ClubExpress

Pros

In ClubExpress, the Control Panel serves as the portal to the program's inner workings, and it conceals an astonishing array of features. Every piece of information that you enter into the Club Express windows grants you more authority and influence over your organization, whether it be a club, a league, or an interest group. It is similar to a massive relational database.

Cons

There's a lot of bureaucracy that makes everything tough to use. We've had to fork over more money in places where we've run into the immovable barrier. The website's features are clumsy at best.

Pros

ClubExpress is very easy for our members to use. The event calendar (our Ride Calendar) is intuitive and registering for Events (Rides) is very simple. The Membership Directory is fantastic as is the number of privacy options each member has to determine what information to make available on the Directory. The Communications options make it easy to communicate with the full membership, or any defined subset of the membership. Accepting payments is easy with a Merchant Account. There are numerous customizable system notifications that will alert users and administrators of important items such as registration for an event, event cancellation, payment receipt, payment due, etc. The system has robust support for membership options and membership renewals. Overall the feature set is very robust.

Cons

The system is not the easiest to learn from an administrative standpoint. I’m a retired software professional and I found it very frustrating. I knew it could do what I wanted to do, but finding out how to do it was very cumbersome. The on-line help is not that helpful. However, the ClubExpress Support Team is fantastic. They are very responsive and helpful. I just felt I had to use the Support Function way too frequently during initial setup & configuration. So, it’s a steep learning curve, but it’s not hard to maintain once you crest that curve. The other major issue for us is the complexity of the Event Creation/Maintenance function. We host over 500 rides per year meaning we create over 500 Events. We have a cadre of approx 50 ride leaders who create these events. I had to manually grant each of these individuals the necessary admin privileges to create calendar events and train them how to create events. There are way more options than we use on our events which makes it quite confusing for many. I would love to be able to hide 75% of the options on the event creation pages.

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Reasons for Choosing ClubExpress

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Reasons for Switching to ClubExpress

Pros

Your offering has the best value for the money. The customer support is wonderful, second to none. The constant attention to upgrades - and that you plan them ahead - shows incredible organization and constant dedication to your customers and to your product.

The features are very robust. It shows that you are really listening closely to your customers' requests - perhaps better than any competitor out there - and responding to them! I do believe that it is possible to offer robust features in a more simplified and intuitive way.

The longevity of several staff members is very impressive, and their dedication to problem-solve with and remember their customers' specific needs and preferences is VERY impressive. I have felt that on several occasions.

When asked if I'd recommend Club Express to others, I want it to be a 10 based on how outstanding you are for the reasons above. Yet, the feedback I receive from many of our members - and the amount of volunteers' time for the learning curve - makes it difficult to recommend it to other organizations' executives when they may not have the same level of volunteer support. Make your site more intuitive and efficient and I will gladly recommend you to everyone!

Cons

1. Club Express focuses on developing a new function, rather than first on how the user can best experience it. I suggest greater ease and intuition (UI/UX) with feature development. E.g., when the new Events/Calendar functionalities rolled out 1-2 years ago, it greatly increased the complexity (and number of mouse clicks) to set up an event. More features are okay, but should be intuitive and efficient.
2. Your data organization is not conducive to simple, obvious changes. Good, intuitive design does not require the tiny-text prompts that I turn off, but have to do so in the site code. What should be simple changes are stuck behind the organization of how the database was structured. Get rid of the instruction prompts (obvious to modern-day computer users); do not let them affect Chapter Finder and other key functions. Information should be built separate from functionality.
3. More attractive, fully responsive template options
4. Mobile set-up (duplicative efforts) should not be needed and currently degrade for tablet
5. Give us more CSS control; place classes on div's, etc. so that our CSS can target them
6. Member registration MUST be simplified; I detailed a PPT of 20 ways to improve it and was shocked that none of the modifications were possible.
7. If you had a modern-looking, fluidly-flowing app that automatically input information from the website databases (directory and design), then you would rock our world and really step it up in many organizations' eyes. :-)

Pros

The Club Express (CE) platform is intuitive, modular, adaptable and continually developing and growing. As a non-profit membership professional association, with only one employee, Executive Officer (EO), and a bunch of volunteers, the 7 level password feature has been incredibly useful in terms of organisational management; being able to assign members access to a single page and/or module etc spreads the work load and, in turn, creates space for the EO to focus on other matters such as developing strategic initiatives.

As a single employee association, the exceptional Club Express support back-up affords extra support for our members as well as making the association less reliant on the tacit knowledge of a single person. In terms of creating our site, this was done by the EO with CE support - no developer expenses required:-)

Our association has 26 thematic groups, which our members can join. The Sub Groups CE module has empowered the conveners of our thematic groups who can be administrators of their own groups. Among other benefits, this feature has streamlined communication between the conveners and their members and has also reduced the EO's administration time spent on thematic groups, again creating space for the EO to dedicate to other matters.

