ClubExpress

Reasonably good site for hosting club web presence

Kommentare: The support has been great. I work in a support role in my day job and I must say calling CE is a frictionless experience. I've emailed on a Saturday or Sunday and gotten responses back during that time - usually because my question is either answered, or the issue fixed. Overall, my experience with Club Express has been good. There's a long list of things I'd love to improve, but for what the software does, it does it reasonably well.

Vorteile:

The hosting software does a reasonably good job in helping create a packaged online presence. For someone not familiar with creating a website there is a lot to be done when creating a site, from the server setup (and administration), creating databases, store functionality (credit card transactions) and other programming. Club Express has all of this packaged up into one reasonably easy to deploy environment. There are certain methodologies which you have to understand in order to best use the site software, but this isn't any different than learning any other software package. With any software/site support is absolutely essential to helping smooth out the rough edges and I've found Club Express support to be very helpful and I can usually get my issues squared away within one call and certainly less than a day.

Nachteile:

While the site is easy to put up, there are some areas where the design is a bit clunky and challenging to use. As long as you stay within their parameters you're probably be fine, but no single organization fits perfectly into that box. Sometimes it's easier to change the code than it is to change the organization culture... other times, the culture has to change to fit the code. Neither of those operations can be very comfortable. One usually requires money, the other usually requires many meetings and often tears as old ways have to change. The site software tries to do many things and given the demand of everyone going mobile these days, the mobile software falls short. It's far FAR easier to to manage on a desktop than on a phone or tablet. Their recently released texting functionality is a great example. Neat feature - but completely unusable unless you're at a computer. Can you do it on a phone? Sure - but the mirad of menus one has to navigate through to send a text makes it useless. It's better just to start a group text before the event and use that going forward.

Easy and Flexible Software

Kommentare: Overall, we are very happy with everything that ClubExpress provides for us. Their software and services are priced very reasonable, and the administrative tools make it very easy to perform weekly and monthly tasks to manage our members and their interests.

Vorteile:

This software has all the tools necessary to build really great web pages for our sailing club. All the administrative features are available for managing our club members, and all the tools work well to manage our club documents and photos. The membership administration is superb, since it allows our members to manage their own contact information, and profiles. At the same time we can administer all our member subscriptions and activities in one place. Membership renewal is very important for our club, and the ClubExpress administrative features allow us to simplifiy this annual process.

Nachteile:

Only a few hiccups were discovered. Originally we had some difficulty uploading groups of photos into our club's photo albums, but that issue seems to be resolved now. One other frustration is managing our historic documentation. There appears to be no way to view documents online, so members who wish to view an historic document must download the document to their computer. Consequently, we need to shrink the size of our documents, by dividing them up into smaller categories. That way the smaller documents are quicker to download, while our larger documents take much more time to download. We find this to be somewhat cumbersome with current technology.

Please make it better. It could be so much better.

Kommentare: They are all about jamming in features with little thought about design and functionality. There needs to be a [SENSITIVE CONTENT] at CE. You have lost customers to Helpful Village because of the difficulty in using the software, and HV costs much more from what I understand and offers fewer features. Read that sentence again... HV costs more and offers fewer features, but people make the switch because of the difficulty in using CE.

Vorteile:

It has A LOT of features, and support staff is usually responsive.

Nachteile:

There are really too many features and few of them work intuitively. We are an organization that works with older adults and we asked CE to increase font sizes across the platform, which was done in some areas and not in others. For years I've asked CE to get rid of the "save twice" issue when adding Secondary members. They have ignored my request for years and I've wasted massive time explaining this same glitch to our members.

Very robust, but sometimes clunky

Kommentare: Overall we've been happy with the product, and are just really getting into the depths to which it can help our organization grow and prosper. The customer service is top notch, quick to respond, and willing to make adjustments just for us. This is a very powerful web service and we are looking to getting to fully know it!!

