Burbio.com
Calendar gridlock was a way of life for Pelham residents Julie and Dennis Roche, the parents of four school-aged boys.
Already drowning in e-mails and flyers to remind them of their children’s school schedule and sports teams’ practices and their own commitments, trying to keep track of it all was taking a toll.
That’s until the couple came up with the idea about two years ago of creating a free digital calendar sharing and synchronization platform that allows parents to search, find and add events from important local calendars and permits groups to easily create and share calendars as well.
Originally focused on Pelham and lower Westchester, the platform has been gaining traction recently throughout Westchester, including in Pleasantville, Yorktown and Peekskill and many other communities.
“We wanted to create a solution for group organizers and for people like us who need to be organized,” said Julie Roche, Burbio.com’s co-founder.
“Our lives have become so overscheduled, but on the other hand we want to give our kids every opportunity to get involved in different things. What comes along with that is calendar frenzy and chaos.”
The couple found that other busy families were similarly accessing different calendars to locate specific information. They also discovered that there was no platform that automatically compiled different schedules into one place.
In addition, they were still seeing flyers being sent home with their children and newsletters arriving in the mail.
“You can’t even look at it all on a computer,” said Roche, who has a background in marketing and market research. “It is definitely overwhelming.”
Naming it Burbio — a play on the word suburbia, since the suburban demographic is the company’s primary target market — was the easy part. Getting the platform up and running was more complicated. Roche, who majored in applied math and took computer programming classes in college, enrolled in a web development and backend programming class to get up to speed.
“That was one of the best things I could have done, to teach myself some of those prototyping tools,” said Roche, who was helped by her husband, who has a background in business development and ad sales.
The end product, Roche said, is a calendar system that is simple to use and can be synched with a number of mobile devices as well as with Google and Apple calendars.
They charge for zip code-targeted advertising and sponsored e-mails and will be adding a marketing platform for local merchants to partner with non-profits.
Since those early days, the Roches, who currently have one full-time employee and several part-timers, have acquired users from about 50 Westchester zip codes, in addition to locations in New Jersey and Connecticut.
Users can access the public calendars of more than 1,000 local nonprofits, public school districts, churches, libraries, restaurants, movie theaters, sports leagues and other organizations. They also receive notifications of recommended events and alerts when event information changes.
A recent addition to the platform is a new carpool-scheduling feature. Roche realizes that not everyone can drive his or her child to every event.
“Carpools are convenient and good for the environment,” said Roche, “but they can be really hard to keep track of when there are lots of changes flying around in texts or e-mails.”
To create a carpool schedule, all a user has to do is click on the “Add a Carpool” icon on the Burbio website. Then, whomever created the carpool invites other drivers, all of whom can add or edit driving shifts on the calendar. Each member of a carpool is notified when the schedule changes, explained Roche.
Behind the Burbio platform is a passion Roche and her husband share–to make local communities more connected and to thrive.
“We like the fact that Burbio is helping people to connect,” said Roche, “rather than replacing the connection.”
For more information or to sign up for Burbio, visit www.burbio.com.
Colette Connolly is a copywriter and p.r. expert. She owns Connolly Communications, which is based in Bronxville, New York. Colette specializes in providing content-rich, SEO-optimized press releases, articles, newsletters, brochures, and customer success stories.