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