When you buy a Rivian, you’re not just getting a vehicle—you’re joining a community. That’s the spirit behind Rivian Clubs of America (RCA), a nonprofit national Rivian club with 26 chapters across North America. RCA brings Rivian owners and enthusiasts together for real-life adventures, off-road excursions, and local meetups—driven by a shared love of the outdoors, electric innovation, and environmental impact.

Behind the scenes, Heylo powers every chapter. As RCA’s enterprise platform, Heylo provides a home base for communication, event planning, payments, and member management—while giving national leadership and the Rivian brand real-time visibility across the entire Rivian community.

From online friends to off-road adventures

Arron Apperson, Executive Director of RCA, got his Rivian in May 2022. After nearly a decade of driving a city-sized electric vehicle, his life had shifted. He and his partner were fostering a young man, teaching him how to ski and snowboard, and they needed a bigger vehicle to carry gear and handle road trips.

“It just seemed to be the truck that brought everything together for us,” he said. “It helped us maintain our electric lifestyle. It also was something that we could take camping with us because we go camping all the time, a truck to have adventures in.”

Like many early Rivian adopters, Arron had been active in online forums for years before receiving his vehicle. “We had formed a lot of friendships online,” he said, “but kind of the zeitgeist of the vehicle and the thing that Rivian was selling was this lifestyle of going out and having adventures.” After years of pandemic isolation, the desire to meet in person and explore together was strong. “We wanted to stop being just online and be in person and we could go on adventures together.”

In San Francisco, the Bay Area Rivian Club began with a single afternoon drive. “I had a couple of people that lived in San Francisco as well...we just got together on an afternoon and we went out for a drive,” Arron said. That meetup led to a larger gathering at Ocean Beach—and the momentum hasn’t stopped.

A growing, national community

Today, the Rivian Clubs of America has 26 chapters—a network of in-person communities, each shaped by its local environment and members. Some host trail rides and campouts like Gary’s Jamboree, a multi-day, family-friendly camping trip that includes going on drives and helping people learn how to take their vehicles off road.

Others focus on local connection and education. “We’re meeting at a local brewery,” Aaron explained, “but we’ll invite somebody from the community that maybe has a business that is kind of centered on Rivian.”

At the national level, RCA shows up big—like at Optima Unplugged, part of the King of the Hammers off-road competition. “They build a city of about a hundred thousand people,” Arron said. “We had six or seven groups total…we had a fantastic time out in the desert showing off what our vehicles can do.”

The diversity of events reflects the flexibility of the Rivian community. “It’s not gonna be camping weather in Arizona in July,” he added. “So having the ability for the different groups around the country to pick their own events within their own biome was something from the very beginning that we really wanted to try and help each of the groups do.”

The result is a community that feels instantly connected, even across borders. “My friend base and my community base has increased across the entire country, and throughout the Americas we instantly kind of have that friendship and that connection.”

How Heylo helped chapters scale

As the community grew, so did the challenge of managing it. “We’re a volunteer organization,” Arron said. “We had a fantastic technology person for a long time, but it became much bigger than what one person could give time to.”

RCA tried building its own systems, cycling through platforms like Squarespace and WordPress for chapter sites, and experimenting with tools for events and payments. But keeping things consistent, secure, and scalable proved difficult. “We realized we needed help,” Arron said. “We weren’t a software company—we were a nonprofit car club.”

That’s when RCA discovered Heylo. Now, Arron says thanks to Heylo’s enterprise chapter templates, a new club joins and “they immediately have a Heylo group, and it’s easy for us to input whatever members have designated them as their home club.”

Heylo gives chapter leads the tools they need to run events independently, while still connecting them to RCA’s national network. “It gives the chapter leads the ability to assign roles...and they can kind of take on the role and design and really run that event.”

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Built for national partnerships

One of the biggest advantages of using Heylo is how it supports RCA’s relationship with Rivian, the brand. “They like to have a bird’s eye view of what all of our events are,” Arron said, “and that is going to be a key to maintaining our relationship with Rivian.”

That visibility means Rivian can support chapters directly—by sending photographers, providing swag, and showing up in person. “At the Optima event, we had several Rivian engineers there who were helping us, plus some race truck drivers.”

Heylo’s enterprise structure makes that kind of national-to-local support seamless. RCA can offer visibility to brand partners at scale, then pass on those benefits—like gear, giveaways, and event sponsorship—to members on the ground.

With Heylo’s enterprise plan, RCA can track membership tiers and participation across chapters. “We can go to any of the clubs and say, we know exactly how many members they have.” Their membership is also tied to the different paid membership tiers.

That centralized structure makes budgeting and planning easier. “The large clubs have obviously a bigger budget than the smaller clubs, but the idea is that as those clubs grow, they get a pro rata of their memberships, and I think Heylo has been instrumental in quantifying that.”

Giving chapter leaders the tools to lead

RCA chapters use Heylo not just to manage logistics, but to experiment, adapt, and lead. For example, the Florida Rivian Cub has been able to charge for events and financially cover all of the costs, Arron said, referencing a major street-block party the Florida chapter hosted. Heylo make it easy for them to keep track of what the club spent, as well as what the participants put back in.

That kind of autonomy allows leaders to shape their chapters in ways that work locally. Chapters can test membership tiers, host public versus members-only events, and even create roles for people who don’t yet own a Rivian. “We also have a role that we’ve entitled ‘enthusiasts,’” said Arron. “These are people that don’t yet own a Rivian...but we want more people to join and we want more people to enjoy these vehicles.”

Heylo gives chapter leaders the tools and flexibility to make it happen. “It gives them the flexibility of being able to set all of those parameters for each event. And then we can kind of sit back and go, oh, that really worked really well, or boy, that didn’t work really well. This is a great learning experience.”

A shared mission

At the heart of the partnership between Heylo and RCA is a shared belief in real-world community. “Your mission—making it so people can meet up in person—fits with our mission so that people can meet up in person,” Arron said. “And so that’s a really nice partnership.”

RCA’s national team is focused on supporting chapter leaders—so that members across the country can do what they came here to do: show up in real life. “It’s at the chapter level where the thing that we want most to happen—the in-person meetings—happens,” said Arron. “And so our role as the national enterprise group is to support those chapters in making that happen.”

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