ERGCircle keeps every chapter event, dollar and member survey in one record, from the January kickoff to the December wrap. When the sponsor asks what the group returned this year, the answer is already written.
Nobody gave you a headcount, a system or a release from your day job. The work still has to hold up when finance reviews the spend and the executive sponsor asks what changed.
Registration lives in the calendar invite, the badge scan lives with facilities, and the paper sheet from the lunch and learn is in someone's tote bag. Three weeks later you report a number you cannot defend.
9 hours per quarter rebuilding listsThe catering invoice hits the cost center two months after the event and the speaker honorarium sits on a colleague's card. You learn you are over on programming when there is no quarter left to correct it.
$4,800 in late coded spendThe annual engagement survey lands in June and says nothing about your chapter specifically. By the time you read the free text comments, the members who wrote them have already stopped showing up.
31 percent attendance drop by fallEvery October the same scramble: screenshots, a borrowed deck template and a chart built from memory. The story is real, the evidence is thin, and the budget ask is weaker for it.
22 unpaid hours every fallERGCircle is built around the way a chapter actually operates: a calendar, a budget line, a membership roster and a promise to the sponsor. Set those up once and the rest is upkeep.
Import your roster from a CSV or from the HR directory, set the chapter's fiscal year, name the executive sponsor and paste in the charter goals. Everything reported later is measured against those goals, not against a generic template.
Each event gets a registration page, a capacity, a budget line and a QR check in that works on a phone at the door. Walk ins are added in two taps, and no shows stay visible so you can see the gap between interest and turnout.
Log the catering, the speaker fee, the venue and the swag as they are committed, with the cost center and the approver on the record. The remaining balance updates the moment a purchase order is entered, so the number in your head matches the number in finance.
A three question pulse goes out after every event and a longer survey runs twice a year. In November, the annual impact report assembles itself from attendance, budget, pulse scores and mentoring pairs, and you edit the narrative rather than hunt for the numbers.
Six working parts, each one earned from a real chapter problem. No module here exists because a competitor has one.
Registration, waitlist, QR check in and walk in capture produce one attendance record per person per event, deduplicated against the roster. Export a headcount with names, departments and first time attendees whenever HR or legal asks how the number was reached.
Set the annual allocation, split it by category and watch commitments, actuals and remaining balance move in real time. Each line carries the vendor, the approver, the event it belongs to and a receipt, so a finance review takes minutes instead of an afternoon.
A short pulse fires the morning after each event and rolls up into a chapter score by quarter, with free text kept separate and anonymous below a group size of eight. You see belonging, usefulness and intent to return before a quiet drop turns into an empty room.
One command builds a board ready report: attendance trend, unique participation rate, budget use against allocation, pulse movement and mentoring outcomes, each figure clickable back to its source records. Export to PDF and slides with your company template applied.
Run cohorts of four to six, match on level, function and stated goal, and track whether pairs actually met. Promotion and internal move data can be linked in by HR so the mentoring claim in your report rests on records rather than anecdote.
Program managers see every chapter side by side: participation rate, spend against allocation, pulse score and event cadence, with a flag when a chapter goes two months without programming. Chapter leads keep control of their own roster and notes.
Averages across 168 US employers using ERGCircle for at least two full quarters, measured against the twelve months before they moved off spreadsheets.
Unique participation replaces raw headcount. Because check in is tied to the roster, a chapter of 300 can prove how many distinct colleagues showed up rather than counting the same twelve people nine times.
Chapters used to return money they never knew they had. Live commitments and a quarterly burn view mean the fourth quarter is planned in August, and an unused balance becomes a second speaker instead of a clawback.
Attendance reconciliation, budget chasing and survey collation were the three heaviest tasks in the volunteer week. Automating the collection leaves the lead free to work on programming and sponsorship instead of administration.
The annual impact report used to take a month of evenings. With the year already recorded, the last steps are writing the narrative, choosing the photographs and getting the sponsor's sign off before the meeting.
Three leads describe what the change felt like in practice. Each one still holds a day job in engineering, finance or communications.
"Our sponsor asked in February how many distinct women had come to anything in the last year. I had a number in nine minutes, with departments attached. That question used to cost me a weekend and I still would not have trusted the answer."
