Key takeaways
- A club site’s first job is telling a stranger what you do and how to join, in one screen, before they scroll.
- A stale events page reads as a dead club. Keeping the calendar current is the clearest sign the club is alive.
- Build the events and join pages so any volunteer can update them, and put the domain and logins in the club’s name.
- Most small orgs need a clean public site plus simple tools, not a heavy member portal.
- Pass the bus test: the site has to outlast whoever is holding it today.
On this page
What should a membership organization website include?
A club or membership organization website needs to do six things: tell a stranger what you do and how to join in one screen, keep events and schedules current, make renewals painless, answer the questions that flood the coordinator's inbox, honour volunteers and sponsors honestly, and stay editable after the volunteer who built it moves away.
Here is the pattern I see in almost every club, society, and league. The website was built years ago by whoever happened to be handy, it looked fine at the time, and then that person moved on. Now the events page still shows last season, the login lives in an inbox nobody checks, and the board is a little afraid to touch it. The site is not broken exactly. It is just frozen, and a frozen club site quietly tells every newcomer the club is not really running anymore.
That is the whole problem in one sentence. A club site is not a brochure that sits still. It is the front door a stranger walks up to when they are deciding whether to spend a season, or a Saturday, or a hundred dollars in dues on your organization. Everything below is about what that door needs to have on it.
- One screen that says what the club does, who it is for, and how to join, without scrolling or guessing.
- A current events list, so a stranger can tell the club is alive and find the next thing to show up to.
- A join or renew path with the dues, the membership year, and what a member actually gets.
- Plain answers to the questions the coordinator hears every week, before anyone has to send an email.
- A real name and a real way to reach a human, not a form that vanishes into an inbox nobody checks.
- Honest credit for the volunteers and sponsors who keep the lights on, shown only where it is accurate.
What does a club website actually need to do?
A club website has six real jobs: explain the club in one screen, pass the currency test with a live events page, make joining and renewing painless, answer the coordinator's most-repeated questions in public, give volunteers and sponsors honest credit, and survive the day the person who built it leaves. Design that does not serve those jobs is just wallpaper.
- 01
Explain the club in one screen
A stranger who lands on the home page should learn what the club does, who belongs, and how to join before they scroll. Most club sites bury that under a mission statement and a photo slideshow, and the curious visitor leaves.
- 02
Pass the currency test
A stale events page reads as a dead club. If the calendar still shows last spring’s bonspiel or a trail day from two years ago, a newcomer assumes nobody is home. Current dates are the single clearest sign the club is active.
- 03
Make joining and renewing painless
Dues should be easy to pay and easy to renew. Every extra step, unclear form, or dead payment link is a member you have to chase by email, or one who quietly lapses and never comes back.
- 04
Answer the inbox before it fills
When are meetings? How much are membership fees? Can I bring kids? Is the hall wheelchair accessible? A good site answers the coordinator’s most-repeated questions in public, so the volunteer inbox stops being the club’s help desk.
- 05
Honour the people who show up
Volunteers and sponsors keep the club running. A board page and an honest sponsor strip give them real credit, which makes the next ask, for time or money, far easier to say yes to.
- 06
Survive volunteer turnover
The person who built the site in 2014 will eventually move away. If the club’s whole web presence lives in their head, that is a slow-motion emergency. The site has to outlast whoever is currently holding it.
A stale events page reads as a dead club. If nothing on the site has changed since last spring, a newcomer assumes nobody is home.
The 2014 volunteer site vs. a site that recruits and retains
The old volunteer-built site looks acceptable and does almost no work. A site that recruits and retains answers the newcomer's real questions where they appear: what the club is, how to join, when the next event is, and who to ask. The difference is not how modern it looks. It is whether a stranger can become a member without emailing anyone.
| The 2014 volunteer site | A site that recruits and retains | |
|---|---|---|
| First screen | A mission statement and a logo | What the club does, who it is for, how to join |
| Events | A calendar frozen on last season | The next few dates, kept current |
| Joining | Email the secretary and wait | Clear dues, membership year, and a way to sign up |
| Renewals | A yearly chase by email chain | Members renew themselves in a couple of minutes |
| Questions | The coordinator’s inbox is the help desk | A public FAQ answers the common ones |
| Who can edit | One person, if you can reach them | A couple of volunteers, on club-owned logins |
| If they leave | The site slowly goes stale | A routine handover, nothing breaks |
Most club sites are not bad on purpose. They were built to look presentable and were never asked to recruit or retain a single member. Closing that gap is mostly about putting the answer where the doubt is, and about making sure the site does not depend on one busy person to stay alive.
What does each page of a club website do?
A membership site does not need many pages, but the few it has should each carry a clear job. Home orients the newcomer, join turns a curious visitor into a member, events proves the club is alive, about builds trust, sponsors give honest credit, and contact points at a real human. Get these six right and you have covered most of what any club needs.
