t have to manage much training. Eventgroove is a pretty plug-and-play kind of program. 

It’s never failed so knowing that it’s reliable year-over-year and especially for us as we grow from a really small grassroots local organization to managing thousands and thousands of students across a huge radius in Montana, the fact that it’s been so reliable year-over-year has been pretty key. 

We started doing a lot of fundraising so as we kind of develop the future we’re looking into some opportunities on how we can expand. Eventgroove is really integral to the way that we manage the community here with regard to our avalanche education program.