It's been a busy few weeks at ClubPal. As government restrictions have started to ease and clubs slowly return to group activities, we've been busy welcoming new clubs on board and adding some great new features to make managing your club even easier. In this update we've got news on some handy new features and updates on what's new at ClubPal. As ever you can stay up to date with what's new by checking out the Release Notes.
A Return to Sessions
It's been great to see people eager to get back to sessions with a noticeable increase in attendance numbers at sessions across all clubs. There has been a slight drop off in virtual session attendance as Zoom fatigue sets in and members head outdoors in the nicer weather, but in-person bookings are heading upwards and waiting lists are being utilised more than ever. We're seeing clubs responding to this by adding more sessions to meet demand and we'll soon be launching new tools to help with this. In a future update we'll be adding the ability to add an additional session when there's a waiting list. You'll be able to automatically move members from the waiting list to the new session.
Extending Member Profiles
In the last month we've rolled out a few updates to improve your ability to track member data. Firstly, we added the new custom profile fields feature which allows you to create your own profile fields and decide if to capture this on the registration form and if the member can view and/or update this data themselves. For example, you might want to capture a members affiliation number or any additional survey questions when they sign up.
We've also added member groups which allows to you tag, filter and email members in these groups. As an example, you can tag Committee members, Coaches or any other group of users you might want to communicate with. Support for member groups has been added to the Compose Email ‘To’ field so you can select a group to send an email to, with all members within that group receiving the message.
Managing Additional Profiles
Another new feature that we're currently testing out with a few clubs is a new ‘Add Profile’ option allowing a user to manage multiple member profiles from one login. This is especially useful for clubs with junior members, allowing a parent to manage their own account and/or one or more children. If you're interested in trying this out for your ClubPal site, please get in touch.
Email Updates
The email feature has also had a couple of small upgrades to make it even more powerful. As well as cloning a previously sent email, you can now clone a draft email too. This is great for allowing you to create an email “template” that you can quickly copy and send out to members.
We've also added a much requested feature that allows you to schedule an email to send at a specific time. Now you can create the email when you have the time and schedule it for any time in the future. You can also make edits to the email up until the scheduled send time.
Last, But Not Least….
In addition, there are a handful of small updates that make life a little bit easier.
- We've also added a Contact Form option for your site. Especially useful for clubs that use ClubPal to host pages for their club website, this is a great addition allowing you to receive questions from prospective new members. We've also included ReCAPTCHA as standard to help prevent getting SPAM from the site.
- You can now set the time of day the booking window for a session opens (it used to be at midnight on the configured day).
- Pro rated payments for membership can now be configured to only pro rate a portion of the fee. This is handy if you are also including affiliation fees in the membership and don't want to pro rata the entire payment.
That's it for this update, but we're already working on the next release and we'll be back with more news on that in the future. If you have any feedback or any feature requests, we'd love to hear from you.