Above all, the fact that CE are continuing developing their platform means that if it doesn't currently do something we want, we know that it will likely be doing it down the track.

Cons

The Club Express default email address (where our newsletters and renewal reminders etc come from) was blocked by all university firewalls and some industry workplaces. This was not a CE issue per se but it was a hiccup we thought we'd covered by emailing all members ahead of the website transition asking them to white-list the address.

It's a small thing but we'd prefer they weren't called Club Express! We get why they have that name but it doesn't have the right tone for us as a professional association. At the end of the day, their platform proved too good to knock back just because of the company name!

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing ClubExpress

Reasons for Switching to ClubExpress

Pros

ClubExpress has many modules that helps organize our running club's organization. The membership module works flawlessly with little to no manual intervention required from administrators. The website generation tools make it easy to create new web pages to support club programs. Event creation and registration is valuable and versatile. Communication tools allow us to create surveys, polls, and email blasts to the membership. ClubExpress keep adding new capabilities like apps and text messaging to keep up with the current preferred methods of receiving notifications. Platform upgrades add new features and fix bugs to improve the user experience. The money management module works well with no issues. Above all, ClubExpress provides all these capabilities with the flexibility to tailor the privacy of content and its members.

Cons

Some content generation can be difficult to wrangle with the supplied tools after a platform upgrade. Some module upgrades to address bugs and customer requests can be a challenge to get working.

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Pros

THe software is stable, relatively easy to use and has the functionality that are needed for a non-profit organization or club. Overall the tool is a great solution. I don't have to spend hours updating a CMS system and no longer have to worry about hackers attacking my site and having to fix/rebuild it. The support staff is excellent and know their product and its capabilities very well.

Cons

Some of the interfaces are a little klugey to use. They are constantly improving them however. There are some limitations to what can be done in terms of customization and tailoring the workflow and overall appearance of the site. Nothing that is a showstopper, but it has slowed us down a couple of times. I do wish they would update some of the templates and have more responsive options.

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Reasons for Switching to ClubExpress

Pros

ClubExpress appears to be the prefect solution for our nonprofit art organization as an affordable integrated member management program with the added web-based features we desired (directory, calendar, storefront, photo albums, custom video page). We appreciate the available tutorials and webinars. Our set up is not yet complete, so we are not presently fully operational, but we anticipate that our first impressions will soon proven correct.

Cons

We're behind schedule on completing our set up for various reasons, but from what we have been able to learn and accomplish so far, we found some of our biggest challenges in the areas related to edit windows with what we perceive as inconsistencies with tools and formats (i.e., we can't add a linked button to the homepage but we can accomplish this task in a news article). We're used to the ease of "drag and drop" templates and applications that we use now, so we are struggling a bit to learn how to use the new tools, symbols and options being offered that are not as intuitive to us. We're challenged with the photo upload variations. Volunteer opportunities don't have the option to be added to the calendar. Storefront products can't be copied to save time in adding multiple inventory variations of the same product type. The program allows for multi-level Membership Types but we had to pay extra for a customization to show the Membership Type in the Member Directory. This being said, we are confident that ClubExpress will prove to be the best solution for our needs and that we will continue to learn and appreciate what ClubExpress has to offer.

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Reasons for Choosing ClubExpress

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Reasons for Switching to ClubExpress

Pros

The ClubExpress platform is a perfect fit for an all volunteer non-profit like Groton Neighbors. It is comprehensive, versatile, user friendly, and affordable. Features tailored to the needs of Villages allowed us to focus our energies during start-up on shaping and building our organization confident that we had the infrastructure needed to run it. We have grown considerably since opening for business 3+ years ago and ClubExpress has grown with us.

Cons

Initially most transactions were discreet - that is, repetitive tasks had to be completed individually. This never impacted our membership but it can be tedious for an all volunteer Virtual Office Staff like ours. ClubExpress has listened to their customers and responded with a steady stream of improvements designed to make our jobs easier.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to ClubExpress

Pros

Full-featured for what we needed. This program provided both a public-facing website as well as a secure members-only area for disseminating information, organizing events, handling application and payments to join, and a location for storing important files for our members and our Board. As an administrator you have great control over accessibility of each area. The tools introduced the last couple of years have allowed us to tailor website pages to meet our needs. And it's so easy to email our membership as well as subgroups of our membership.

Cons

For our organization, the only thing it was missing was the ability to create a waitlist for events and then to add folks on the waitlist as slots for an event opened.

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Reasons for Choosing ClubExpress

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Reasons for Switching to ClubExpress

Pros

I love that I can manage both the front and back end of the business all from the same platform.

Cons

There's nothing I dislike about ClubExpress.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing ClubExpress

Reasons for Switching to ClubExpress