About Upstate International
Upstate International connects cultures in Greenville and the wider Upstate of South Carolina through language classes, events and a membership community.
The problem
Upstate International’s members, classes and donors lived in four places that didn’t agree with each other. Memberships and orders ran through WooCommerce on the WordPress site. Classes ran on CourseStorm, which staff said didn’t track membership well. Member accounts were WordPress pages, and an older WordPress plugin tried to keep Little Green Light, their donor database, in step with all of it.
Every renewal, class sign-up and event registration touched more than one tool, and staff spent their time checking that the numbers matched.
UI Engine
We replaced the patchwork with one platform built for how Upstate International actually works. UI Engine has its own member portal and its own staff dashboard, and it holds every rule about memberships, classes, events and payments in one place.
- Memberships: three membership levels, with family members added to a single membership.
- Classes and events: language classes by semester, events and conversation clubs, all with online sign-up.
- Payments: Stripe checkout, plus cash and check orders that staff can enter and reverse.
- Accounts: members sign in with a password, and new members activate their account from an emailed link.
A registration widget sits on the Upstate International website, so visitors sign up without leaving the page they’re on. WordPress now handles the content, and the old store and class pages send visitors to the new portal.
Little Green Light without retyping
Every member and every payment goes to Little Green Light through a background queue. Each payment lands as a gift in the right fund, whether it’s a membership, a class or an event. If Little Green Light is slow or busy, the queue waits and tries again instead of dropping the record.
What runs on its own
Scheduled jobs handle the routine work: renewal reminders, expiring memberships, reminders for pay-by-check orders, a daily digest for staff, and an hourly check that every Stripe payment was recorded.
Staff run the rest from the dashboard. They manage classes and semesters, move a student between classes, review scholarship requests, send messages and pull reports, and they can see the sync status for Little Green Light at a glance.
For another donor-database build, see Not One More Alabama, or read about our Systems work.