How Manjimup Family Centre Runs Over 600 Events A Year With Member Jungle

 

Manjimup Family Centre is a community organisation in Manjimup, Western Australia, that offers playgroups, parenting classes, and community events. For the past three years, they have relied on Member Jungle to help manage their operations. With an impressive average of over 600 events each year, they are our largest user of the Event Management System. 

Earlier in 2025, I had the opportunity to meet with Ruth Phillips, the manager of Manjimup Family Centre, to discuss her experiences with the system. You can read the full interview here: Manjimup Family Centre: Customer Story. 

Given the extensive number of events they host, I decided to write a follow-up article focusing on their experiences using Member Jungle to manage all of their events. 

How Is The Manjimup Family Centre & What Types Of Events Do They Host?

As I’ve already mentioned, Manjimup Family Centre runs an absolutely massive number of events, with them running 698 events in 2024 alone. 

Ruth Phillips Manjimup Family Centre’s Manager had this to say about the type of events they run and their aim.  

“So, we're obviously a family center. We're funded by the Department of Communities. Our [...] brief is to foster connection and participation by our community members; we have a primary focus on families,”

“We run lots of activities where families can be involved together, primarily with under-school-age children. So, we do lots of playgroups, we do programs like a cooking program for three-year-olds and then we do parenting courses as well,” 

“Programs like Circle of Security, Tuning into Kids, or Protective Behaviors, which are designed to upskill parents. Looking at the wider community, we run any programs that will help people connect. For example, we run the repair cafe, where people come and bring their broken stuff, and we have volunteers who fix it up for them. Then, we've got interest groups in things like leather work and Tai Chi. We have a Lego club for school age children,”.   

To demonstrate just how busy they are, I looked at their website while writing this, and today, they have four events alone. A children's playgroup, an adult social group, a family support group and a Tai Chi Class. 

With so many events each day, you can imagine how useful it is to have a system like Member Jungle that provides online registration, ticket sales, event pages, an event calendar, and online purchases. 

How Have Member Jungle’s New Recurring Events Helped The Manjimup Family Centre?

As Manjimup Family Centre run so many events and repeat events, they found that scheduling all of their events in the system took up a lot of time.

Here is Ruth, who talks a bit about what that process used to look like for them. 

“We have Monday playgroups that run for 40 weeks a year, and I would have to go in and clone each one individually, and then I'd have to do Tuesday playgroups, and then I'd have to do Wednesday playgroups, and then I'd have to do Little Chefs that goes every Wednesday. It was really, really time-consuming and really, really boring, to be honest,”.  

After dropping hours upon hours into scheduling and cloning hundreds of events, Ruth decided to put in a feature suggestion with Member Jungle for a way to set up recurring events in the system. 

If you’re not familiar, Member Jungle allows customers to suggest features that they would like to see our development team work on. These feature suggestions aren’t guaranteed to become a reality, but they are evaluated and many ideas end up becoming a part of the system down the line. 

So, the Member Jungle team decided to focus on improving our event management system, and part of that was creating and introducing recurring events. 

Ruth had this to say about recurring events when it came out. 

“So, when they brought that in, it was brilliant. I've been really loving using it because it saves so much time,” 

“It's fantastic. I've now programmed until the end of the year, and I can do it in one big hit. Then, if I just want to change one thing about one of those events, I can change it for the whole year instead of having to go back into every single event and change it,”

“If I want to swap in a different image, you can just do that. If it's for Wednesday Playgroup, I can do it for every Wednesday Playgroup for the rest of the year. It’s really good if I make mistakes, too. It's really easy to go back and fix it,” 

“I am absolutely loving it. I'm so grateful that they have done that because it's helped us no end, and saved my sanity,” Ruth explained. 

Lastly, Ruth had this to say about her experience with Member Jungle’s constant improvements via product releases and feature suggestions. 

“Another thing that I like about Member Jungle. I feel like it's not like someone's just written a software package and put it out and it doesn't develop. I feel like it's always developing, and I think that's really important,” Ruth said.

How To Find Out More About Member Jungle’s Releases & Event System

If you want more details about how Member Jungle is always improving the system, please read You've Asked We've Listened: All The New Event Features At Member Jungle

For more info on how our event system works, have a peep at How To Run An Event With Member Jungle - A Guide.