Overview

NeatClubs.COM was inspired by our own family’s involvement in a competitive sporting organization where we learned first hand the challenges associated with managing registrations, coordinating club related activities, collecting fees and payments for various events, ordering team uniforms, managing fund-raising activities and volunteer schedules and dealing with the range of issues that most clubs small organizations need to deal with on a regular daily basis. Despite searching for a solution to manage our own organization’s needs, we could not find a solution that addressed the range of needs that we had at a price that we could afford as a not for profit. The observation that small clubs, associations and not for profits are under-served in the area of on-line management collaboration and electronic commerce capabilities led to the vision of the NeatClubs.COM service. Despite the service initially being aimed at clubs and associations, small businesses and small commercial service based organizations could equally benefit from the significant capabilities and low price point of an on-line membership management system. Many of these needs that small clubs have are common with small business needs for on-line commerce activities.

Before we get started actually describing what NeatClubs.COM is and how it works, it may be useful to consider the things that we felt were important for an on-line service for our own organization. These ideas represented some of the core design criteria for NeatClubs.COM

• Club administration systems must be very simple and quick to setup and should be a hosted service so that small organizations are not burdened with technology management challenges. The system must be highly reliable and available seven days a year, 24 hours a day.
• Any on-line service aimed at clubs and small business must be very inexpensive to accommodate the limited budgets of small businesses and not for profits, and pricing schemes must be simple, transparent and without hidden costs. Although simple web page design has become highly commoditized, the cost and complexity of building on-line transaction based websites with registration and electronic commerce capabilities remains out of reach for small organizations. Costs associated with even very small and unsophisticated customized e-commerce sites can often be many thousands of dollars.
• The system must protect the organization and its member data. Please note that the term ‘member’ is used repeatedly in this document to describe any individual who has a login account and identity on your website. Members may be sponsors, customers, subscribers or just about any identifiable group that you are designing an on-line service for. For most clubs and small businesses, their membership or repeat customer base that they have spent years building represents their single most important asset.
• In the event that someone wishes to cease using the service for any reason, it must be very simple to extract data and cancel the service without financial penalties and without losing valuable information. Organizations do not wish to be “locked” to a single provider without the flexibility to change.
• Small organizations need to be able to ‘brand’ their site with their own color schemes, logos and menu layouts so that people who interact with the site see a highly professional e-commerce capable. While some of the community based solutions for things like on-line event and management and photo gallery management are impressive they often rely on banner advertising as a singnificant source of revenue for the provider. Such solutions do not project a professional, high quality image for the organization.
• Any system must be entirely “self serve” from a customer or member perspective so that members can view events calendars, share confidential documents or photos on-line and perform a wide-range of other activities without the need to bother busy organization administrators or small business owners.
• Basic e-mail and newsletter management capabilities are required that target specific subsets of your managed membership or customer base while respecting user privacy. Privacy issues and emerging privacy legislation[1] applicable to on-line commerce activities are another significant reason that organizations engaged in on-line market activities need a system that respects member privacy.
• System support is required to easily setup registration and on-line payment for various types of activities including, one-time events such as tournaments or picnics, recurring events such as regular practices or club meetings, donation events, fund raising activities, subscriptions, registrations against published program schedules and sales transactions etc.
• Maintaining web content can be tedious, and while knowledge of technology like HTML is becoming more common, the content of the website should be easily maintainable by non-technical people who are tasked with maintaining portions of their organization’s website. Small organizations definitely do not want to need to call a service provider and incur additional expense everytime they want to make simple changes to their website.
• A Photo Gallery for securely storing photos of club related activities as a source of interest and to help build a community around your club or business is important. For many recreational organizations or small businesses offering recreational activities having user contributed where users provide permission to share photos with others is very useful. For small business owners and contractors it is also useful to be able to profile examples of their work on-line. This applies equally to interior decorators, contractors who install interlock driveways and many other types of small businesses
• A service must provide an online document library that supports popular document types and facilitates sharing between members and the general public as appropriate while respecting confidentiality and access controls.
• Simple on-line invoicing capabilities to facilitate on-line payment to the club or business without the hassle of generating purchase orders or raising internal requisitions is very useful. By making it easy to pay, small organizations can improve collection and reduce outstanding accounts receivable. These types of services can also allow small business owners to institute policies where a deposit is required when booking particular activities on-line.
• Capabilities for club specific e-mail addresses, anti-spam facilities, data backup and restore facilities and SMS messaging are core to organizations wishing to provide advanced functionality to their user communities. The staff of a club or small businesses must have the option of having their own customized e-mail address of the for ‘name@myclub.com’. These e-mail addresses may automatically redirect to another personal e-mail address if the club organizer does not want to deal with managing multiple e-mail accounts.
• In short, what is required is a simple, secure system that can easily be accessed by the general public as well as organization membership or stakeholders to make an organization or business run more efficiently.

