Why I built software for employee resource groups
I did not come to this field through human resources. I came to it through operations software, and through a long stretch of building reporting tools for teams whose work was real but whose records were not. The pattern was always the same: someone competent was doing important work in the margins of her calendar, and the systems around her captured none of it. When budget season came, the work that had no record was the work that got cut.
The first women's employee resource group I worked with had four hundred members on paper, a chapter lead who was a senior supply chain analyst, and a shared drive with nineteen versions of an attendance spreadsheet. She could tell me, without notes, which sessions had landed and which had emptied out. What she could not do was prove it to a finance partner in the ten minutes she was given. That gap is the whole product. ERGCircle exists so the person doing the work is not the only evidence that the work happened.
I spent the first year of this project doing very little coding. I sat in chapter planning calls, read charters, watched a QR check in fail at a door because the venue had no signal, and listened to program managers explain why they refused to push participation data anywhere near a performance system. Those conversations wrote the constraints: attendance is never visible to a member's manager, pulse comments are suppressed below a group size of eight, demographic fields are optional, and nothing leaves the platform unless a person exports it on purpose.
What I learned about this trade
Three things changed how I build. First, chapter leads are volunteers with day jobs, so every task in the product has to survive being picked up at nine at night after a full day of other work. Second, the budget conversation is usually where a program is won or lost, and a lead who can show ninety two percent of allocation spent with receipts attached is treated differently than one who returns money. Third, the annual impact report is not a vanity document. It is the artifact that decides whether next year gets funded, so it has to be assembled from real records, and each number has to be clickable back to the event or invoice that produced it.
I also learned to stop selling enthusiasm. The people running these programs have been pitched a great deal of software that promised belonging and delivered a dashboard. What they want is a defensible headcount, a budget that reconciles with finance, and a survey short enough that people answer it.
Experience and expertise
- Fourteen years building operational and reporting software for teams that run programs alongside their main role.
- Four years working specifically with US employee resource group programs, from single chapters to portfolios of more than thirty.
- Hands on work with roster imports from Workday, BambooHR and SFTP feeds, and with SAML single sign on across Okta and Entra ID.
- Direct experience preparing security reviews and data processing terms for employers in financial services, health care and industrial manufacturing.
- Founder and publication director of MLJ, SASU, the company that publishes ERGCircle.
How this product is built and maintained
Every feature starts as a recorded problem from a named chapter, not as a competitor comparison. I write the specification, build it, and test it against a real program's data before it ships. Release notes go out monthly and name what changed, what broke and what was removed. Nothing on this site is written by a content farm: the copy, the FAQ answers and the numbers in the outcomes section are mine, and when a figure changes I update the page rather than leave a friendly old number in place.
Editorially, I hold to three rules. Claims carry their source, so a percentage on this site can be traced to a defined cohort and a measurement window. Customer quotes are used with written permission and are never edited beyond punctuation. Where the product does not do something, the site says so instead of implying it does. Support mail is answered within one business day by me, and security questions get the packet rather than a promise to follow up.
What I am accountable for
Uptime, data handling, the accuracy of the reports the product generates, and the honesty of what is written here. If ERGCircle produces a number a chapter lead takes into a board meeting, that number has to be right, and if it is ever wrong I want to hear about it the same day.
Contact the author
Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com with a question about the product, a request for the security packet, or a correction to anything published on this site. If you would rather see the platform running against your own chapter structure, use the demo request form and mention your fiscal calendar. Program office questions about multi chapter rollups and data retention are welcome and usually answered the same day.