- Home
- One screen that names the club, who it is for, and the next step. What you do, where you meet, and a clear button to join or see events. No slogan wall, no autoplay slideshow standing between a newcomer and the answer.
- Join or renew
- The dues, the membership year, what a member gets, and a way to pay or sign up without an email back-and-forth. If renewals are the yearly headache, this is the page that fixes it.
- Events and schedule
- The next few dates up top, kept current. Meetings, games, work parties, the annual general meeting, the season calendar. This is the page that passes or fails the currency test, so it has to be the easiest one to update.
- About and board
- Who runs the club, how the board works, and how someone gets involved. Real names and roles build trust and make the club feel like people, not a logo.
- Sponsors and supporters
- Honest credit for the businesses and grants that back the club, shown only where it is true. A clean sponsor strip is worth more to a renewing sponsor than a buried logo nobody sees.
- Contact
- A real human, a real way to reach them, and where the club meets. A map, the hall address, and the questions people ask most, so the contact form is the last resort, not the only door.
Notice how little of this is decoration. A curling club, a trail society, a ski hill auxiliary, an arts council, a chamber of commerce, and a minor sports league all run on the same six answers. What changes is the flavour, not the structure. The community hall down the road and a provincial association both need a stranger to find the join button.
When do spreadsheets and a Facebook group stop being enough?
A member spreadsheet and a Facebook group carry a small club a long way, and there is nothing wrong with that. They stop being enough when renewals turn into a yearly email chase, when only one person can update anything, and when the same questions keep landing in the inbox. That is the moment a simple public site and a couple of tools start paying for themselves.
Plenty of good clubs run for years on a spreadsheet and a group chat. The trouble is that those tools serve people who are already inside. They do almost nothing for the stranger deciding whether to join, and they quietly concentrate the whole operation in one volunteer’s hands. When that volunteer is busy, away, or ready to step down, the cracks show all at once.
- 01
The member list lives in one person’s spreadsheet
It works until that volunteer is away, the file gets three conflicting copies, or a renewal falls through the cracks. Small clubs run on spreadsheets for years, and that is fine, right up until it quietly is not.
- 02
Renewals happen by email chain
When dues collection is a series of reminder emails and e-transfers tracked by hand, the coordinator is doing the club’s accounting in their spare time. A simple online join and renew path takes that weight off one person.
- 03
Nobody can update the events
If posting a new date means texting the one person with the login, the calendar goes stale the first busy month. That is the currency test failing in slow motion.
- 04
The same questions arrive every week
When the inbox keeps asking the same handful of things, those answers belong on the site. A spreadsheet cannot answer a newcomer at 9pm, but a good FAQ can.
The honest read is that spreadsheets are not the enemy, they are just the wrong front door. This is the same tipping point I wrote about in when spreadsheets stop being enough for your business: the file still works, but it has quietly become the thing everything depends on, and one person is carrying it. A public site plus a simple join and renew path moves that weight off a single volunteer and gives newcomers a way in.
Do most clubs need a member portal?
Most small clubs do not need a member portal. They need a clean public site plus a couple of simple tools: an online join and renew path, and an events page anyone can update. Portal software earns its cost once you have hundreds of members, real access-control needs, or member-only content to manage. Below that, a portal is usually more admin than it saves.
Member portals are appealing because they promise to put everything in one system: logins, directories, member-only pages, event registration, dues. For a large association with staff, that can be worth it. For a hundred-member curling club run by volunteers, a portal often means a new subscription, a login wall that keeps the public out, and one more system somebody has to learn and maintain. The heavy tool solves a problem the club does not have yet.
My honest middle ground: start with a clean public site and add only the simple tools you will actually use. Take dues online so renewals stop being a chase. Keep the events page dead easy to edit. Add a members-only area only when you have real member-only content, a directory people ask for, or access rules you cannot handle by email. When a club genuinely outgrows the simple setup, a portal becomes worth its cost, and that is a good problem to have. Just do not buy the heavy tool before the club needs it.
A realistic before and after
Illustrative composite, no invented numbers. The point is the shape of the change, not a metric.
Before
A community society had a site built years ago by a volunteer who had since moved away. The events page still showed the previous spring, the join page was an email address, and renewals were a yearly email chase run entirely by the treasurer. Newcomers could not tell whether the club was still active, so most did not reach out.
After
The rebuild led with what the club does and a clear join button, put the next few events up top on a page any board member could update, and let members pay dues and renew online. The domain and logins moved into the club’s name, and a short handover note went into the records. The site stopped depending on one person and started reading as a club that was clearly still running.
How do you build a club website that survives volunteer turnover?
