ClubRunner

Kommentare: As a district website administrator, I appreciate the flexibility the design function allows me to customize the home page to reflect the personality and message of the District Governor. I can fairly easily change the page as DG terms change.
As a club website administrator, I can easily update the content as new events and promotions come to the fore.
As a club secretary, I can get on top of the administrative tasks that can't be allowed to fall behind.

Vorteile: ClubRunner can handle many of the essential day-to-day tasks that Rotary clubs need to accomplish but it's greatest value is less obvious: it offers continuity of management in an environment where the management team can change from year to year.
That said, it's strengths include:
+ An Attendance Module that takes minutes to update but offers useful reports on individuals as well as overall club performance.
+ Membership records include a wealth of information
+ Email communication to club membership, custom lists, officers and committee members are easy to set up and send
+ Committee Management Module takes the committee experience to the next level.
+ Excellent support team and pretty good documentation

Nachteile: Any platform that is designed to be used by both beginners and experienced users will never make everyone happy. They tend to include compromises and limits.
A few of the negatives include:
+Volunteers Module is not intuitive to set up
+ Newsletter/Bulletin Module is hard grasp. It may be trying to do too much.
+ Custom Reports are still a mystery to me.
+ It needs an image editing component that will allow users to easily add captions to photos.

Kommentare: Have been secretary of our club for years, actually dating back to when some people didn't have email!
Features I use frequently:
MEMBER DATABASE is so great! Easy to use and members can update their own data! I can run reports with ease, particularly the annual ones for member data such as average member age, honorary, attendance exempt, etc. I can also send out an invitation to members to request them to review and update their own profiles, either global invitation or just to specific members.
Members no longer call me to ask for another member's contact info! They look it up themselves! (THIS is worth the money alone!)
EVENTS: Create your event, invite everyone, they respond and you print out your attendance list for ordering supplies/seats. Of course this only works well when members respond but Clubrunner makes it easy to send repeat invitations to members to virtually beat them about the heads and shoulders. You can also choose member types such as 'only send to non responders.' No sense haranguing the people who have already responded!
FRIEND LIST: How many times have you heard from a spouse, "I just found out about this event yesterday"? Any interested spouses can be added to a 'friends' list and you can also include them when you send out interesting emails. Also include people like your ADG and DG, for Really Important Events that you would like to invite them to.
EMAIL: So easy to use the email communication that several committee members of the Club have sent emails out on their own, without instruction! Easy to select 'recipients' for some or all. Sometimes I email through Clubrunner, and other times I....
DOWNLOAD MEMBER DATA: I LOVE this feature. I have a presaved report for generating email addresses and then I sometimes email from my personal account. I have also used this feature to calculate most recent members, longest members, sponsor lists, classification lists, etc. By downloading into excel, you can sort the data any way you need!
BIRTHDAY/ANNIVERSARY: You can run reports to help to recognize member birthdays and club anniversaries.
RI Integration! YAY! No separate data entry!
This software is very powerful and yet fairly simple to use. If I become stymied, I submit a 'support ticket' and receive a response within 18-30 hours. One time that I submitted a security issue, they corrected their software that same day! I have been thrilled to use this software to help us keep our club organized.

Vorteile: Stated above

Nachteile: Occasionally what I am trying to do is not clearly found.
Wish the member dues billing section was more flexible.

Kommentare: I've been a Rotarian since 1984. I've been involved both at the club and district level as we began to upgrade to a common computerized service function. Our district chose ClubRunner, and I've been involved with it since 2007. I am well familiar with club independent websites and their inability to keep up with changing technologies and their uselessness once key members left the club. Pre-ClubRunner efforts gave me less than desirable on-line experiences. ClubRunner changed all this. It took some time to learn the system, but I'm pleased that they have continued to upgrade their service, expand their service, and provide a variety of training tools to learn how to use the system. I was one of the system administrators in my district, and I found it easy to find and use the different tools available dealing with many of the aspects of the system. As an officer of my club, I found it easy to service the functions I needed there. I ran into occasional snags along the way, but they were usually cleared up quickly. Generally, I am very pleased with ClubRunner. I'm glad all the clubs in my district use it too. I don't use it on a daily basis like I have in the past, but I'm pleased to still see additions to service over time, and efforts being made to make the system more user friendly and more useful. Thanks.

Vorteile: I used the email system many times at the district level, along with finding and serving member info among the clubs in the district. I liked the district officer chart and the services that spun off that. I really like the document vault at the club level. We used to hold massive amounts in a cloud account, which is largely lost now for a variety of issues. Using ClubRunner to perform most of these functions electronically; and we used to store from paper records that were hard to retrieve -- all of this is good.

Nachteile: It took many of us a while to: 1) switch to computer data entry; and 2) grow comfortable with paying money for a service we never used before. It took a mind shift, and a step back to survey what the advantages might be. The advantages were not clear when we first got started using a paid computer service. It wasn't until I was club president in 2007-08 to see what a sorry lack of information existed between my club, our district and our International headquarters -- and our club was just down the street from the International headquarters.

Kommentare: We have been with Clubrunner since 2010 in its early days with Rotary clubs. The Clubrunner team has been incredibly responsive to Rotary clubs worldwide to adapt their software to meet our needs. We have seen a tremendous enhancement in the software over the years. Two of us began working with the product with little to no experience and have, with the new software, been able to develop a professional looking website that is interesting and engaging to those both within the Rotary community but also to those outside of Rotary. What a great marketing tool for clubs. We find the online tutorials are very helpful especially for new members learning how the site works. Keep up the great work!.

Vorteile: How easy it makes clubs look like they are great at web design. The availability of images and tools that are common in Rotary worldwide.

Nachteile: There is so much to learn about ClubRunner that as a volunteer you feel sometimes that you have simply touched the tip of the iceberg of its capacity. But the flip side is you can get something posted with relative ease with little understanding of how you did it ;-)

Kommentare: I have now been using ClubRunner at Club and District level for four years and rate it as well above average. It is a very good, cost effective, software designed with a clear understanding of Rotary and capable of application world wide. For the beginner and regular users help is never very far away (videos, FAQ's etc and an outstanding Customer service team). If it's used properly, ClubRunner can streamline Club and District administration and eliminate double handling through the ability to seamlessly integrate with My Rotary (rotary.org). My own experience (and that of others) is that it takes a while to get comfortable with the software and to understand how powerful and far reaching it is. But I think that this is mostly due to a lack of exposure to computing rather than a high degree of difficulty in using the software. Of course there's always room for improvement especially with the Event management, eCommerce and Meeting Responsibilities modules, but my impression is that the creators are well aware of and accept this reality and are committed to constant improvement. Every Club should have one!

Vorteile: Well designed, well targeted, cost effective, world wide application and integrated with rotary.org.

Nachteile: Event management, eCommerce and Meeting Responsibility modules let the software down