All work
Non-Profit / Community Organization · Waukegan, IL
Club Apaseo El Alto
From papers and excel to a fully automated system
Club Apaseo El Alto, a Waukegan nonprofit, replaced paper sign-ins and spreadsheets with a Spanish-and-English member app and a new website, an eight-month, $13,000 project. The club reports 100% reporting accuracy and more than 60 volunteer hours saved a month.
Services provided
- SEO
- Website Development
- Custom App Development
- Timeline
- 8 months
- Investment
- $13,000
- Time saved
- 60+ hrs/month
The client
About Club Apaseo El Alto
Club Apaseo El Alto serves Waukegan families through food and bread pantries twice a week, community classes, loans of medical and mobility equipment for elderly and disabled neighbors, and programs celebrating Mexican arts, music and traditions. Most of the families it serves speak Spanish.
- Industry
- Non-Profit / Community Organization
- Location
- Waukegan, IL
- Service area
- Waukegan families, most of them Spanish-speaking
The challenge
Where they started
Behind the scenes, it all ran on paper and Excel. Volunteers signed families in by hand on pantry days, then typed the sheets into spreadsheets afterward. State and member reports were compiled from those spreadsheets, and every manual step was a chance for a count to come out wrong.
Online, the club had a single-page Blogspot site and depended on Facebook for outreach. Families had no way to register for services themselves, and donors had no clear place to give.
The club needed accurate reporting without the volunteer hours, and a way for families to sign up on their own, in their own language.
Our approach
How we tackled it
Map the paper process
Before building anything, we documented how sign-ins, member records and state reports actually moved through the club.
Build the member app, Spanish first
Accounts, sign-in and password reset default to Spanish, with English one tap away.
Model pantry days as events
Recurring event series, event types with their own form questions, and registrations that record the children in each household.
Automate the reports
Reports are generated from the registration data in the background, so nothing is retyped from paper.
Rebuild the public site
Programs, gallery, a Register button into the app and a Donate button.
What we built
The solution
We built Club Apaseo a custom member app that runs registration, events and reporting in one place, and a new website to bring families and donors to it.
The project began under our previous name, Illuminate IT & Marketing, which is why the public site's footer still carries that credit.
Bilingual accounts
Families create an account and sign in in Spanish or English.
Recurring events
Pantry days and programs are set up once and repeat on a schedule.
Household registrations
Each registration records the household, including children.
Custom questions per event type
Each kind of event asks only what it needs.
Automated reports
Member and pantry reports built from live data.
Event history
A record of every change to an event's status.
Public website
Programs, gallery, registration and donations.
Results
The numbers behind the story
100%
Reporting accuracy (client-reported)
60+ hrs
Volunteer admin time saved per month (client-reported)
+119%
Search clicks to the registration app (Jun 2025 → Sep 2026)
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Reporting accuracy | Hand-compiled from paper and Excel | 100% (client-reported) |
| Volunteer admin time | Manual data entry after every pantry day | 60+ hours a month saved (client-reported) |
| Search clicks per month | 125 (Jun 2025) | 185 (Sep 2026, +48%) |
| Average search position | 5.7 (Jun 2025) | 4.3 (Sep 2026) |
| Search clicks to the registration app | 16 (Jun 2025) | 35 (Sep 2026, +119%) |
Club Apaseo's reports now come straight out of the app instead of being rebuilt from sign-in sheets, and volunteers no longer spend pantry nights on data entry. Families are finding the club on their own, too: it holds position 1 when people search its name, and clicks straight to the registration app more than doubled.
Measured by: Google search data, June 2025 (earliest month retained) vs September 2026; reporting accuracy and time saved as reported by Club Apaseo El Alto.
“The team at Spark N Code completely transformed how we operate. The new system has saved us countless hours and improved our reporting accuracy to 100%. Our outreach has improved significantly with the new website, allowing us to better serve our community.”
Ongoing work
Still working together
The member app runs every pantry day. Families register from their phones, in Spanish or English, before they arrive, and the club's reports build themselves from that data.
Free · No email required · ~10 seconds
Find out what Google actually thinks of your business.
Type your business name and get a real Google Business Profile score. Which fields are costing you Map Pack visibility, and what to fix first. No email, no call, no catch.
- Real score, instantly
- Nothing to sign up for
- Keep the fixes
Your score out of 100, with the three things holding it back, ranked by how much they would move the needle.
Ready to be our next case study?
Tell me about your business. I'll tell you exactly what I'd build and what I'd expect it to do — in plain language, free, no pressure.
Curious how we work? See our services or read the blog.