Build it so the site outlasts whoever is holding it today. Put the domain and logins in the club's name, make the events and join pages the easiest things to edit, make sure more than one person can log in, and write a short handover note. The test to keep in your head is simple: what happens if the one person who can edit the site moves away next month?
- 1Run the bus test. Ask who can edit the site today, and what happens to the club’s web presence if that person moves away next month. If the honest answer is nobody, that is the first thing to fix.
- 2Get the logins and the domain into the club’s name, not a personal account. The domain, the hosting, and the site should belong to the organization, so a board handover does not mean starting over.
- 3Make the events and join pages the two easiest things to change. A volunteer with no web background should be able to post a new date or update the dues in a few minutes without breaking the layout.
- 4Write a one-page handover note: where the site lives, how to log in, and how to do the three things that change most. Keep it with the club records, not in a personal inbox.
- 5Put the questions the coordinator answers most into a public FAQ, so the knowledge lives on the site instead of leaving with the volunteer who happened to know it.
That bus test is the difference between a club site that gets handed over calmly and one that becomes an emergency at the worst possible time. It is closely related to what I mean by website maintenance: not just security updates, but making sure the people who run the club can actually keep it current without fear. A site the board understands and can edit is worth far more than a fancier one only one person can touch.
What does a club or membership organization website cost?
A club site does not have to be expensive, and it should be scoped to what the organization actually needs rather than a package on a menu. The number moves with scope: whether you need online payments, event tools, or a members-only area. What you are really buying is a front door a stranger can use and a build the board can keep current.
A clean club site at Kootenay Made Digital starts at $2,000, scoped to what the organization actually needs rather than a package name, and built so any volunteer can update events without breaking anything. The Own It Monthly plan fits a club budget year: $2,000 once, or 12 payments of $189, $2,268 all in. If your organization has never had a proper site, that is the starting point for a first one. If you have an old volunteer-built site that nobody can update, the same budget usually covers a rebuild that puts the club back in control.
The real cost of a frozen club site is not the rebuild. It is every newcomer who checked the events page, saw last season, assumed the club was done, and never came back. A site that stays current, makes joining simple, and survives the next board handover pays for itself in the members it stops quietly losing. The full picture of how I build these, page by page with pricing context, lives on the membership organization websites page.
Sources and further reading
- Google Search Central: SEO Starter Guide
Google explains how clear titles, headings, helpful content, and a sensible structure help both people and search systems understand a site, which matters when a newcomer is searching for your club by name or activity.
- Google Search Central: creating helpful content
Google frames strong pages around people-first usefulness and satisfying answers, which is exactly how a prospective member reads a club site: can I tell what this is, and how I join?
- Google Business Profile help: manage your business info
For clubs with a public hall or meeting place, an accurate profile with current hours, address, and photos helps people find you and reinforces the same information the website carries.
Frequently asked questions
Does a small club need a website if it already has a Facebook group?
A Facebook group is good for members who are already in it, but it is a poor front door for strangers. Not everyone has an account, posts get buried, and you do not control it. A small public site is the one place a newcomer can find what you do, how to join, and when the next event is, without logging into anything. The two work well together: the site is the front door, the group is the back room.
How do clubs keep a website updated when it is run by volunteers?
The trick is to build the site so the things that change most, events and dues, are the easiest to edit, and to make sure more than one person can log in. Put the domain and logins in the club’s name, write a short handover note, and keep the design simple enough that a volunteer with no web background can post a new date without breaking anything. A site that only one person can touch is one resignation away from going stale.
What should a club join page include?
The dues, the membership year, what a member actually gets, and a way to sign up or renew without a back-and-forth email. Say who the club is for and what happens after someone joins. If you can accept payment online, the yearly renewal headache mostly disappears, because members can handle it themselves instead of waiting on a reminder.
Should a club build a member portal?
Usually not at first. Most small clubs and societies need a clean public site plus a couple of simple tools, an online join and renew path and a current events page, not a heavy members-only portal. Portal software earns its cost once you have hundreds of members, real access control needs, or member-only content and directories to manage. Below that, a portal is often more admin than it saves, and it adds one more system a volunteer has to learn.
How much does a club or membership organization website cost?
A clean club site at Kootenay Made Digital starts at $2,000, scoped to what the organization actually needs rather than a package name, and built so any volunteer can update events without breaking anything. The Own It Monthly plan fits a club budget year: $2,000 once, or 12 payments of $189, $2,268 all in. What moves the number is scope, whether you need online payments, event tools, or a members-only area, not a tier on a menu.
What happens to a club website when the person who built it leaves?
That depends entirely on whether the club owns its own site. If the domain, hosting, and logins live in the organization’s name and a couple of people can edit it, a board handover is routine. If it all lived in one volunteer’s personal account, the club can lose its domain, its email, and years of content overnight. This is the bus test, and it is worth passing before you need to.
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