Does anyone have an app for their club? We do have a website, but with todays standard, everyone wants an app for club information and communication.
If you do, did you develop yourself with some of the free/paid services or have it built for you?
Also, what content does your app contain?
Thanks.
I’m super curious about this, I think it would be very helpful. Hopefully some responds with some experience surrounding it.
What features would the app have? Our local club just uses facebook groups - which kind of sucks.
If someone in your group is slightly tech-savvy, you can build a no-code app on a platform such as bubble.io. It would cost a monthly subscription fee to keep it “live” but there is a ton you can do with it.
Hi Jeff,
I know this is an older topic, but thought I’d respond to it anyway since I just joined the forum.
Our club doesn’t have a specific “app” for running the club, but we use Squarespace for our website which works well for both desktops and smart phones. Squarespace provides many services that we take advantage of like a store front for selling club memberships and merch. It’s great for collecting membership due and miscellaneous fees for our annual camp out, and such. It integrates nicely with Printful which offers on-demand clothing purchases so we don’t have to worry about stocking these types of items. We only make a few bucks on each sale, but not having to stock stuff makes it worth it. Squarespace definitely isn’t cheap, but well worth it if your club is moderate in size (~30+ members) and you’re looking to grow. Overall our club spends a little over $400/year on our web presence.
We are also a 501C3 Non-Profit. This means we qualify for Google Workspace business account for free, which is huge for us! This allows us to manage club email accounts centrally and give us plenty of cloud based disk storage for our important, and not so important, documents. It allows shared access to files like our monthly presentations so multiple people can edit concurrently. We also use Google Forms that allows our membership to register beers in our monthly club competitions. This saves our cellar master a ton of work come monthly meeting time.
Our club accounting is done on Wave. It was free service when we signed up for it, but I think there might be a charge now. It offers all the accounting power we need for managing out finances, and it integrates well with our bank account too.
Unfortunately to set all this up does require a moderate level computer knowledge and savvy, but it’s not like we had to go out and hire programmers and system integrators to make it all work together.
You can check us out here: placerbrewers.org
Hopefully this helps a bit.
Cheers, Dave
Since we’re digging up an old topic I’ll chip in here too. Communicating with your club across at least three generations of people is difficult. We have a newsletter (everyone still has email right), a website (which may not be worth the effort), a Facebook page (which I loathe), and a Instagram account (also not great). That’s a lot of platforms and I’m still surprised when new brewers find us.
Communication is a constant struggle and I wish we had better tools available to us.
I think this is a challenge for clubs and groups of all sorts right now.
I’d love to ditch Facebook (for multiple reasons), but it’s what a lot of our local organizations use, and there’s no obvious replacement.
Yeah, communication is such a pain that we have two people dedicated to it and then I do a lot of chatter otherwise! (And yeah, we have some folks who barely want to do email and then we have other folks who want us to use their latest flavor of socials) We still have people who complain about us ditching printed and mailed newsletters!
We have:
And despite all this, there are still times when you have to reach out and poke people directly lest they say “I didn’t hear anything about that!”
Not saying we can do it, but…if the AHA could help clubs with mutually needed and reoccuring services what would those top things be?
Julia, this is an interesting problem that likely doesn’t have one solution. I think we’re trying to solve at least two problems 1) Communicate, engage, and retain current members and 2) be in spaces that attract new members.
How the AHA would help clubs do either of those is worth investigating. Discounted rates for popular platforms, like mailchimp or website hosting are just two quick ideas off my awake way too early brain here. Hopefully others could chime in.
I know a local club uses Slack for it’s board communication, again just another platform for communication.