Review: ClubExpress.com for Figure Skating Club Management

When my friend took over our figure skating club’s ice contracts last year, she quickly found out that it was a full-time job, with no pay and very little thanks. Our system involved a clunky Excel spreadsheet, paper contracts, amounts due that might not be accurate, and phone calls/e-mails. She found herself making phone calls if the ice was full and there was a waiting list. Members e-mailed her about switching their contracted days because of medical emergencies, band concerts, and mosquito bites. Members begged for credits and didn’t want to pay extra to walk-on the ice.

What a nightmare.

A few months ago, she became tired of all of the work and the comments from her husband about how much time she spent on the contracts and how thankless people were. So, she scoured the Internet for a solution to the contracting nightmare. She found ClubExpress.com and it’s now the club management solution that our club uses.

Features. ClubExpress does everything a club needs: it provides a club website (hosting’s included), and has online functionality for: membership, club events (like ice contracts, test sessions, and competitions), membership database, reminder e-mails, committees, club documents, payments (with a link to QuickBooks*), reports, surveys, online newsletter, and FAQ. You can make custom pages too and display photo galleries.

Access. Members can login to have access to their accounts and see what ice they’ve signed up for and how much they owe. Committee members can have access to their own committee pages where they can update their sites themselves. Site administrators can have access to the entire site. ClubExpress comes with eight different permission levels, so the membership chair can poke around that database, but not the financial pages.

Set-up. My friend set up our club’s site with the help of ClubExpress. Their help is included in the fees that we pay each month. You don’t need to know any programming to set up the site, but if you do know some rudimentary HTML, it’s helpful. She doesn’t know any and our site works just fine.

Pricing. ClubExpress charges our club 40¢ per month for each active member. We’ve had to modify member definitions so we can adapt to the ClubExpress system and not pay 40¢ per person, but 40¢ per family. USFSA lists the skater as the first member and the parent as the second member. We’ve switched it around on our Club Express site because parents often have more than one kid in skating. When Mom is contracting for ice, we want to pay the fee for her once a month, not twice a month. So, the primary member is the parent on our club’s site and the junior members are listed under her for no extra charge.

There’s also a one-time set-up fee of $150 when the club first signs up with ClubExpress. It’s worth it, though. The cost covers importing your current data onto club express and phone support.

You’ll find that there’s a charge if you want ClubExpress to handle credit card transactions, too. We decided against accepting credit or debit cards on our site because the fees are pretty high for ice contracts. If a skater contracts for $500 worth of ice in a month, the processing fee is $12.15 (2.39% + 20¢). So, until we figure something else out, we’re still asking our members to send in checks for their fees instead of running their credit cards.

Free Trial. I think this is the best part. You can try it for 60 days for free. Set up a whole figure skating club website, show it to your board, invite them to play around on it. You’re limited to how many members you can enter on the trial (10) and you can’t process credit card payments, but enough of the features are included in the trial for you and your club’s board members to get a feel for it.

Bottom line: I think ClubExpress is 100 percent worthwhile. It doesn’t offer you a custom solution, so you’ll spend some think time trying to figure out how to make membership and other tasks appear in an intuitive way for your membership. However, there’s no way you’d be able to get a custom online club management solution for just $150 set-up fee. The cost of the site depends upon how many members your club has. It can be as little as $20 a month, which is a bargain. We still have some work to do on our club’s site. I’d like to see a more robust FAQ section, more documents online, and a photo gallery, but those things will come in time. Right now, I’m very happy that contracting and registering for events is much simpler than before. I would really recommend this solution to clubs that want to have a web portal for their membership.

You can explore ClubExpress’s demonstration club to see a model page. Really, you’ll only be able to explore the Membership area, but you’ll get the idea.

Well, parents, what do you think? Does your club have an online portal for membership to register for events? Do you have a great system for club management? How do you deal with the logistics of managing a club without making it your own personal nightmare? Do you have an inexpensive way of accepting credit cards? I’d love to hear about that. Please share in the comments!

Please note: Ice Mom, IceMom.net, and the Rinkformation sites receive no money for product reviews. Advertising is always separate from editorial content.

*Correction: Thank you, Dan, of ClubExpress for pointing out my error. ClubExpress links up to QuickBooks, not QuickBase.

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Photo credits:
Awake at Night: Alyssa Miller on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Club Express logo: ClubExpress.com
Nightmare [on Elm Street]: Eric Rae on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Hosington House: explorerTom on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Nightmare [glass house]: Cаvin 〄  / Andrew Kuznetsov on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Sleep City: Cаvin 〄  / Andrew Kuznetsov on Flickr.com Creative Commons