Vorteile:

The ClubExpress system is very robust with a very wide variety of modules, and endless ways to customize them. We are only 6 months in to using it, and I am sure we have not yet figured out all of the ways or organization can benefit. The email editor, once learned, is very powerful and can be manipulated with a wide variety of options. Customer service is top notch!

Nachteile:

Some of the procedures to complete steps can be a bit cumbersome: for example if you make a change in a change box, select save on the change box, but forget to select save at the bottom of the page, all changes are lost. Reports seem to take one or two dialog boxes to generate (could be condensed). Web editor feels clunky. Some editors have limited font options, and edits sometimes don't take on the first try.

Club Express Fan

Kommentare: Very, very positive. Tech support is great, accessable, and quite clear in their responses.

Vorteile:

It's tailored to clubs & social organizations making it's functionality ideal for us. The modules are, I believe, are unique to our (clubs) environment.

Nachteile:

Formating is a bit of a PIA and can be cumbersome. Picture & photo upload is limited to resident computers only. There's no direct access to social media or cloud storage which is a definite negative. Event questions are very limited and do not offer If-Or linking. Event registrations can be confusing for the non- tech users/ members.

Meh

Kommentare: I was here with ClubExpress was chosen by management but had very little training on it as I left the organization shortly after. Now I am back in a management capacity and there are still many things that are clunky about the platform. It seems to take a very long time to get the hang of the ins and outs and has caused at least one ex-employee to cry. Seriously. I have stuck with it, and it does become easier, but SOOOO much time to figure some of it out. The videos have been a bit helpful but often it is just easier to ask a colleague how to do something in the system rather than have to sit thru a 10 minute video and only have 1/2 of the question answered.

Vorteile:

It keeps all of our customer history information in one place.

Nachteile:

It can be rather clunky and sometimes just will not save things they way they were typed or created. It is not very intuitive and there always seems to be a 'work around' needed.

Sadly not happy with ClubExpress

Kommentare: I enjoy the support we get from customer service, but some other members feel like they've been rude or unhelpful. If you would like more information, I would like to put you in touch with several of our members/admins who can discuss why they are disappointed with the product.

Vorteile:

Ability to create paid for events. Lots of options and functions for creating pages and customization, especially if you understand computers a little. You don't have to be completely computer savvy to use this product.

Nachteile:

Hard to get around, I feel like I'm clicking all over the place. My organization really dislikes the forums and we need to reset settings, but we'd have to go through 600+ users to reset each setting individually due to an error during set up. The forums seem to be either too difficult for users or somehow not engaging enough for them. I think my organization is looking for a platform like Facebook, so communication between members is easier. Poor chat service. Classifieds are not easy to use. Formatting issues often happen and s

Automated Membership Management

Kommentare: We have recently updated from an antiquated system that was not meeting our community's needs. There are additional features we would appreciate, but are currently enjoying the modern, user-friendly interface. Their user manual is complete and thorough, help buttons are available on all screens for users and admins, and phone or email support is quick and efficient.

Vorteile:

ClubExpress reduced our workload for membership processes by 95%, automating our correspondence, dues collection, and renewals.

Nachteile:

Ours is a parent-child group, and we find it frustrating that families are not linked in the directory. Our members organize events, but an admin has to assist every time there is a fee. Our membership manager has to separately track additional criteria for renewal.

Club Grows as we Utilize New Features

Kommentare: Their support team never lets us down. Quick responses to our queries and happy to keep answering questions until we are satisfied.

Vorteile:

Fulfilled our need to have member management together with communications and finances

Nachteile:

Now that we use most of its features, we find that volunteers who want to help with it are intimidated by its process. Plus, because we use only volunteers and we oversee so many members, we have to be careful about who we allow into the system to maintain member privacy.

