The club runs on people who already have jobs.
Sympodial holds the roster, the dues, the renewals and the pages the public sees, so the handful of volunteers keeping your club going can get back to the part they actually signed up for.
First club aboard: Herrington Harbour Sailing Association, around 300 dues-paying members, plus families and the volunteers who pay nothing.
Sooner or later, none of you will be running this club.
For most clubs it is somewhere between eighteen months and three years. A new secretary inherits a login, a spreadsheet nobody understands, and a shrug.
Whatever you are running on now was hard to learn once. It will be hard to learn again, for the next person, and the one after her. That cost never appears on the invoice, and it is the largest thing your club actually pays.
Sympodial is built to be handed over. Things are called what they are. Dues are dues, renewal is renewal, a household is a household. Nothing important lives in one volunteer's memory, and nobody needs a training session to find the roster.
Summer. The part everybody actually joined for.
Nobody joined your club to receive administration. This is the stretch where the software's entire job is to stay out of the way.
Photography for art direction only. Replace with real club photography before launch.
The quiet stuff, handled.
None of this is why anybody joined your club. All of it is why somebody on your committee is awake at eleven on a Tuesday.
Renewals that chase themselves.
A note at thirty days, another at seven, one on the day. One per household rather than one per person, because a family is a family. Nobody is asked twice for money they already sent.
Your members never learn anything.
No passwords, no accounts to set up, no reset request landing in your inbox on a Sunday night. A link arrives by email and they are in.
Paying dues and holding office are different things.
Your treasurer is not an administrator because she is on the family plan. Name the roles your club really has, hand them out, and let the volunteer who has never paid a penny run the regatta.
Bring the roster you already keep.
Upload the export from whatever you are leaving and say which column is which. Import it twice and nothing duplicates. A bad row fails on its own and names its own spreadsheet line.
Nobody volunteered to be the website person.
Your public pages should take twenty minutes and look like your club. Home, about, join, contact, in your colours and your logo, at your own address. Not ours, and not 2004's.
Everyone in this market sells you everything. Here is what we have not built.
You would find out eventually. Better now, from us, than in month three.
- Taking dues by card. Members paying online, money settling into your club's account rather than ours. Next, and the one we refuse to rush.
- Documents. Folders and files, shared with the same roles you already hand out.
- Event registration. Member, non-member and guest prices, with a waiting list.
- Newsletters to the whole club. Deliberately later. Mailing three hundred people badly is worse than not mailing them, so keep sending from whatever you use today.
- Your own web address. For now you live at yourclub.sympodial.com. Your own domain comes after the pilot.
Send us your roster. We will send back your club.
Not a demo full of somebody else's members. Your actual people, your membership types, your renewal dates, loaded and waiting, so your board can look at the real thing and decide.
We are taking clubs on one at a time. There is no price list yet, and we are not going to invent one to fill this space.