ClubPal now runs an MCP server. Connect it to your AI assistant, whether that is ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or another that supports MCP, and you can ask questions about your club, its members, renewals, sessions, bookings, events and payments, in plain English, and get answers drawn from your own ClubPal data. As far as we know, ClubPal is the first platform built for volunteer-run clubs to offer an official one.

What an MCP server is

MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the open standard AI assistants use to connect to other software. Without it, getting club data into an AI assistant meant exporting a spreadsheet, tidying it up and pasting it in, and doing it again next week when it was out of date. With it, the assistant looks up what it needs while it answers you, and the numbers are always today's.

What one club did in its first week

The most interesting use so far was not one we had planned for. A running club wanted last season's cross country league results age graded. The results lived on the league's website. The dates of birth lived in ClubPal. Nobody had ever put the two together, because it meant matching every runner by hand.

They asked their AI assistant to do it in one go. It read the league results pages, matched each runner to a member, worked out their age on race day, added a five-year age category, age graded every result, ranked the lot and laid the tables out as images. The club uploaded those straight onto a page of its ClubPal website.

ClubPal supplied the members. Everything else was the assistant doing what it already does, with the one piece of data it never had before. That is the real point of the connector: AI assistants already read web pages, spreadsheets and documents, and now it can put your club next to them.

What you can ask

A few of the questions admins are already asking:

  • How many memberships expire in October, and how many will fail to renew because the card on file no longer works?
  • How many people should I expect at Tuesday's session, and who used to come most weeks but has stopped?
  • What did we take last month, split by category, after fees and refunds?
  • Who still owes us money, and what is overdue?
  • How many tickets have we sold for the summer ball, and who has not paid yet?
  • Can ClubPal take a deposit for a pitch booking, and how do I turn it on?

That last one needs no club data at all: the assistant can read the ClubPal documentation too. There are worked examples on the AI assistant feature page.

What it will not do

The connection is read-only. Your assistant can look things up, but there is no way for it to edit a member, take or refund a payment, cancel a session or send an email. Ask it to and it will tell you it cannot.

It also acts as you. Each admin connects with their own ClubPal login, and the assistant only sees what that admin could already see, checked again on every question. An admin without payments access gets an assistant that cannot answer payment questions. Card details are never shared, whatever the permissions.

Why it is off until your club turns it on

Whatever your assistant reads, including members' details, is sent to the company that provides it, such as OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. That is a decision for the club rather than for one admin, so AI assistant connections start switched off for every club. A System Administrator turns them on under Admin > Settings, and turning them off again stops every connection straight away. It is worth a look at your club's privacy notice before you switch it on.

How to connect

  1. A System Administrator switches on Allow AI Assistant Connections? in Admin > Settings.
  2. In your AI assistant's settings, add a custom connector (some call it an MCP server) and paste in https://mcp.clubpal.app/mcp.
  3. Pick your club, sign in as you normally would, check which profile it will use, and click Allow.

There is no API key and no developer involved, and no charge from ClubPal. The full guide, with step-by-step setup and every kind of question it can answer, is in the docs: Connect an AI assistant.

If you try it, we would love to hear what you asked. Get in touch.