Hello Kissena friends and fam,
KCC is consolidating our communications platforms to a single, easy to use and access platform that incorporates group chats, direct messages, club emails and calendar and events.
The board piloted a few different platforms and discovered Heylo, popular with run clubs, but also perfect for a cycling club like ours. It provides a great balance of all of our needs at a very reasonable cost. We hope Heylo can be a place for both long form content like ride and race reports and shorter direct and instant messaging and group chats.
Vanilla forums will be archived as a “frozen in amber” resource, including image and media content uploaded over the years, but it no longer be a functional forum. We are working on a timeline to transfer it permanently to a different domain and will update everyone once complete.
Kissena’s Slack channel will also be discontinued by Tuesday March 31st, 2026. We strongly encourage everyone to start using Heylo for direct messaging and group chats:
Step 1: Join Kissena’s Heylo group here:
https://heylo.com/invite/gkTOQxhRL
Step 2: Bookmark Kissena’s Heylo group in your browser here:
https://heylo.group/kissena-cycling-club
Step 3: Download the app to your phone:
Apple iOS
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/heylo-build-community-groups/id1445966180
Google Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.piccup&hl=en_US
General Heylo FAQ/Help Center
Additional background on why we’re moving to Heylo:
Vanilla is ending support for this platform while simultaneously increasing the cost for hosting it. This seemed like a good inflection point to move forward to something more modern and save money in the process. We also realized our communications stack has entropied over the years, spreading out across disparate platforms like Mailchimp, Vanilla forum, Slack, GCal and iMessage groups and ultimately lacking cohesiveness and creating confusion for new members. Having a single unified platform will hopefully resolve that and make it easier for the team to maintain!
Kissena’s Vanilla forum was created 15 years ago and served us well, but so much has changed since then. Over the years we’ve explored and used platforms like Slack and Discord, but found limitations that didn’t suit the needs of a small, local sports club like ours. We also tested Circle, a platform some coaching services use, but found the platform is optimized for exactly that - coaching services! Heylo, popular with run clubs, seemed to have a lot of great parallels with what we needed: Chat, messaging, events calendar, and email communications all on one easy to maintain platform.
We realize this is a huge shift in how we connect with each other and where we create new lore and preserve club history, so we do not take this change lightly. No system is perfect, so we would love to hear your feedback (you can post up a new discussion or a board member a private chat!).
We hope this unified, easily accessible platform will enable us to continue honoring Kissena’s proud tradition of an open and welcoming culture.
Cya on Heylo!
🙏🤘🚴♂️
Kissena Cycling Club Board, 2026
Greg Hoge, President
David Yang, VP
Niall Smart, Technology
Bret Sigler, Treasurer
David Vibert, Membership
Lennart Zandbergen, Development
Eloy Anzola, Public Relations
JP Partland, Sponsorship
Avelino Garcia, Secretary
