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Club Memberships

ClubEvent can manage your Club’s membership subscriptions by allowing Administrators to create membership plans, then allowing users to ‘join’ the club onto one of these plans.  They will then be sent a welcome message, and any payment requests.  At the start of each membership period, they will be reminded and asked for payment for the next period.

Membership Settings

In order to start using the Membership functions, the Club Owner must enable the Membership options in the Settings menu:

Once “Enable membership functions has been checked, Administrators will now see the “Memberships” menu, where membership settings can be found. Note that this checkbox will be greyed out until you have set-up a Stripe connection – as membership requires a connection with our payment provider.

The following items must be configured:

  • The membership form
  • Welcome and Renewal messages
  • Membership Plans

Membership form

The membership form will be used by your members when joining your club.  There are three fixed fields on the form – name, email, membership plan.  Other fields can be added/removed to match your requirements.

Data from this form will be visible on the member record created as part of the Join process, and can only be viewed/changed by club Administrators.  Member details may be exported into a spreadsheet using the option on the Settings menu.

Fields can be added by pressing the ‘+’ button, and re-ordered by pressing the ‘double arrow’ button, and dragging/dropping into correct order.

An existing field can be edited or deleted by pressing one of the buttons to the left of the field.

 

Adding form fields is similar to creating ticket fields for events,- each field must have:

  • name:  used to identify the data and can’t be changed once created
  • label:  The label as seen by the user
  • type:  The type of field – which determines how the user enters the data:
    • text:  For entering a line of text
    • number: For entering a number
    • email: For entering a correctly formatted email address
    • dateofbirth:  For entering a date, allowing for browser ‘calendar helpers’
    • dropdown:  For selecting from a list of options
    • checkbox:  For presenting a yes/no checkbox
    • note:  For entering a number of lines of text
  • placeholder:  greyed out text that appears when the field is empty, to prompt the user
  • description: text that appears under the field to explain what the field is for
  • help popup:  text that will appear if the user presses a small (?) icon under the field
  • field options:  These vary according to the field type, and may include:
    • required:  Whether the user MUST complete this field in order to save the form
    • validate: a validation regex to aid with correctness – see www.clubevent.co.uk/faqs for more details
    • initial value: just that – the initial value in the field
    • options:  Dropdown fields require a comma separated list of options for users to choose between
  • Field usage
    • You can determine which fields are used on different membership plans

Welcome & Renewal messages

These messages will be sent to users on first application and subsequent renewals to the Club plans.  You should tailor the messages to your requirements, although there is a default message in place.

Membership Plans

Again, plans can be thought of a little like ticket types from events – you can create a number of plans, either for member types such as Adults/Juniors, or plan durations, such as Annual/Monthly.  Plans can be added/rearranged using the buttons at the top of the table, and edited or removed by swiping left/right to reveal the buttons.

Membership plans have the following options:

  • Name:  The name for the plan, which cannot be changed once created
  • Period: Plans can be yearly, quarterly, monthly or a custom number of months
  • Period Start:  When a plan should start; either at the beginning of a month, or on the join date (for a rolling plan)
  • Remind in advance:  Whether to remind people in advance of the next plan period (they can pay as soon as they receive the advance reminder)
  • Price:  Amount that will be charged for each period
  • Initial price:  Whether an initial payment will be required, before starting the plan on the period start
  • Expired period:  How many months before a member is expired (returned to just a contact) after they fail to pay for their plan.
  • Hide plan:  Whether to hide the plan from the user
  • Description:  A description of the membership plan for the user
Notes

Plans can be quite complex, so it is worth thinking through how you would like to operate your membership subscriptions.  Whilst people might prefer membership periods starting from the day they join, that can be a headache for club treasurers, with membership start dates spread around the year.

