About Legwork
Community advocacy organizations run on their members.
A growing base of people you can reach and count on is what lets a neighborhood bike coalition, a transit riders union, or a statewide housing campaign actually advance its vision. It's the engine.
Why Legwork exists
Membership is the most natural way to build that base. But the software for running one is split badly. At one end, suites priced and configured for organizations with dedicated development staff. At the other, nothing, so the program gets patched together out of an email tool, a payment link, and a spreadsheet. Groups run by volunteers can't afford the first option. Large ones pay for it and still end up doing membership on the side.
Creators have platforms built around them. The organizations that hold places together deserve the same.
Tech companies have an entire industry of tools built around recurring revenue. Legwork exists to build that for everyone else: the all-volunteer chapter, the statewide advocacy organization, the national organization with a membership department, and everything in between.
What Legwork is
Legwork helps community organizations thrive by strengthening their connections with the people who support them. It starts with membership, at any size, and handles the parts of running a membership program that take the most time: sign-ups, renewals, benefits, staying in touch with your members, and knowing who's actually in, whether that work lands on one volunteer's evenings or on a membership team. If it takes more than an afternoon to set up, or costs anything before your first member joins, we've built it wrong.
Two things make it different from what you've probably looked at.
It's built for membership, not donations.
Most membership software treats a member as a donor with a recurring gift. We think membership is a relationship: someone joins, stays informed, and decides over time how much to give. So on Legwork, members who pay nothing are still real members, with real benefits and real inclusion, and the financial ask comes when your organization is ready to make it.
It's a network, not a silo.
A member gets one account across every organization they belong to. Joining a second organization is a click instead of a new signup.
Both hold whether your program has 40 members or 40,000.
Who's building it
Legwork is being built by someone who has run a community organization and built software.
Jack Ketcham
Jack is a software engineer. For the past several years he has been head of engineering at a venture-backed startup, building a consumer platform with recurring payments from the ground up.
He was also board president of Tempe Bicycle Action Group, an all-volunteer bike advocacy nonprofit, after years of bike and safe-streets advocacy in the Phoenix area, work he continues in San Jose today. He knows the constraints these organizations run under, and what it takes to build software people will trust with their money.
How we operate
These aren't aspirations. They're how Legwork works, and we'd rather you hold us to them than take our word for it.
A plan that costs $0
Community has no monthly price and no trial that expires. An organization with no budget can run a professional membership program on Legwork. Plans with more seats and a lower platform fee are there when your team needs them.
We make money when you do
Legwork takes a platform fee on each membership payment, which members can choose to cover at checkout. Some organizations also choose a paid Plan for more seats and a lower fee. Either way, we do well when your membership program does.
Your members are yours
We never sell data and we never spam your members. Their information is used to run your membership program and nothing else.
No lock-in
Your members and your payments stay yours. If Legwork stops being the right tool, you don't have to ask permission to go.
Built to still be here
We're building Legwork to be a small, durable company that's still running your membership program in ten years. That shapes what we build, what we don't, and how fast we grow.
Where we are right now
Legwork is pre-release. We're working with our first design partner organizations, advocacy groups who are shaping what Legwork becomes before it's available to everyone.
Become a design partner
If your membership program is stuck, we'd like to talk.
Local chapter, statewide group, or national organization: if your program lives in a spreadsheet, sits inside a CRM nobody likes, or has never gotten off the ground, you're who we want to hear from.
What you get
- The product shaped around how your organization actually works
- A direct line to the person building it. Problems get fixed, not ticketed.
- Help launching your program, or moving your existing members over
- A say in what gets built next
What we need from you
- Run your real membership program on Legwork, not a test
- About an hour every couple of weeks to talk through what’s working and what isn’t
- Blunt feedback. Polite doesn’t help us.