NeatClubs.COM today meets all of these basic requirements, and we are continuing to evolve the system to be adaptable to other needs as we learn from our customers what functionality is required to support particulars needs of their clubs or businesses. This overview document explains some of the unique features and capabilities of the NeatClubs.COM service. Whether you run a club, association, church sporting team or small businesses, a service like NeatClubs.COM can have significant value. Some of the specific benefits of the service are listed below.

What NeatClubs.COM can do for your association or club:

• Increase fund raising or sponsorship revenues by making it simple to publish activities, events and program schedules on-line and accept on-line payment.
• Reduce the time and effort involved in coordinating events, managing volunteers, sharing information, collecting dues and managing registrations.
• Simplify the problem of on-line content management and web-site maintenance by sharing the task of updating website content with volunteers or committee members in your organization.
• Simplify the running e-mail campaigns and high quality electronic mailers or newsletters to always stay in touch with your membership, parents, volunteers, sponsors, athletes or any group that you need to communicate with on a regular basis.
• Simplify the burden of keeping members information up to date by providing the facility for membership to update their personal profiles on-line
• Allow your members or users to easily register for activities or events, purchase goods or services or provide on-line payment without all the hassle and complexity of setting up your own e-commerce enabled web presence.
• Create a sense of community around your organization by allowing members to contribute photos and share documents securely and maintain a shared activity calendar so that all of your members are on the same page when it comes to upcoming events.

What NeatClubs.COM can do for a small business:

• Increase revenue by making it easier for customers or sales prospects to register on-line or purchase services on-line
• Maintain an on-line calendar of events and activities and build a sense of community around your business
• Simplify accounts receivable collection by providing a very simple ad-hoc on-line invoicing capabilities to allow customers who owe you money to easily provide payment on-line
• NeatClubs.COM can serve as an easily maintainable website to profile your business on-line
• Run targeted e-mail campaigns aimed at improving demand creation for your product or service
• Provide your customers with a structured way to provide feedback on your service and run on-line promotions and referral campaigns to stimulate your business.

How does NeatClubs.COM work?

So if you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably wondering what this service really is and exactly how it works. NeatClubs.COM is a hosted internet service that requires very little in the way of setup for you to get started. To keep costs as low is possible, it is built entirely using open-source software technologies. The software and your data is stored in a professionally managed secure data center governed by service level agreements and uptime guarantees. Each club or organization using the service has their own secure database instance to prevent others from having visibility to confidential data. Within a very short period of time, typically thirty minutes or so, the service can be up and running, customized for your bluc or business and it can effectively act as your organizations website if you do not already have a site. If you already have a web-site, you can still use NeatClubs.COM for its on-line registration facilities, event calendars, on-line payment functions and other capabilities not typically found in simple websites developed for small clubs or small businesses. If you already have an internet domain registered for your organization we can use your own domain name, and if you do not, we can quickly register one for you and have it active typically within one hour. Rather than paying someone to develop a custom website for you, a web site branded with your own organization’s logo can be up and running very quickly. The appearance of the actual site will vary depending on how individual sites have customized it, and how they use the tool. A few sample sites are shown below.

Figure 1: The NeatClubs.COM service adapted to act as a website for a church

NeatClubs.COM can be used to setup a public website for a church or school where public information is easily accessible from the site, but members of a congregation might have access to considerably more information once they login. The Menu options down the side of the screen will vary depending on who (if anyone) is logged in to the site, and menu items across the top are completely customizable by any administrator of your site who you trust to contribute content. Note that in Figure 1 above, the administrator of the site is logged in. Because they have authorization to edit content on the site, a small pencil icon appears on each page that would not be visible to regular users. Clicking on this icon brings the administrator of the site directly into an on-line editor so that they can quickly change the text on any web page on the fly. In the case of a business updating the website may be done by trusted employees whereas in the case of a club it may be board members, associates or others. If you can use a word processor you can easily create content for your own website at a fraction the cost of having a website professionally developed for you.

Figure 2: An early access NeatClubs.COM user managing a recreational hockey club

In the case of a sporting organization, the management of the site can be done by club coordinators or other volunteers. In the example in Figure 2 a membership class called “Fan” is setup. Fan’s have visibility to items on the club website that others do not by virtue of the fact they are known to the administrators of the site. In this case note that the Fan of the club does not have privileges to edit content on-line so the edit icon does not appear.