After reviewing several AMS and trialing a couple we chose Club Express

Kommentare: As this is our first AMS, the migration from a proprietary database system into club express was very easy. Passing our data through a spreadsheet to re-format it according to the spreadsheets they providing making the data upload very simple. We just started our annual renewal cycle of members on Jan 1 and will look forward to hearing our uses thoughts on it at the spring meeting.

Vorteile:

It's all encompassing with one additional feature that many others didn't have. We were able to point our domain at our ClubExpress site and through them create aliases for all the officers, the committees/forums etc. that can be maintained through the site via memberships. These email addresses allow our board and users to interact via email the same as they would with direct email addresses or using a listserv.

Nachteile:

They don't support DSEC/DMARC yet for email systems so aren't able to tag outbound email as authoritative for our domain so some mail receivers will put inbound email in a users spam email box. Also their email relay has a delay unlike many listservs and only processes mail a few times/hour.

The Great and Not So

Kommentare: We have observed a moderate increase in fee-based memberships which helps to support our political efforts in the county. The integration of membership management and related financial transactions gives us much better visibility into our operations and gives us the ability to identify and work with those members who have demonstrated a strong financial commitment to our organization and its work. As noted in the Cons above, we have been quite disappointed with event management (it is way too hard to configure and manage events especially when the majority of people interested in and attending such events are not actually formal members in the CE member database) and email communications for our audience of over 10,000 interested parties but not formal members. We have lowered our expectations for a single system to do everything for our large, county-based political organization interacting with a very large population of people most of whom are not formal members of the organization. I would not recommend ClubExpress as the single, do-it-all system for other such political organizations, but I would recommend it for formal member management and web presence.

Vorteile:

The product is very good for managing formal memberships within our county political organization. We were able to configure not only the usual demographic information but could also create custom data elements to identify and track members who have formal voting rights for the business of the organization. Managing and maintaining our web presence is easy without having to resort to web/HTML coding which to date is an option but not one we have needed.

Nachteile:

As we intended, we migrated our custom website and member management system, our third-party event management services, and our third-party email communication services all to ClubExpress. After moving all of these, we found great value for the website and member management functionality. Unfortunately, the email communication and event management services in ClubExpress have failed significantly to meet our needs, so we have quit using those services in ClubExpress and gone back to our former service providers, MailChimp and Eventbrite, for those services. This has resulted in incremental costs we had planned to eliminate.

RinMyVillage

Kommentare: Is essential to our operation and we could not operate without it.

Vorteile:

This software is absolutely essential for our organization. Without it we would not be able to coordinate the efforts of volunteers and would have to have paid staff. That would add hundreds of dollars to the nominal cost we now charge our elderly members who receive services. I've been able to operate as an online organization without a physical office for the last dozen years. This means that volunteers can work from their homes coordinating services and finding volunteers for members. The software handles all of our renewals even sending out snail mail letters to members who do not use computers when they need to renew. Our website is completely generated using the club Express software.

Nachteile:

There are no major features that we can think of that are missing. That's not a coincidence over the last dozen years club Express as responded by adding those features we think we need sometimes involving major development effort. Only mind tweaks to increase efficiency are needed from time to time.

Don't look any further

Kommentare: Seven years ago I was on the team to find and implement website software for our growing club. We searched for a year but when we found Club Express and worked with them and the demo software we were all convinced that for our purposes this was the best solution that we had seen. We have been using the software now for 6 years and have no desire to look elsewhere. From day one their software support team help desk has been the best I have ever worked with in my 35 years of messing with computers. They respond quickly, speak English and when we are having a difficult time implementing something they will often do the coding for us at no extra charge. Early on we had a very complicated event/registration we wanted to get on the calendar. I told the support person what we wanted/needed and he did it for us. We have copied and modified that event several times since with little difficulty.

Vorteile:

I love that it is WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get. I don't have to know HTML or any other programming language. I love that it is user-friendly. I love that I can delegate certain pages and/or functions to other folks and they can't mess in areas that they don't belong. I love the unlimited space available at no extra charge. I love the modularity. There is a module for almost anything a club would ever want to do. I love the clear and extensive documentation that is always up to date. I love that there are constant improvements and additional functionality being added. There are many more things to love but most of all I love the stellar support via email and/or phone.

