Choir management software for choruses that run on volunteer time

Choir management software should do one thing above all: give the volunteer who runs the chorus their evenings back. EnsembleBase does that by keeping one roster (organized by voice part) and using it for seating charts, attendance, availability, dues, ticket sales, and every email you send.

Community choruses rarely fail for musical reasons. They wear out the two or three people doing the administration: the president who chases dues, the manager who rebuilds the riser chart, the volunteer who copies email addresses from the spreadsheet into the newsletter tool and hopes nobody joined since last month. Each of those jobs is small. Together, scattered across five tools, they eat ten hours a week. If that volunteer is you, here's what one roster changes.

The scattered system every chorus recognizes

Ask a choir administrator where the membership data lives and the answer is usually "several places, and they disagree." The symptoms are familiar:

None of these tools talk to each other, so a single change — a new second soprano, say — has to be entered four or five times. Miss one, and she never gets the concert-week email or a riser spot.

One roster, organized the way choirs actually work

In EnsembleBase, voice parts are sections. Sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses (or SSAATTBB if you split) are first-class groupings on the roster, with section assignments, substitute status, and contact details in one record per singer. Add members once and they appear in the attendance list, the email audiences, the seating chart builder, and the dues ledger. Attendance is a checklist against that same roster: take it at rehearsal, and you see who's slipping long before it becomes a concert-eligibility conversation.

Riser charts come from the same place. Shape the stage template into rows, then work through the unplaced list: the new alto goes next to a strong reader, the tenor who gets vertigo stays off the top riser. Because the builder reads the roster, nobody gets forgotten and nobody imaginary gets a spot. Publish when it's ready and singers find their own position in the portal next to their schedule, music, and dues status.

Know who is coming before the downbeat

Polls are easy; the forty people who never answer are the problem. So the workflow here leads with the chase: one click emails exactly the members who haven't responded, and automated reminders repeat on a schedule you set, recalculated each time against who still owes an answer. Post the term's dates once and you know on Monday that only two tenors are coming Tuesday, early enough to do something about it. When a date changes, the update goes out through the same system to the current roster instead of last season's list.

Email a voice part without rebuilding a list

Because email is tied to the roster, "everyone," "sopranos and altos," or "members who haven't responded to the availability poll" are audiences you pick, not lists you maintain. Rehearsal reminders, concert-week logistics, and dues notices all go through the same place, and the send list is always the current membership. When someone joins in October, they get the November emails automatically, because there is only one roster.

Dues work the same way. Set the season's dues, track who has paid, collect payment online, and follow up with exactly the people who still owe, without the treasurer cross-referencing a bank statement against a spreadsheet.

Concerts: ticketing and a public page on the same roster

When concert week arrives, EnsembleBase handles the audience side too. On the Pro and Scale plans, each concert gets a public event page where anyone can buy tickets; the flat $1.00 service fee is added at checkout, and buyers can choose to cover the card processing. When they do, the chorus keeps the full face value of every ticket. Door sales and ticket scanning are built in, and sales roll up on the same dashboard as everything else.

What changes in an ordinary week

A new alto joins at Tuesday rehearsal. You add her once, and she's already in the attendance list, the email audience, the dues ledger, and the unplaced list in the riser builder — the four places she'd otherwise be missing from until someone noticed. The six singers who never answered the spring availability poll get a reminder sent to exactly those six, without anyone building a list. And when the board asks how ticket sales are going, the answer is on the dashboard rather than in the inbox of whoever set up the ticketing account three seasons ago.

Getting your chorus in

Import, don't retype. The roster you already have comes in as-is: upload the spreadsheet (CSV or Excel), match the columns with a guided mapper (name, email, voice part, status), and duplicates are flagged before anything lands. The roster you've kept for fifteen years arrives intact.

A realistic first week. Import the roster, send one email through the system so members recognize the new sender, and post the term's dates with an availability poll. Turn on dues in week three. You don't have to move everything at once, and nothing about the old spreadsheet stops working while you switch.

The members who will never log in. Every chorus has them, and they lose nothing: email and reminders reach the address on their roster record, the treasurer records their check against their balance, and they answer the availability email straight from the link in it, with no account and no password. Nobody has to log in for the system to work.