British Cycling Club Tool

Another downside: I now get spammed daily by people advertising holidays or training camps in Spain, riding in the Alps and so on, events, and the typical non-cycling stuff that I wasn't getting before

Keith, I can see it might be handy for some but frankly I've got plenty to do without worrying about whether club members bother to read their emails.

Stephen, welcome to the world of volunteering. If it's any consolation, it is the same everywhere else, and not just cycling clubs.

Mail Chimp doesn't have to be mass emails, it can monitor individual emails to make sure they are read

mailchimp would be overkill. The only mass emails I send out are things like notice of AGM, renewal reminders and the very occasional urgent message that something significant has been rearranged. Can't see why it would work better than normal email.

That's a good carrot Stephen. Like most clubs, we find that it's the same few people that offer to help each time. Far too many members, particularly parents of youth racers, think we exist merely to indulge them and their offspring so just ignore requests for help, even when they are at the race already.

If you want to make sure that people are getting and opening the emails on top of bounced ones, you could load it all through something like mail chimp

It just gives you a little help when someone says "I didn't get that email"

I wouldn't know where to start Keith! HTML (not 5), CSS and a bit of ASP is my limit, I stopped doing that kind of stuff for my job 10 years ago.

But the BC facility doesn't offer anything I really need. Access queries/filtered lists are pasted into Excel for anyone else (e.g. monthly list of members for committee). Same to pull out email addresses while if I send notices or reminders I can subsequently see the recipients, which you don't appear to get with BC. Any replies come into the same account.

Struggle to see what more is required...

The best tool I have, set up by my predecessor, is that I can send all membership emails from my personal gmail account but send them as membership sec, not from my own address. I use gmail's filters to file emails and have created templates (called 'canned responses') to save repeatedly typing the same acknowledgements, reminders etc.

Simon, could you not strip the code and then make it work for your purposes?

Short version:
It's useable and may be OK if you don't already have a system in place but it has shortcomings.

Long version:
Been using it since late last year, though I'm not overly enamoured. It's a bit clunky and you can't customise it.

When I joined we had ~150 current and past members listed on there who had listed us as their club, not the current membership. You can upload a list using an Excel template. Club members don't need BC membership but the person administering it does, so while my first year was free it will cost me money to use from next year (I would not join BC otherwise).

We thought it may help to get people to pay their subs more readily and we can send notices of events. We have had a few renewals and a couple of new members pay via BC but it's not made the membership sec redundant. Slackers don't appear to respond any more readily and I haven't noticed anything to manage helpers.

If anything, it has created extra work. I'm logging in frequently to check for new payments and I have to remember to update members' expiry date on the site when renewed as well as in the club's simple Access database I inherited (though I'll be switching to FileMaker as I much prefer it).

Have used it to send renewal reminders and notice of imminent events but I don't know if it helps. I don't get notified if it bounces or if a member has no email address in their profile.

If you want an online facility then a couple of google docs spreadsheets shared with key members could hold the same data.

You are welcome to message me via my profile on here if you want to ask me anything.