Moving a club that already exists, without a bad evening
Start with the register, because everything else hangs off it, and do it from the spreadsheet you already keep. Up to 16 entrants per event is free and the register is free at any size, so a whole club can be moved over and a season run before anybody is asked for money.
Start with the register, from the spreadsheet you already keep.
Start with the register
The member list is imported from a spreadsheet with five columns: email address, first name, last name, membership type and your own reference, which is the number your existing administration already knows each member by. Up to two hundred rows go in at once, and there is a preview before anything is sent.
The preview says what each line will do: a good address that has not been invited, an address that is not an address, a duplicate inside your own list, somebody this club has already invited, and somebody who already joined. What it never says is whether an address already has an account on SetMatcher: that is the person’s own business, not the committee’s.
Nobody is signed up without knowing
An import sends invitations. It does not create accounts and it does not create memberships: somebody becomes a member of your club when they accept with their own account, and until then the line is an invitation with a state on it. An invitation can be pending, accepted, declined, or taken back by the committee.
The consequence is worth planning for: on the day you import, your register is empty and your invitation list is full, and it fills up over the following fortnight as people answer. Import once, well before the season, rather than the night before the first fixture.
Your own membership types, and your own look
Name the membership types before you import, because a row carries one. Every club does this differently, so there is no fixed list: senior, junior, weekday, honorary, whatever your own constitution says. A type that members still hold cannot be deleted, which is the one rule the screen enforces.
Then the look. Upload the club logo and a cover photograph, as PNG, JPEG or WebP files of up to two megabytes, and pick one of four colour themes. There is deliberately no free colour picker and no choice of font: every club page stays readable and still looks like part of the same site, which is what makes a stranger trust the page they landed on.
Then the play, not before
Once people are on the register, make the groups the club actually has: the Tuesday evening, the youth section, the league squad. A group already running somewhere else on SetMatcher can be handed over to the club rather than rebuilt, and the handover changes nothing until the club accepts it.
From there the ranking assembles itself. Results from every group the club owns feed one ranking per sport, so a member who plays in three of them appears once, with everything they played in it. Nothing has to be re-entered, and a club that moves in October has a meaningful ranking by Christmas.
Where to read next
More on the subjects you have just read about.
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