Figure 3: NeatClubs.COM service managing a competitive Trampoline Club

Once the website is up and running (which takes no time at all) typically about 30 to 60 minutes spent on the phone with a simple web conference is all that is required to get a non-technical administrator of the site comfortable with the basics of how to use the calendar, how to add content and documents, how to setup events and send newsletters etc. NeatClubs.COM really does make setting up a website for your organization simple and quick.

Initial System Configuration

Most club administrators or small business owners will want to tailor the service to their own organizations needs and their own preferences. Configuration of the system is done entirely through a web based interface, and there is extensive on-line help available to provide guidance. Through the administrator interface you can indicate things like the name of your organization or business, your street address, your phone number(s) as well as the e-mail addresses of organizers of the club or business principals and a host of other parameters. When the site is presented this sort of information will appear in the right places. Templates are provided as well for things like “contact us” pages, “terms and conditions” governing the use of the site and “privacy policies” that you can review and alter appropriately depending on your intended use of the service and the nature of your business.

Figure 4: One of the Configuration Screens where users are guided through the setup process

Color and layout selections are made through this same web interface and a link to an optional PayPal^TM merchant account is selected that links to a bank account at your financial institution to facilitate on-line payment. (The PayPal setup for the free merchant service is another point of configuration that takes about 20 minutes described later in this document). Organizers can typically setup parameters association with their organization very quickly as reasonable defaults are provided. Because every organization is subtly different in terms of the data they need to store about customers, members or subscribers, you can select which of the common pre-defined database items you would like to see on data entry screens that your members will fill in. You can turn these data fields on or off depending on their relevance to you organization.

Figure 5: Optional Configuration of Stored Data Fields by the Site Administrator

Figure 6: A Sample Data Entry Screen that a Member or Customer uses to update their on-line profile

You can also add data items that are unique to your own organization and change the layout of data entry screens as you see fit. This ability to tailor the data that is stored is a key feature that gives NeatClubs.COM the flexibility to handle events ranging from booking birthday parties to restaurant reservations to managing alumni associations and fan clubs. The forms presented to users of the site as shown in Figure 6 above will depend on how the database is setup by the administrator (in Figure 5).

Figure 7: A system setup screen that allows a site to define their own terminology for different types of users of the system

You can define your own categories of membership as shown in Figure 7, your own document types and use your own terminology for images and associated event types for maximum flexibility. This ability to change the site significantly to adapt to your club or business is a key feature of the NeatClubs.COM service.

On-line Content Management Facilities

The NeatClubs.COM service provides content management capabilities so that you can use the service itself as your organizations complete website if you choose to. In order to make the maintenance of on-line content as easy as possible, the system includes an on-line WYSIWYG[2] editor as mentioned earlier. All pages on the system can be edited by users who are setup by the administrator to have content creation and editing privileges. These users can simply click on an ‘edit’ icon that appears on any content related page or they can update web pages using the document library. By default, users can edit or update any page that they themselves created while an administrator of the system may edit any page.

Figure 8: A screen capture of the WYSIWYG editor used to change web pages and edit documents on-line

The system supports cut and paste functionality from popular word processing packages such as MS-Word to make it very simple for users to develop and “post” their on-line content while preserving formatting such as tables, underline and font styles. Images stored in the on-line image repository can be imported directly into on-line documents or web pages, and images can be resized to fit the context of a document or web-page on-line. Also, any text or graphic in a document or web page may be easily “linked” to another. This allows content creators on the site to create pages where users can “click” to easily find related documents or materials or register on-line for events. The system allows users to develop their own pull-down menus and associate these custom menus with documents created on-line, descriptions of on-line events or links to other other external websites either in the same browser window or in a new pop-up window. Using these facilities it is possible for organizations to completely control the look and feel of their web presence and to tailor NeatClubs.COM to the unique needs of their own organization. In fact, unlike other hosted services, your customer or members need never know that you are not running your own custom developed website.

Figure 9: The Interface for defining the custom pull down menus across the top of the screen

Shared Calendars

A key requirement for many organizations is an easy to use event calendar that coordinates activities and events so that members can see the different activities that are planned and scheduled. The NeatClubs.COM interface allows any authorized user of the system to create calendar entries or events. Users may register for events or activities simply by clicking on the appropriate event in the calendar. Activities that appear in the calendar can include information events, recurring activities such as meetings or practices, events requiring registration or payment to attend, subscription events or on-line sales events with associated shopping cart functionality. Figure 10 shows what a simple calendar for a sporting club might look like.

