Announcing the NeatClubs.COM Early Access Program!

Hi everyone. I won't make a habit of sending e-mail like this (in fact, please consider this a on-time communication)  As many of you know I've been locked up for a few months now working away on an offering aimed at clubs, associations and small business owners. I'm now at the stage where I'm seeking some "pioneering souls" who have an interest in working with me to prove value and help steer development directions in an early access program. I "paired down my contacts list" to send this e-mail only to friends & associates who I thought would not mind receiving such a note & explanation of what I've been up to.

NeatClubs.COM is a potential fit for anyone that needs to manage a community on-line. It can co-ordinate events, accept registrations and payments, manage content, communication and newsletter distribution and lots of other "neat" stuff. Since I've clearly crossed the line into sales mode now, I may as well go just a little bit further before I get to the early access offer :-)

Benefits of NeatClubs.COM

• Simplifies communication with your organization
• Increase program registration or membership related revenue by making it easier for your members or customers to register and pay on-line
• Simplifies the administration headaches associated with coordinating events and activities for all or subsets of your membership
• Improve your revenue by extending services and fund-raising activities to a potentially wider-audience (including the general public)
• Build a sense of community to encourage repeat business
• Improve collection of money by offering simple on-line payment options

Key Features

The functionality of NeatClubs.COM is quite rich. We are attempting to address the range of things that small organizations and businesses do with an organization centric website.

• A fully hosted customer branded web presence without banner ads or popups
• Your own organization domain name and e-mail services
  
• Simple on-line content administration for non-techies
• Secure permission based Document and Photo libraries
• On-line maintenance of your membership database
• Shared Calendars and Event Listings
• Automated Event Notification & Reminders
• Support for On-line Event Registration & Payment
• Facilities to accept donations, recurring payments and subscriptions
• Generation and tracking of on-line Electronic Invoices (bill presentment)
• Newsletter Management (that respects member Privacy)
• Simple shopping cart functionality for selling items on-line
• Integration with Google Sitemaps to take away the hassle associated with making your site searchable on the web without also making confidential information searchable
  

You can view a draft on-line PDF brochure or you can see other documents and presentations related to this effort in the NeatClubs.COM Document Library by searching for documents categorized as "Promotional Documents".

Early Access Inquiries

If you, or someone you know is running an association, club or small business and might be interested in such an offer, and sees at least $40.00 / month of value in such a solution (which is the anticipated cost when released), I would be most interested in hearing from you. Please click on the link below if you know anyone who may be a potential early access customer interested in using this system on a trial basis. Also, feel free to forward this e-mail to others. I am looking for a reasonably small number of early access users starting in August.

Criteria for Early Access Customers

• Willing to invest time in understanding and using an early stage software project and to guide it's development by offering feedback in return for a really good deal! :-) - While the software is functional and is usable now, further enhancements are required .
• Early customers need not be technically oriented, but they should have an interest in computers and a strong interest in improving the effeciency of their organization.
• Early access customers need to be willing to spend time understanding and setting up the software for their own organizations and communicate about what's working and what's not.
  
• I'm interested specifically in early access customers who wish to exercise the event management, on-line calendaring, registration and on-line payment facilities and have their members transact with the system on-line. While NeatClubs.COM can be used to provision a business or organizations simple web-site, the value and differentiation from basic websites and commerce sites comes in the on-line registration and payment components.
• Early access customers can use the system at no cost, however they should have a genuine intent to want to use the system (assuming it meets their needs) on a "for fee" basis once the system is released. Should early access customers want their own domain during the trial period (so that their website is not under the neatclubs.com domain), they may register a domain name through us, but we will charge nominal fees for this to cover our own costs in this area

Register with the NeatClubs.COM Website

NeatClubs.COM has a facility to send one-time newsletters of this sort my importing contacts from an Outlook contacts database. I did not however add anyone to the NeatClubs.COM database without their permission. If you are interested in registering a profile with us so that we can you advised of developments with the system, you can got to the NeatClubs.COM website and Request a Login account. We have left registration "open" so that pre-approval is not required to join.

Background

The idea for a service like NeatClubs.COM came from my observation that while almost everyone has a web-site, it is still a hassle (and sometimes a very expensive hassle) for smaller businesses and organizations to conduct real business over the web. While web pages are easy to implement, on-line payment, on-line event or program registrations, dynamic web publishing, newsletter management, photo galleries, calendaring and scheduling, electronic invoicing and the like remain in the realm of the "mysterious & unexplained" to most. I completely believe in the value of portals and identity based systems and while they are being rapidy embraced in the corporate world, I believe that small organizations, not-for-profits and associations are under-served in this area. The typical way that such sites are built today is to a web developer and/or a hosting company to spec and build your own integrated solution typically using a blend of open-source software and custom components often at a cost of many thousands of dollars plus on-going hosting and maintenance fees. So - my idea was pretty simple - I wanted to build a powerful generic solution for small businesses, clubs and associations that "does it all", that could be implemented within an hour or so, and offer it for a price that represents real value for clubs, associations and not-for-profits. (ie. skip the couple of thousand dollars part and just pay the hosting fees! :-)

Does this sound too good to be true? The economies of scale of modern web-hosting are enormous and allow for very in-expensive solutions. The only reason interactive commerce sites are expensive is because consultants like to make them expensive!

Even if you do not have a specific need in mind, I'd be interested in getting peoples views on services like this and your experience. While not yet ready for release there is an early -sandbox" NeatClubs.COM environment available on-line for people to test and play with at the URL http://neatclubs.com/demo. I'll be working to make the demo site as well the functionality of roughly a dozen additional sites running NeatClubs.COM richer in the coming weeks.
I've purposely built the system to be as versatile as I could make it. I can see potential applications with associations, clubs, sporting organizations, recreational centers, music studios, professional groups, fan clubs, small business, neighborhood or cottage associations etc. I'm sure that are many types of organizations I've not even thought about yet! If you see a niche where such a solution might be deployed repeatedly, let's talk!.

Thank you very much for your time.

Sincerely,

Gord.