Nachteile:

I don't like that there is no way to download more than one photo at a time. Multi-photo uploads are supported but not downloads. I don't like that photo searches bring up multiple instances of the same photo and only returns 100 photos instead of all that meet the criteria. There needs to be better ways to manage photos. Maybe an interface like Windows Explorer.f The survey module needs to do better reporting of results. Maybe something similar to what Survey Monkey does.

Complete Club Management Platform

Kommentare: This has been extremely well received by our members and we noticed a huge uptick in applications for membership at our gun club. The ease of use of the platform makes it simple and easy to update and provide as much information as we can to members and the public alike to increase interest and participation in our Club activities.
Members are still complimenting our website committee and with online renewals the administrative savings are immense. Online renewals were going to be a make or break with our Club and ClubExpress and they exceeded on all ends. I set up the renewals incorrectly and one phone call and ClubExpress was able to fix my mistake. Members were shocked how easy renewals are while still being through: we can display our range rules and members have to sign off on them before renewing. Finally, we've seen an uptick in our optional raffle ticket purchases for our annual gun raffle. Members were able to easily add on their purchases and since the funds go into different "accounts" in ClubExpress' log, we can easily separate membership dues from raffle ticket purchases.

Vorteile:

The front end for website creation is simple and easy to use, but the system is extremely robust in the back end (administrative systems). Right now we are going through renewals and nearly everyone was shocked by how simple it is to navigate. It's hard to list just one: they really thought of everything and keep updating and adding more features to their platform. The system is extremely through. Finally the two times were I had issues, ClubExpress has answered the call and had the problems solved extremely fast; they know their stuff and and fix problems quickly.

Nachteile:

Knowing what we know now, the original set-up costs were higher than we needed to purchase. However, knowing what we know now, we would have definitely chosen ClubExpress again; we see no reason to change from ClubExpress anytime soon.

Good Software for Clubs

Kommentare: I can easily get the reports that I need: lists of people who have purchased tickets; or lists of people buying memberships either through PayPal (or finances application) or by cash or check. I like the Event Calendar portion of the software. Most often I am entering just Basic Information and Location. I like being able to add a linkable email address or website, and to include a contact phone number. Having a button to include a hot link to a map application is great. The ability to make multiple copies of an event, either recurring weekly or monthly, is wonderful. I am still learning some of the other features such as having an event that spans multiple days. The Money tab features are broad, but include the things that I need as a treasurer. I primarily use Trans/Payments by Account to get information on activity. This I check almost daily. User Payments/Credits lets me see who has paid by cash/check versus by PayPal. Finally being able to click on an event on our home page, go to Administrator Option, and then create a report makes preparation for a concert very easy.

Vorteile:

Club Express is easy to navigate. The learning curve was relatively brief for the things that I use: aspects of the People tab to locate members or update membership, the Website tab to access and update the Event Calendar, and the Money tab to keep tabs on purchases of tickets or memberships. The Event Calendar is full featured. Some events recur with slight change from month to month, and this is easy to enter. Other events might recur irregularly, but it is easy to search for an event and duplicate it with changes. There are lots of options in some of the menus, and it takes some time to determine what is the best choice. I like to view some reports online as a pdf, other times I prefer downloading in MS Excel format or csv format.

Nachteile:

No real issues anywhere. The wealth of options can be overwhelming at first, but it is quick to learn.

General review of Club Express

Kommentare: It meets our needs, informing members of upcoming events and the details, tracks participants, payments and communicate club information.

Vorteile:

It is easy for members to use, they can check for available rides with the basic information they need to make a choice.

Nachteile:

I find it difficult to customize, I have made progress but there are more things I would like to do. It seems to be on a base template which itself can't be altered, although some of the content area can be customized.