Figure 10: Sample on-line calendar to coordinate organization activities

The calendar will show only those events that users of the website are authorized to. The system also supports (not yet fully implemented at the time of this writing) reminders for calendar events. E-mail messages or cellular text messages can be provided to advise people of last minute scheduling changes or to advise them of things like a change of venue for an event either automatically or at the discretion of the activity organizer. Calendar activities employ easy to read graphics symbols so that it is easy to understand the nature of a particular events at a glance. Deadlines for registration may also be specified and are automatically placed on the events calendar. Users can simply click a link on calendar entries to expand the view of the event, register for the event or see who else has registered for an event if the organizer has permitted this capability in the setup. The shared calendar is at the heart of the NeatClubs.COM service. Having a private, shared events calendar for your organization that is able to remind your membership of pending deadlines is a key requirement for effectively organizing your on-line community or business.

Photo Galleries

Many organizations are interested in sharing photos on-line. Even if you are running a for-profit business, a photo album service creates a sense of community, and helps make your organization more central to communities that you serve thereby helping to promote your overall. Unlike publicly available photo sharing services, the NeatClubs.COM photos are integrated in such a way that pictures can be embedded into documents, web-pages on the site and other document types such as on-line newsletters intended to be shared with others. Any authorized user of the website can contribute a photo, and contributors may place restrictions on who is authorized to see photos that and whether photos can be viewed by the General Public. This is particularly useful for clubs or organizations dealing with children where the sharing of photos may be restricted to known, trusted groups.

Figure 11: Interface used to contribute photos to the on-line photo gallery

The system will maintain an archive of photos that can be filtered or sorted by contributor, arbitrary event names provided by those who contribute the pictures, and pictures can be categorized according to your own pre-defined pictures types that you can define for your own organization. Figure 11 shows how photos are contributed to the system by a typical user.

Figure 12: Interface for browsing on-line photos in the photo gallery

The pictures or photos that you will have visibility to will depend on your role. For example, people without login accounts on the system will see only “PUBLIC” pictures where other pictures might be available only to arbitrary membership categories such as “volunteer”, “board member” or “parent” depending on how you have setup your organizations membership types.

On-line Registration and Payment

Perhaps one of the most powerful features of NeatClubs.COM is its ability to handle on-line registration for various event and transaction types. An administrator of the system (there can be multiple administrators) will define on-line activities and describe attributes associated with those activities. There are a standard set of pre-defined types of events to help get someone started. Events may be “information only” events that appear in the calendar or they may be activities related to sponsorship, donations, subscriptions or more sophisticated on-line activities where registration, payment and user notification may be required. For any event definition, the administrator can provide custom text that describes the event, they can specify the date, time and recurrence profile if applicable, and they can indicate who is able to register. Associated costs (if any) can be indicated when the event is defined, and custom fields can be setup that the event organizer would like to have completed by each registrant. This flexible framework saves the need for club administrators to be directly involved in the tedious task of receiving registrations.

Figure 13: One of the Sample Screens involved in setting up an on-line event

Administrators can be notified automatically by e-mail whenever someone subscribes or registers for an activity whether that activity involves payment or not. By viewing event listings as opposed to the calendar view, event organizers can see at a glance how many people have registered for various on-line activities at a glance.

Figure 14: A list of on-line event types and activities as seen by a system administrator

Conducting On-line Sales

In addition to providing facilities for on-line event registrations, many organizations need to support simple online sales transactions. While not a complete on-line merchandising solution, NeatClubs.COM is ideal for businesses or clubs that wish to sell on-line from a reasonably small list of items (ie. 100 or less). For a small sporting club or a small business, these sorts of on-line sales can be an additional source of revenue, and delivery and shipment may often be outsourced to a third party provider.

Figure 15: Describing an Item to be offered for sale on-line

NeatClubs.COM allows users with appropriate privileges to describe items available for sale on-line and provides the flexibility to accommodate up to two different tax designations. Administrators can specify options such as color preference, size preference and other variables associated with an item being sold on-line. Once the items for sale have been described and images uploaded, an on-line selling activity can be setup by the administrator

Figure 16: An interface that allows an administrator to define items for sale on-line

Notification of an on-line sale can appear on the calendar, a web page on your site, or it may be sent via e-mail to any or all member categories in your organizations database. On-line sales can be conducted on an on-going basis, or optionally they may have a specific date range associated with them. People who participate in an on-line sale are automatically guided through a simple multi-step shopping cart application and when they check-out they have the option of providing payment directly to you