Key decisions are:

  • Whether to start plans on someones join date (can get messy!)
  • What periods to offer; annual is easy for the club, but you may attract more members with a monthly payment option
  • When to start your plan; an annual plan, starting in January sounds the easiest, but consider if there are any large holidays around that period that may sap peoples funds (e.g. Christmas/Thanksgiving etc.)
  • What to do mid period; if you have an annual plan, starting in January, then what happens when someone joins in September.
    • Using ‘free until period start’, you can be completely flexible in your first payment and not use ClubEvent to manage that one.
    • Using ‘pro-rated until period start’, the percentage of the period left will be charged to the user initially, and then a full period amount when the next period starts

 

 

 

Importing members

Members can obviously join one by one, by using the ClubEvent app, and choosing ‘Join Club’, which will take them through the joining process.  However, it is likely that you already have a member list and you may already have a membership system that you want to migrate from.

In this case, you can create a spreadsheet of member details and simply import them into the system to have them activated as users.

The spreadsheet should have the following columns:

  • ‘name’:  Their name, e.g. Fred Smith
  • ’email’:  Their email address, e.g. fred@clubevent.co.uk
  • ‘mobile’:  Their mobile number (optional)
  • ‘comments’:  Any comments
  • ‘tags’:  A comma separated list of tags – note that these should match tags already set-up in the system.  e.g. (U16, first team, senior team)
  • ‘member’:  Should be one of ‘YES’ or ‘NO’
  • ‘plan’:  The name of the plan to put them on – must match EXACTLY the a plan name (e.g. Annual Membership  – ‘annual membership’ will not match!)
  • <others>:  any other fields that you created on your membership form can be added as columns, using the field ‘name’ that you used when creating the form.

The spreadsheet can then be imported in the Contacts screen, using the button.  When importing, you will be asked whether to set-up an initial payment for each member.  Clearly, if you are switching from another system, where people have already paid for this year, you would not want to charge them for the remainder of the year!

Note that if your sheet includes people who are already on the contact list (but not members) then the import will turn them into members and add the membership plan and any form details onto their record.

 

Migrating contacts to members

If your members are already contacts in the system, you could export the contact list, add in the appropriate fields, and then import them again.  Another way of converting them to members is to:

  1. Create tags that match the name of your membership plans
  2. Tag all the contacts that you want on that plan (with that tag!)
  3. Select the Tags dropdown and filter on the plan tag
  4. From the actions menu, choose the option “Convert to members”

 

Member communications

ClubEvent provides a few ways to aid communication with your contacts, members and event participants:

  • Share details of events on social media (Event -> Actions menu)
  • Send messages to all event participants (Event -> Actions menu)
  • Send a message individual participant (Left click/tap on a participant in the event)
  • Send messages to contacts/members (Contacts -> Send Message button)
  • Use email groups…

Email groups

ClubEvent supports the creation of email groups by using contact tags.  In order to set-up a group:

  1. Create a tag that represents the group, e.g ‘firstteam’
    – From the “Tags & Groups” menu, create the contact tag
  2. Create an email group:
     – You can use anything as the group prefix (or the same tag string – e.g. firstteam)
    – decide who can send to the group
    – decide where replies to the group will go
    – choose the recipients – i.e. choose the tag you created earlier (you can use multiple tags here)
  3. Your group will then be available with an email address of:
      <tag>.<clubcode>@clubevent.co.uk

More on group settings

  • Group prefix:  Should be a string with no spaces, as is valid for use in the first part of an email address.  Clearly it needs to describe the email group in some way.
  • Senders:
    • Anyone in group:  Anyone who is in the recpient ‘list’ can send to the group.  They must send from the email address that is associated with their contact record
    • Only nominated senders:  This will allow you to choose one or more tags for the senders – so you could have a tag ‘committee’ that includes all committee members and make them nominated senders for the group, where the recipients are a different set of people
    • Public can send:  The group is open for anyone to send to
  • Replies:  Choose where replies to group messages will go
    • The group:  Replies will go back to all members of the group
    • To sender:  Replies will go back to the sender of the message
    • To specific address:  Replies will go back to a specific email address
  • Recipients:  Choose the tags for those people who the messages will be send to
  • Description: A simple description of the group for your own purposes – this is simply an ‘admin’ note.
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