Clunky, not flexible

Vorteile:

I find CE not especially easy to use. Your telephone tech support is pretty good, but at times, we even stymy them with report request or tech issues.

Nachteile:

Trying to create an emailing is frustrating. Elements jump around, text doesn't look the same in the emailing form as it does when sent in an email. I have to go back and forth and back and forth to make sure what I see on the emailing form comes out correctly in the actual email. I also find searches and reports time-consuming. First, it's difficult to customize a report. Second, I often have to sort and re-sort reports to get the exact data I need and often have to do a manual count. Also, this year we transitioned away from a dues-paying membership organization. We call former members Friends. There is little flexibility to easily customize Club Express's membership model to our new model, even tho we need and use many of the CE capabilities.

Well worth the money and set up

Vorteile:

ClubExpress has always been able to help with any of the issues that we have had. We love that the membership has access to their information at all times and is able to change things as needed without having to contact another member to have it updated.

Nachteile:

ClubExpress tries to be everything to everyone and sometimes it doesn't work. Members having to log in to register for an event has been a challenge for our group since many say that they dont want to log in to register. They simply want to point, click, submit. Also would love to have the ability for the calendar to integrate with Google Calendar or have a way for members to subscribe to the calendar.

Ride Yourself Fit Website

Kommentare: Ride Yourself Fit is a non-profit 501c3 club for bicycling, walking and healthy eating with an overall motto of fun, fitness and fellowship. We are able to get the necessary information out to our membership and the general public in an easy and complete manner using this software.

Vorteile:

The ease of use and the variety of options that fit the club's needs for a website. Periodic updates are received and the manual contains good information. The event calendar has many options and is easy to develop for various events. Registrations and payments for events is simple as well and membership renewals.

Nachteile:

Would like to see a few more options that allow individual users to develop and save information. As an example, RYF uses a variety of colors that define specific programs and activities. These colors are not part of the standard colors offered by Club Express. The webmaster must use the HTML color code number each time that specific color is desired. There should be an option to save these specific colors in a semi-permanent basis for future use. Also some improvement could be better interaction with an Excel spreadsheet for downloading large spreadsheets and data.

End Board Member Burnout

Kommentare: More members, easier event planning, and marketing. We were recognized by our Global leadership for doubling our membership 2 years after implementation. Other chapters have asked for our help in implementing the same software and procedures.

Vorteile:

We used free tools like Gmail, MailChimp, Weebly and Paypal. Nothing spoke to each other and our membership database was a nightmare. Membership, programming, and treasurer each kept separate databases and our records were a mess. Our committee did an exhaustive review of 5 software packages before deciding on Club Express. Now everything is in one place. We have doubled our membership and cut the workload for board members in half. 2 years after implementation our chapter was recognized for our leadership. Club Express was the reason. Simply automating renewals and dues reminders was huge. Tracking attendance and collecting satisfaction polls helped up to create programs that better serve our membership. The integration with the website keeps everyone informed. New events show up on the calendar. New members show up in our searchable member database from the homepage.

Nachteile:

Software this powerful also requires some learning. Many of the functions have small "icons" instead of drop-down menus. It has taken me a while to learn the iconography and I often click the wrong option before finding the one I really want. I wish it was more intuitive, but that is a very subjective statement. Intuitive to me may not be that way for you. We have 3 board members that have become experts on Club Express and we have not had any issues training the next generation as they take over our chapter.

Membership Management Made Easy

Kommentare: Our overall experience with Club Express has been wonderful. We joke that this has brought our Club into the 21st Century! We have 500 members and growing and without Club Express, I don't know how we would have managed!

