Apps to manage clubs - Spond?

Wife's hockey club uses Pitchero.

https://join.pitchero.com/club-app

Our club uses Spond. Seems to work well as an end user. No idea from the admin side.

My Wife's hockey club uses Teamer.

It's free, but she has nothing but bad words for it, so up to you if you want free or good 🙂

You can do all of that for free with Spond.

I've been using it for years now, as I help run two clubs.  Both were previously 'organised' using WhatsApp, Facebook, email etc, and it became increasingly hard to manage.  Spond is free (although if you want to use it to take/make payments it will take a %+fee).

We've got multiple groups set up within each club, each with its own group of helpers/admins.  It's simple to set up events, either ad-hoc or series and once events are accepted they drop into your iCal calendar, so it's easier to track alongside other things.  Attendance is easy to track too - you can download xls over any timeframe to show who attended what event, and so on.

The only slight downside to it I can think of is that there isn't an integration with social media (IG, FB etc), so it's really only a private system, for internal club stuff.

I’m on the committee of a running club and at the moment we have a pretty haphazard way of communicating with members. There are a few WhatsApp groups, e-mail and Facebook. I want to simplify this and think a simple app might be the way forward. I’ve used Spond briefly but would welcome other ideas..

We do all this via WA groups for a cycling club.

A ride leaders group to discuss planning.

An all on group for general chat about stuff.

Ride list with routes & leaders gets posted every week to the main WA group and a public FB group (for non members to be able to find).

Works very well. We have maybe 200 members and on a good day put out 60+ riders split into groups by ability.

 

We started using Spond as the lock-downs eased and we were limited to group sizes (I set it up for the club and it's really easy to use), we're still using it and have regular club rides and ad-hoc club nights through it. I'm not sure if we've set it up optimally for our club setup, but I'm not sure how to improve it without losing functionality and the ability to easily swap between groups. It's easy to share routes and send messages (although there is a limit to number of people you message so have to send multiple) - my main complaints would be the number of notifications received, it's another app as people are still trying to use fb, watsapp etc and it's a private group so non-members cannot see what we're doing (we have approx 160 club members and 1000+ people on the fb  page so those who haven't yet decided to join don't see what we're doing). If it were up to me we'd go back to the simple system we used to have and just use the fb group, but the majority of the club like it so it's here to stay (for now anyway)!

Spond admin here for our U14 rugby team. Good app and can do all you need it to. Happy for you to dm me if you need, but the Spond team are also excellent and very helpful.

Cycle Club uses the Stack Team app.

Views are mixed - it seems the most structured way of publicising the activities and rides, but access is limited to our 400+ members, so we still end up repeating ourselves on the main FB chat group and the club Strava page.

General view seems to be its good for members but an extra burden on ride captains

Not everyone does social media, or does the "preferred" method of social media, emails probably still the best way to get important messages out.

Whatever you do, make sure you turn off follow up comments. I get 1 message from the club organiser then 20 messages going "thanks for the info".

Spond seems as good as any for me.

our club has just moved to Spond in place of FB. @theotherjonv could perhaps provide more feedback on its usage.

Our club uses Sportmember - we did consider spond but it didn’t have the functionality we needed as the time.

We use it as membership database,membership fee collection, race calendar, attendance record, volunteering platform and website host, back end is easy to use and member app is good. Its great for communication direct to members and has proved invaluable for event updates as you can send notifications rather than having to rely on email or social media.

We replaced multiple platforms with Sportmember, so much so that we hardly use Facebook anymore - we are now One click registration for events

Daughter’s netball club has recently moved to Spond - works OK though there’s still an issue with people using the WhatsApp group it was meant to replace.

Ability to communicate to whole of club.

This will be the problem for any system.  Spond works well if you install the app and turn on notifications etc.  Do all your people have smartphones?  Are all your people likely to actually install an App?  Although Apps are supposed to be "intuitive" don't be surprised if you have to send instructions for anything that's not 100% obvious.

We use spond for Junior member comms to parents.  We don't have the juiors directly on there at the moment for "child protection reasons" - but I'm surprised if there is not a good way to manage who can post what to who.

IMHO the trick is not just about the medium of communication but the quality and frequency.  If you always send a clear, concise, well written email at 9am on Thursday it will get the attention you want.  If you end up sending on Wed night, then a correction on Thursday lunchtime and a last minute update on Friday night that's when its gets missed or confusing.  Similarly Whatsapp can work if you focus the conversations - one giant group may be a swamp of useful stuff and crap.  They have a new "Communities" structure designed to have many groups around one common theme - e.g. "Big Bike Club" has subgroups of "MTB trips" and "Road bikes" "Sunday Club run" "racing" "social" etc.

Seems to be a good consensus for Spond. I help out at a rugby club and they use Pitchero.

I'd avoid that if you can. It doesn't sound like it does quite what you want anyway but it is frustrating. There are lots of silly wee bugs - things like you schedule a session and it creates it (and circulates notices etc.) for an hour earlier than you choose. Assuming that's a timezone GMT/BST confusion thing. Lately it started getting confused when parents had kids in 2 different age groups and they were receiving notices for one age group with the other kid's name on it...

Just reviving this thread. I'm about to help a local running club update their website. It's currently on Wix and the easiest thing would be to edit the current site, or make a new one within Wix and retire the old one. But, our club uses Spond and I see Spond now offer their own website builder that integrates with the app. Ideal for managing membership, payments, events, etc, all in one place (across website and app).

Anyone used this? It's potentially a neat solution though does tie us to the platform.

Son's cycling club uses Spond and it works a treat.  They even have a small charge taken for each booking, useful for paying for expenses etc.  They book multiple sessions for different levels and activities.

@vww - I hadn't realised that there was a website builder too. I will ask our web guy if he's looked into using it.

Look into connectMyClub - very feature rich. Our 180-200 member run club uses it for all functions, from announcements to voting to signing up to training sessions (many options) to announcements to ordering and paying for club kit!