How AIARE Fixed Years of Technology Pain in Three Days with Zite

Nearly 30 years ago, backcountry skiing was becoming more accessible. Better equipment meant more people could travel into avalanche terrain, but avalanche education in the United States was fragmented. Someone taking a course in California might learn something completely different from someone taking one in Colorado.

AIARE was created to change that. The organization developed a national standard for avalanche education, then built a network of providers and instructors capable of teaching that standard consistently.

Today, AIARE works with roughly 115 education providers and has trained about 1,600 instructors. Those providers teach approximately 10,000 recreational students every year. AIARE also runs instructor training and professional courses for people pursuing careers such as ski patrol, guiding, and avalanche forecasting.

That reach creates a complicated operational challenge behind the scenes. Providers need to submit course information and student rosters. Instructors need to meet specific qualifications and experience requirements. Students complete online learning. AIARE needs accurate records across all of it.

When Executive Director Vickie Hormuth joined AIARE eight years ago, the organization's central technology stack was built around FileMaker and WordPress. Even extracting information from FileMaker required paying a third-party contractor.

AIARE eventually moved much of its data into Airtable. That opened up enormous possibilities, but as the organization grew, its infrastructure grew with it. Data became spread across separate Airtable bases organized by year. That made it difficult to compare trends across years or follow the history of an individual student. The team began hitting automation and data limits.

Meanwhile, its provider portal remained on WordPress.

The custom connection between WordPress and Airtable was slow and brittle. WordPress updates could break functionality. Course roster uploads had persistent problems. Providers had to move between separate systems to upload students and check their online learning progress.

And because Sarah MacGregor, AIARE's Digital Product and Systems Manager, also handles many of the organization's support emails, she knew exactly where providers were getting stuck.

Sarah manages AIARE's technology alongside overseeing member support, with no formal technical training. Because AIARE is a nonprofit with a small technology budget, hiring a dedicated engineering team or bringing in consultants every time the organization needed a new workflow wasn't realistic.

Then Sarah started experimenting with Zite.

Sarah built a new provider experience on top of AIARE's existing systems. Providers can now add courses and upload student rosters through the same interface with fewer clicks, faster loading speeds, and no software compatibility bugs — and an intuitive experience that doesn't require an email to AIARE just to move through successfully.

AIARE hasn't replaced everything at once. Payments, for example, still send providers back into the legacy portal. The team is deliberately treating the project as a phased rollout, starting with the problems providers felt most acutely and expanding from there.

Zite checks each roster for duplicates and applies AIARE's business rules before a course can be marked complete.

Instructor requirements that live across different Airtable data can be checked automatically. Providers only see instructors qualified for the particular course they're teaching. Date validation catches potential errors before they enter AIARE's database.

Zite also connects directly to LearnDash, so providers can see a student's online-learning progress alongside the rest of the course information rather than checking an entirely separate system.

The new portal brings information from AIARE's separate seasonal Airtable bases into one cleaner experience.

The benefits aren't limited to what providers see. Every validation Zite handles before information reaches AIARE also improves the quality of the organization's underlying data. That matters for a nonprofit that regularly reports to its board and other stakeholders.

Sarah occupies an unusual position: she sees the support requests when something doesn't work, builds the systems designed to solve those problems, and then works with the resulting data. That creates a direct feedback loop between the people using AIARE's systems and the people improving them.

For Vickie, that may be the bigger story. In 25 years working in nonprofits, she says she has never had a technical person on staff.

AIARE recently created a volunteer technology committee to help think through its long-term infrastructure. But before that committee had even held its first meeting, Sarah had already demonstrated something important. Problems the organization had spent years trying to solve suddenly felt solvable.

That has changed how AIARE thinks about what's possible with its limited resources. Instead of assuming a new experience requires another plugin, a custom integration, a consultant, or an engineer, the people closest to the problem can increasingly build the solution themselves.

The provider portal is only one corner of AIARE's technology ecosystem. The organization wants to carry its impact even further by supporting learners directly, such as providing easier access to certificates and high-caliber online learning. It is exploring a digital version of its field book to better support students' ability to apply their curriculum framework in the backcountry. Instructors, avalanche professionals, and the public alike need continuing-education resources, and AIARE sees promise in Zite to support this next stage of impact.

AIARE is also beginning to consider an even bigger change: whether Zite's native database could eventually help consolidate infrastructure currently spread across Airtable bases and other systems.

For an organization whose mission depends on giving people the knowledge to make better decisions in consequential environments, better technology isn't really about technology. It's about making that knowledge easier to deliver.