Website for a small club?

May 6, 2023 2:58 PM

Are you a member of a hobby group with a good website that’s easy to use? Please tell me about it.

An organization I belong to would like to have a website that also serves as a hub for the group.

Ideally, the front page could allow non-members to learn something about the group, see public events, be able to join (and pay), and sign up for a newsletter. It needs to be easily editable so that the pages could be changed by anyone, not just someone technically proficient (me).

There should be members-only features, like (and this is a wish list, not a requirement) private events, messaging to other members, membership renewal, contact information.

Finally, someone (the webmaster, not me) should be able to send out the email to the group, newsletters to everyone, and archive newsletters and other digital media.

There’s probably more that would be useful. Are there other features that you have for your club website would be good to have that I’m not thinking of?

Googling has brought up ‘Wild Apricot’ as well as many sites that will design websites for clubs (not at all what I am looking for). Wild Apricot’s club website examples look nice from the outside. Does anyone use it, and would you choose it again?

Most importantly, other suggestions of sites to check out?

posted by AMyNameIs to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (4 answers total)

Their page for competitve research lists a handful of other sites which are no doubt selected to make them look good, but if you google multiple of those names all together, you'll no doubt root out blog posts (both human- and bot-written), webboard discussions, reddit threads, etc. discussing your problem in general terms. It takes a while, but you'll probably find the names of other options, as well as less biased analysis.

That said, Wild Apricot is surprisingly expensive! Maybe they target groups that have membership fees, in which case it's probably easy to absorb at less than $1/mo. (and decreasing as you grow), and as I see from your question you do have a membership fee. From what I gather, here's what WA is missing:

Event Calendar (event lists seem to come with)
Messaging. You get per-member email addresses and that's it. Up to you to set up mass-mailing, blog/RSS/event notifications, member-to-member, admin-to-everybody, etc. Anything beyond clicking on an email address and sending a single user per email.

So there will probably be outlays for side services beyond what WA (or similar) provides. One thing I've learned from messing around on the developer side of things like this is that the companies will offer as few features as possible for the most they can charge, and anything that doesn't seem to be included will probably involve paying other companies to provide it.
posted by rhizome at 3:25 PM on May 6, 2023

We use Wild Apricot for our non-profit organization.

It is a little bit clunky, and not very modern. It is however pretty easy to learn to manage. Feel free ot DM me if you want to discuss details.

To add to Rhizome's comment above - you can get a "calendar view", instead of a listing if that's what you are looking for.
posted by Rabarberofficer at 4:51 PM on May 6, 2023

Take a look at clubexpress.com. It seems to do what you're wanting.
posted by Short Attention Sp at 4:01 AM on May 7, 2023

I’m a little surprised how expensive these things are, especially for a small organization. Clubexpress is half the price of Wild Apricot.

I’m marking all 3 as best answers since they are all have good information.
posted by AMyNameIs at 4:30 PM on May 7, 2023