Our Story: Built by Club Volunteers, For Club Volunteers

The Member Jungle story is one of real-world experience, born from the frustrations of club volunteers who wanted to spend less time on manual admin and more time with their community. The platform's mission is to give back time to those who run their organisations, empowering them with an all-in-one membership software solution. This focus on the needs of club administration ensures the software is a powerful tool for streamlining operations and fulfilling the core mission of any volunteer-run organisation.

Member Jungle wasn’t born in a boardroom, full of stuffy people in suits. It was born from the real-world frustration of running a club.

 

 

Our founders, Michael Barwell, Jeff Pond and Leigh Clover, were living and breathing club life long before they started the company. Michael was starting a car club that would one day grow to have over 2000 members, Jeff was on the committee of a Harley owners group, and Leigh was helping run a soccer club. They knew the late nights and administrative headaches all too well.

Michael and Jeff shared their thoughts about those early days. 

“The timing of Member Jungle and when we started coincided with when I was part of a group that founded a car club. So I really had a feel for what club administrators needed and what club members needed,” Michael said. 

We were really struggling to look after the couple hundred members that we had. As we were already in the tech industry, we thought there's got to be a better way to do this.” Jeff said. 

That feeling, the frustration of being buried in admin instead of focusing on the community, is the reason Member Jungle exists.

The Lightbulb Moment

At the time, our original company, Telligence, was building custom websites. One day, a client, an allied health group, asked us to build a system to help them manage their members.

“About fifteen years ago, we started to get a couple of organisations that were managing groups of people, managing members of their health profession organisations.

“So we built a rudimentary membership management system for them. It was clunky but they absolutely loved it because of the amount of time that they could save,” Michael recalled.

That feedback connected the dots between their personal passion and their professional skills. They were already feeling the pain in their own clubs, and now they had proof that they could build a solution that genuinely helped.

From an Idea to Our Main Mission

That early project gave them the validation they needed. In 2017, Member Jungle officially launched as a new part of the business, dedicated to solving the problems we knew so well.

Over the following years, Member Jungle slowly became the main focus for Telligence. More of our team's time was dedicated to improving the platform until eventually, it became the focus of the entire company. Today, Member Jungle is the name on the door, and for nearly a decade, we've been helping clubs and associations get back to what matters most.

A Mission That Drives Our Whole Team

When I was talking to the Member Jungle team members about this, there was one common thread, they all love how much they are able to help people out with the software. To wrap this up, I'd like to include a few quotes from the team about what working at Member Jungle means to them.

 

 

“To see the excitement as I'm handing over a system to these club administrators who often had no idea that there was something out there to make their lives easier, and how much time and effort it's going to save them. I don't think you can explain the fulfilment that it gives in my job,” Renee Krischer, Project and Account Manager. 

"Our goal is to solve the biggest problem in volunteer-run clubs: passionate people spending all their time on manual tasks instead of on their community. The most valuable thing we can give them back is time. That’s the payback you can’t put a price on, because it means having more time for what really matters,” Michael Barwell, CEO and Founder. 

“We can actually make a difference to membership organisations, and there's no better feeling when you implement a new system with a customer and they want to hug you because you've just made such a difference to their life and given them so many hours back,” Leigh Clover. Director of Membership and Marketing. 

Find Out More About Member Jungle

If you aren’t tired of hearing me prattle on about Member Jungle yet and want to know more about us, then I have some links for you. 

To find out about some of the driving values behind Member Jungle, check out Green Membership Management: Help Your Club, Help The Planet.

If you want to see videos of the Member Jungle team talking about what they do and why they love it, check out this YouTube playlist Meet The Team.