Great Club Products

Pros

This software makes it so easy to manage our Rotary club membership, events and website

Cons

the navigation on the back end can be a bit confusing with added "beta" modules

This platform does a very good job handling all the essential tasks any Rotary club would need.

As a district website administrator, I appreciate the flexibility the design function allows me to customize the home page to reflect the personality and message of the District Governor. I can fairly easily change the page as DG terms change. As a club website administrator, I can easily update the content as new events and promotions come to the fore. As a club secretary, I can get on top of the administrative tasks that can't be allowed to fall behind.

Pros

ClubRunner can handle many of the essential day-to-day tasks that Rotary clubs need to accomplish but it's greatest value is less obvious: it offers continuity of management in an environment where the management team can change from year to year. That said, it's strengths include: + An Attendance Module that takes minutes to update but offers useful reports on individuals as well as overall club performance. + Membership records include a wealth of information + Email communication to club membership, custom lists, officers and committee members are easy to set up and send + Committee Management Module takes the committee experience to the next level. + Excellent support team and pretty good documentation

Cons

Any platform that is designed to be used by both beginners and experienced users will never make everyone happy. They tend to include compromises and limits. A few of the negatives include: +Volunteers Module is not intuitive to set up + Newsletter/Bulletin Module is hard grasp. It may be trying to do too much. + Custom Reports are still a mystery to me. + It needs an image editing component that will allow users to easily add captions to photos.

ClubRunner for Rotary

We use Clubrunner for a CRM, administrative reporting, and our website host. Overall, it needs improvements, but has helped bring Rotary Clubs into the Internet Age.

Pros

ClubRunner is useful as a website, CRM, accounting system, email delivery, and one-stop-shop for my Rotary Club's administrative needs. It also synchronizes with Rotary International and puts all the thousands of clubs on one format.

Cons

The administrative interface is not user friendly. SO. MUCH. TEXT. I experienced the Internet in the 90's and early 2000's, so I can navigate it. For our older members for whom Facebook and news sites are their primary Internet usage, the administrative tools and membership tools are pages full of clutter. The web development tools are more difficult to use than other design softwares such as Squarespace or Wix.

Invaluable if you need to maintain member database!

Have been secretary of our club for years, actually dating back to when some people didn't have email! Features I use frequently: MEMBER DATABASE is so great! Easy to use and members can update their own data! I can run reports with ease, particularly the annual ones for member data such as average member age, honorary, attendance exempt, etc. I can also send out an invitation to members to request them to review and update their own profiles, either global invitation or just to specific members. Members no longer call me to ask for another member's contact info! They look it up themselves! (THIS is worth the money alone!) EVENTS: Create your event, invite everyone, they respond and you print out your attendance list for ordering supplies/seats. Of course this only works well when members respond but Clubrunner makes it easy to send repeat invitations to members to virtually beat them about the heads and shoulders. You can also choose member types such as 'only send to non responders.' No sense haranguing the people who have already responded! FRIEND LIST: How many times have you heard from a spouse, "I just found out about this event yesterday"? Any interested spouses can be added to a 'friends' list and you can also include them when you send out interesting emails. Also include people like your ADG and DG, for Really Important Events that you would like to invite them to. EMAIL: So easy to use the email communication that several committee members of the Club have sent emails out on their own, without instruction! Easy to select 'recipients' for some or all. Sometimes I email through Clubrunner, and other times I.... DOWNLOAD MEMBER DATA: I LOVE this feature. I have a presaved report for generating email addresses and then I sometimes email from my personal account. I have also used this feature to calculate most recent members, longest members, sponsor lists, classification lists, etc. By downloading into excel, you can sort the data any way you need! BIRTHDAY/ANNIVERSARY: You can run reports to help to recognize member birthdays and club anniversaries. RI Integration! YAY! No separate data entry! This software is very powerful and yet fairly simple to use. If I become stymied, I submit a 'support ticket' and receive a response within 18-30 hours. One time that I submitted a security issue, they corrected their software that same day! I have been thrilled to use this software to help us keep our club organized.

Pros

Stated above

Cons

Occasionally what I am trying to do is not clearly found. Wish the member dues billing section was more flexible.

Long time member has used ClubRunner for years at both the club and district levels.

I've been a Rotarian since 1984. I've been involved both at the club and district level as we began to upgrade to a common computerized service function. Our district chose ClubRunner, and I've been involved with it since 2007. I am well familiar with club independent websites and their inability to keep up with changing technologies and their uselessness once key members left the club. Pre-ClubRunner efforts gave me less than desirable on-line experiences. ClubRunner changed all this. It took some time to learn the system, but I'm pleased that they have continued to upgrade their service, expand their service, and provide a variety of training tools to learn how to use the system. I was one of the system administrators in my district, and I found it easy to find and use the different tools available dealing with many of the aspects of the system. As an officer of my club, I found it easy to service the functions I needed there. I ran into occasional snags along the way, but they were usually cleared up quickly. Generally, I am very pleased with ClubRunner. I'm glad all the clubs in my district use it too. I don't use it on a daily basis like I have in the past, but I'm pleased to still see additions to service over time, and efforts being made to make the system more user friendly and more useful. Thanks.

Pros

I used the email system many times at the district level, along with finding and serving member info among the clubs in the district. I liked the district officer chart and the services that spun off that. I really like the document vault at the club level. We used to hold massive amounts in a cloud account, which is largely lost now for a variety of issues. Using ClubRunner to perform most of these functions electronically; and we used to store from paper records that were hard to retrieve -- all of this is good.

Cons

It took many of us a while to: 1) switch to computer data entry; and 2) grow comfortable with paying money for a service we never used before. It took a mind shift, and a step back to survey what the advantages might be. The advantages were not clear when we first got started using a paid computer service. It wasn't until I was club president in 2007-08 to see what a sorry lack of information existed between my club, our district and our International headquarters -- and our club was just down the street from the International headquarters.