How it began
Planning should feel lighter.
Life is an event made of many events. Birthdays and field trips, potlucks and playoffs, showers, fundraisers, holidays, the volunteer shift nobody remembered to fill. Our goal is to help you organize and manage them all — not just the party, but everything around it.
TallyGather started with two parents, two careers, and one very full family calendar. We build the tools, so you can bring people together — one link, no friction, all free.
We're a husband and wife team with demanding jobs and kids deep in school life, and we pitch in where we can — class parties, teacher appreciation week, book fairs, the spring carnival that somehow needs forty volunteers and a hundred cupcakes. Dad helps out in Scouts — whatever the pack needs that year, cubmaster one season and den leader the next — and mom is right there with the Brownies. There's always another headcount to chase.
Events are her craft — mom spends her workdays on timelines, vendors and headcounts that have to be right. Even with that experience, every school event turned into the same tangle: an invitation buried in a group text, replies arriving by text, email and a note in a backpack, and a spreadsheet someone rebuilt each year.
This could be so much simpler.
Eventually we stopped complaining and started building. TallyGather is the small tool we wanted on those nights — send something that looks nice, collect answers in one place, see who has replied and who hasn't, fill the open slots, and know your numbers before you're standing in the gym wondering if you ordered enough pizza.
And the part nobody warns you about: the loose ends. This family paid for their baseball tickets, but you haven't handed the tickets over yet. Three people promised to bring folding tables. So we built tracking right in — add your own columns for whatever matters that week, check people off as you go, and leave a note so nothing slips. All of it fast enough to use from a phone in the carpool line, and simple enough to hand to the next volunteer without a training session.
One place, not five
Invitations, sign-up slots, surveys and votes live together — so you stop stitching a plan out of group texts, spreadsheets and a paper sheet on a folding table.
Your people, ready to go
Contacts, families and people groups are saved once and reused forever. The class list you built in September still works in May.
Beautiful without the effort
Every invitation gets a real design — themed or AI-made — because volunteers deserve something that looks like someone cared.
Free for the people doing the work
Room parents, coaches, committee chairs and team moms shouldn't need a budget to organize a bake sale. The whole thing is free.
Tell us what you need
We hear the same frustrations from colleagues and parent friends, and we still use TallyGather for every event we run, so the annoying parts get fixed fast. If there's something that would make your life easier, tell us — that's what we build next.
TallyGather grew from invitations into contacts, tracking lists and the loose ends between events — and that's where it keeps going: more of life's events, managed in one place.