Vorteile:

The ease of use of the Club Express software as an administrator is what I like about it most. We went from managing our membership on paper to this system, and it has been a life saver. Our old website had no functionality and was only informational. We now have all of our membership information in ONE place for all admins to see in ONE place, and no longer have boxes and boxes of paperwork and endless spreadsheets. We also now can manage and coordinate events with our membership, take credit card payments online, take in new members thru our website, and facilitate our membership renewal seamlessly online. Reporting in Club Express is also endless. You can extract information on your membership, financials, communication...to your hearts content. I also really like the fact that Club Express regularly makes upgrades to their system, to incorporate new features. The attachments upgrade was one of the features that have made our renewal process much more streamlined.

Nachteile:

Having minimal experience setting up a website, I found the construction and editing of the Home Page to be a bit confusing and difficult. In particular the upper part - where the login and profile sit. Luckily we signed up for a website technician to built it for us, enabling us to focus on the main content of our site.

It's okay

Kommentare: I feel our experience has been "okay." It meets our needs to have a website and create events for our group. Unfortunately, very few members visit our site regularly or care about the site. That's not Clubexpress's fault, but if we could have a more userfriendly, visually appealing, and interactive site, which might help. I've had board members suggest looking for a different website administrator program.

Vorteile:

It's very customizable and works well for our association. We're able to collect dues and fees, which is very convenient. We're able to keep track of memberships and create events, which is necessary for what we do. I like be able to send emails to our membership and adjust the look or our site.

Nachteile:

Because it's so customizable, it's difficult to administrate. I'm not an internet site builder or computer whiz, so I've had to learn a lot on my own, which has taken a lot of time. Most of the time I've reached out to customer service, the representative has been very helpful and friendly. Several times it seemed I was bothering them by calling, and they made me feel stupid because I didn't know certain things about the site.

The customer support alone is well worth the investment

Kommentare: It's been great. Members are using our system more. We are disseminating more info through our members only portal and having coordinators for different features have helped spread the work around more efficiently.

Vorteile:

I liked the fact that as we were converting from another platform without support how accomodating CE was. As I was building our site from the ground up without much experience in website building, they stopped in whenever I hit a roadblock and I didn't incur fees other that out monthly fees. Over the, CE has continued to respond to issues we encountered and address them quickly and communicate often with progress or alternate solution to solve our problems. We are a volunteer organization which often requires the time of a regular paid position and CE has made it easy to support our members and provide a much needed member management solution that we did not have previously.

Nachteile:

There are a few features that I would like to see implemented but nothing that are deal breakers for us.bi would like to see more opportunities to export data and filter it other than in the canned reports but overall it works for us.

ClubExpress for a Large Car Club

Kommentare: For the past 10 years we have been able to do online membership signup, renewals, and reminders. This has resulted in significant savings in postage and supplies plus increased renewals. We publish a monthly newsletter that we used to mail to our members. Since ClubExpress, we've gone to email notification with the newsletter available online. This, alone, saved the Club over $18,000 the first year.

Vorteile:

ClubExpress allows us to communicate instantly with our 1,200 members. It also makes it easy keep our members informed of upcoming events and activities. It allows us to register both members and non-members for these events for both single and multiple activities and run meaningful reports about them. Ten years ago we had to use a paid third party to maintain our website. It was never up to date. ClubExpress lets us design and maintain our present site internally for free. The Club has an annual event that encompasses three days of events and includes17 different activities. ClubExpress makes it possible for us to do online registration, take credit card payments, and administer the event. We couldn't do it without it.

Nachteile:

Custom reporting could be better. As it is, all data collected for an event can be output to Word, Excel, CSV, and pdf. It can then be manipulated but not always easily.

Excellent for member and event management

Kommentare: It has made our membership and event management much simpler resulting in more of our volunteers being willing to help with administration

Vorteile:

All processes follow a consistent methodology, so once you learn how to do one thing, it's easy to learn the rest. The website is consistent with modern practices for using software unlike some older membership and event management systems

Nachteile:

A very small criticism - It's too easy forget to hit "Save and Make Active" at the bottom of editing screens and so lose all your work