New payment platform

Rain or shine - we compost!

One year of composting together on Kauai. Mahalo nui!

Here is what you can find in this newsletter...

I. New payment platform - Steps to sign up, Members Portal, Help II. Survey - Please give us feedback so we can improve and grow for you III. Chop, chop - Please cut/shred materials into smaller pieces

New payment platform Our new payment system/storefront is live and can be accessed through our website or this link. There is a new start-up fee beginning March 1 ($15) for new members but will be waived for our existing members with the discount code PUNA320. Steps for signing up:

1. Go to our website and scroll down to the different

"Pick-up Services." Just under the bucket plan descriptions you can select your location. Select your location

1. You will be redirected to our online store front. Select your bucket plan, fill out the requested information. You'll see an item pop up in the shopping cart

2. Click on the shopping cart, enter the discount code PUNA320 to waive the start-up fee and select Checkout.

3. A login window will appear and you'll have to create a member account

4. You're almost done! After creating your account, on the new screen select Add Payment Method

5. After you've added your card information, click on the Complete Checkout button. That's it! You made it!

Members Portal The new system has a Member’s Portal (which can be accessed from our website: Members > Members Portal or this link) where you can sign in to check on your account. Your account username is your email and if we created an account for you, your password can be changed by clicking “Forgot password.” Need help? Check out the FAQ on our website. Still need help? We will also be calling this week to assist with the transition. You can always call, text or email us too! Friendly reminder: prices for our membership tiers have changed

to allow us to continue our services sustainably.*

* In the past year we have gained a better idea of how much food waste our system can handle and created a recipe that gives our compost quality, allows us to reach necessary temperatures, and is finished in a timely fashion. Various carbon feedstocks (needed to balance out the nitrogen rich food scraps) have also proven to take much of our time and labor. Because of this we have learned that in order to maintain the quality and value of our product, with the responsibility we have to return compost to you, we need to adjust our membership tiers. We hope you can understand these decisions we made, it was not easy and we had many meetings for months discussing these changes but knew it was what we had to do in order for us to continue our work.

We would love your feedback! As we reach our one-year anniversary we are very excited to engage with you and re

ceive feedback to move forward. Please consider taking our survey below to help us with a few topics, including - what gets you excited about our service, the frequency of receiving compost fertilizer, and services and perks we hope to add on in the future.

Member Check-in Survey

New membership tiers, referral program

Aloha Compost Kauai members!

This is our “Once-in-awhile Newsletter” to give you some updates and transparency on our business and member services. We plan to only send these out once a month (or less) with updates that we think will be helpful for you. This month we have more to say than normal as we have reached almost a YEAR of being in business. [Our business papers were filed in Jan. 2020, but March 2020 was our official start when Jesse and Rebekah went door-to-door to find our first members, pre-COVID-19].

We apologize for the length of this post, but we promise a lot of it is important.

We appreciate your support and can’t say enough about how great it feels that some of you have been with us for over a year now.

There are two important changes happening this month and we wanted to give you at least 30 days notice about them.

1. We will be using a new payment platform which will help us keep our memberships and subscriptions organized.

2. We will be implementing new membership tiers for new members and members who have service with 2 or more buckets.

1. New payment platform

The day has come that we have outgrown Paypal and need to transition to a new payment system that will allow us to continue to grow. This new system will make it easier for our members to check the status of their payments (added members portal on our website), allow us to streamline memberships with payments (yay for only one spreadsheet!), and have a more professional look on our website. We will proceed with subscription memberships starting this month.

• If you have a subscription through Paypal now, we will keep it in place for the month of March

• If you were receiving individual monthly invoices by Paypal, we will send a March invoice through our new payment platform

Beginning April 1, we hope to be fully immersed in an easy recurring subscription model. This will make it easier for all of us to stay on top of our responsibilities. We are hoping that less time spent on payment updates will mean more time on other features of our business.

To stay connected and assist anyone who may have questions, please feel free to call, text or email us. We hope to have all members on our new and improved payment system in April. Please make sure to use the fancy promotion code to waive the start-up fee when signing up for your subscription membership.

2. New membership tiers + start-up fee

After almost a year of working with our community and 30 accounts later, we are needing to implement new membership tiers with a start-up cost. The new start-up cost doesn’t cover the full price of buckets but will help offset some of the cost so we can focus on expanding in other necessary areas. This will only apply to new members.

Please make sure to use the fancy promotion code to waive the start-up fee when signing up for your subscription membership.

New membership tiers may affect current memberships with 2 or more buckets. In the past year we have gained a better idea of how much food waste our system can handle and created a recipe that gives our compost quality, allows us to reach necessary temperatures, and is finished in a timely fashion. Various carbon feedstocks (needed to balance out the nitrogen rich food scraps) have also proven to take much of our time and labor. Because of this we have learned that in order to maintain the quality and value of our product, with the responsibility we have to return compost to you, we need to adjust our membership tiers. We hope you can understand these decisions we made, it was not easy and we had many meetings for months discussing these changes but knew it was what we had to do in order for us to continue our work.

3. BONUS: Get a FREE month of service

We would like to reward our members by adding a new referral code feature. With our new payment platform we can now use referral codes that will give you a free month of service for every code entered. When telling your friends or family about our services let them know they can use your unique referral code (and then when they become a member, they get one too!). Referral codes are simply YOUR LAST NAME. Easy right? So, tell any and all of your friends that are in our service area to use your code. They will also get to use their code in the future for their FREE month of service too.

Mahalo nui for your kokua

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Compost Kauaʻi