Today a person can buy a ticket to your event without ever becoming a member, and the board finds out afterwards. This proposal closes that path, ends the double entry, brings ticketing onto infrastructure the society owns, and puts a working system in your hands before registration opens.
All of it came from the call rather than from us. If we have misread any of it, say so and we will correct it before anything is signed.
Membership, CME and tickets are three separate purchases on two separate systems, so a person can buy event tickets without ever becoming a member. The only thing protecting a members-only event today is an unlisted Eventbrite link, and once that link is forwarded to one non-member it is public. The board finds out afterwards and has to chase a refund by hand.
Every attendee exists once in MemberPress and again in Eventbrite, with no shared record. Reconciling the two lists is done by the executive director personally, every convention cycle.
Images are served at full size with no compression, so pages crawl. Updating content through the page builder is slow enough that it discourages keeping the site current — the 2026 convention is missing from the conventions list even though its page exists.
The observership program, grants and orientation sessions run all year but exist only as names. There is no page to send an applicant to and no record of who applied or attended.
Written plainly on purpose. This list becomes the scope in the service agreement, and the scope is what decides, later, whether something is ours to fix or new work to quote.
Development finishing is the halfway mark, not the finish line. The weeks after it are what make the difference between a system that works and a system that works on the day 300 people use it at once.
Not a tier, not a starting point, and not priced per feature. Everything in section two is covered by the figure below, fixed on signing.
One time. Billed in three stages against delivery, with the system live before December 1, 2026.
Anything outside the signed scope — a new program, a new revenue stream, a change the board decides on later — is $145 an hour, estimated in writing and approved before any hour is worked. There is no monthly retainer to sign.
Defects in the signed scope are ours to fix at no charge for 12 months after go-live, and hosting, monitoring and backups are covered through that first year.
“When you release this and bugs come up, are those part of maintenance, or are they still part of the main project?”
Secretary, on the call
The scope is written in the service agreement in plain language before anything is signed. If a disagreement arises about which side of the line something falls on, the written scope decides it — not our memory of a call, and not yours.
Every session on the site is recorded and replayable. When someone abandons a ticket purchase halfway, we see the exact step that lost them and fix it — rather than guessing why sales were soft.
The slow pages are not a mystery. Full-size photographs are being served to phones. Every upload is compressed and resized automatically, so nobody on the board has to think about it again.
The domain, the Stripe account, the member data, the code. If you ever part ways with us, you leave with a working system and nothing to renegotiate.
Anything with this many moving parts will surface small issues in its first months. They are ours to fix at no charge, for the life of the agreement. What we will not do is discover them on December 1 — that is what November’s testing cycles are for.
If you do something, do it with all your might.
The standard we were raised on, and the one we build to.There is — with room to spare — if we start this month. Every week after that comes out of November’s testing, and November’s testing is the part we will not cut.
The board picks an option, or tells us what to change about one. A short call is enough.
We send the service agreement with the scope written out in the same plain language as this page.
Signature and deposit, access handed over, and the build starts that week.