"The budget view is what won finance over. Every catering order and honorarium sits against a cost center with an approver, so our quarterly review stopped being an argument. We closed the year at 94 percent of allocation and asked for more with a straight face."
"We run seven chapters and I was the bottleneck for all of them. Now each lead posts her own events and spend, and I read one rollup on Monday. The flag for a chapter with no programming in two months has already saved two of them."
Most of the work in an employee resource group happens in the quiet weeks. These are the jobs ERGCircle picks up while you are in your day job.
A short digest reaches the lead and the program office: last week's check ins, the pulse score, spend committed and any event without a room or a budget line. Nothing to log in for, and nothing to chase before you have had coffee.
Members register, join a waitlist, or move to the next session without an email thread. Capacity, dietary notes and accessibility requests reach the organizer in one list they can hand to catering and facilities.
Check ins reconcile against the roster, the pulse goes out the next morning, and the invoice you upload attaches to the event it belongs to. By Friday the event is complete in the record with nothing left in your inbox.
A chapter should never have to ration seats. Every plan carries unlimited members, unlimited events and the full annual impact report.
$99 per month
For a single women's network running its own calendar and budget.
$229 per month
For a program office running several chapters under one charter and one allocation.
$479 per month
For employers running the full ERG portfolio across regions and business units.
Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars, with no setup fee and no annual lock in. Cancel at any time from the admin settings and your data stays exportable for 60 days afterward.
Written for the person who will have to defend the purchase, the data handling and the time it takes to switch.
The price covers the whole chapter or program, not seats, so adding members never changes the invoice. One Chapter is $99 per month, Company Wide is $229 per month and covers up to twelve chapters, and Enterprise is $479 per month for an unlimited portfolio. Support, the pulse surveys and the annual impact report are included at every level. The only paid extra is a custom report template built to your brand guidelines, quoted once.
Most leads finish setup in one afternoon. You import the roster from a CSV or connect the HR directory, set the fiscal year and allocation, and publish the first event the same day. On Company Wide and Enterprise we run the roster import and the first event together on a call so nothing is stuck waiting on IT. Historic attendance and spend from the current year can be backfilled later without redoing anything.
Member records are held on SOC 2 aligned infrastructure in US regions, encrypted in transit and at rest. Chapter leads see their own roster and attendance, program managers see rollups, and pulse free text is anonymized and suppressed below a group size of eight so a small chapter cannot be identified by comment. Membership itself is never written back to an HR system unless your team asks for that export. You own the data and can delete a chapter and its records at any time.
Calendar invites sync with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and single sign on works with Okta, Entra ID and any SAML provider. Roster sync reads from Workday, BambooHR and SFTP feeds. Budget lines export to CSV in the format your finance team already imports, and Enterprise adds an API and a warehouse export for people analytics. There is no browser extension and nothing to install on member devices.
Cancel from the admin settings and billing stops at the end of the current month, with no exit fee and no phone call required. Your account stays readable and exportable for 60 days so you can pull attendance, budget and pulse history in CSV and take the impact report with you. After that window the records are deleted on request or on schedule. Program budgets shift, and a tool that holds your year hostage is not worth buying.
That concern is fair and we designed against it. Membership and attendance are visible to the chapter lead and the program office, never to a member's manager, and there is no feed pushing participation into performance systems. Demographic fields are optional, self reported and reportable only in aggregate. We give every chapter a plain language notice to share with members explaining what is recorded and why, which is usually the fastest way to settle the question at the first meeting.
Practical reporting for women's ERG leads and diversity program managers running budgets, events and impact inside US companies.
A charter turns a group of volunteers into a recognized company program. Here is what belongs in it, who signs it, and which clauses legal always sends back for a rewrite.
The three labels are not interchangeable. Each implies different funding, a different reporting line and different expectations from leadership. Here is how the models actually operate.
ERG budgets are built from a handful of recurring line items. Knowing how finance codes each one tells you which survive a spending freeze and which quietly disappear.
Tell us how your chapters are set up today and what your sponsor asks for. A demo runs 30 minutes and uses your own program shape, not a canned dataset.
One reply from one person, no drip sequence and no sales cadence. You can also email jimenezjulien42@gmail.com directly.
ERGCircle is written and maintained by Jimenez Julien, who works directly with the chapter leads and program offices using it. Read how the product is built and what he is accountable for.