How to Sign Up
On this page:
When you are ready to sign up, you can do so entirely online, in less than 5 minutes. No payment or bank information is required to set up your account. Click the link below to start the process:
The signup wizard has three screens, prompting for basic information about your club or association. It also creates the first administrator account. One of the screens is our Subscription Agreement which you must accept in order to proceed. So the signup wizard should be completed by an officer or authorized representative of your organization.
Once it is complete, your account is established in Setup mode. You have a shell web site and membership database that you can start building out. You will access the web site using a ShortName that you specify in the signup wizard. For example, if you specify "abc" as your ShortName, you will use "http://abc.clubexpress.com" to access the site.
You will then be taken to a Setup Check List of tasks which must be completed before you can activate your site. Until you have completed all of these items, logging into the system will take you to this screen. While you are in Setup mode, the public side of the web site is turned off and only administrators can log in.
Every item on the Check List can also be found on the administrator's Control Panel, along with dozens of other options. Click the Control Panel menu choice to review these other options. One option on the Control Panel main screen allows you to download our complete administrator manual, which explains every option within ClubExpress.
Trial Mode
If you want to go into Trial Mode (see Convincing Your Board for more information), do everything on the Setup Check List except the bank information. Then call us and we'll switch you into Trial Mode manually.
Active Mode
If you want to go straight to Active mode, do everything on the Setup Check List including the bank information. Once all items are showing a green check mark, you will see a "Finished" button at the bottom of the Check List. Click it and the Check List will go away. Then go to the Control Panel and click the "Activate Web Site" button at the bottom of the page. You are now live.
One of the required tasks on the Check List is your bank information. ClubExpress deposits money we collect on your behalf directly into your bank account and we also withdraw the setup fee and our monthly fees directly from your bank account.
When you provide your bank information, the system will make a small deposit and withdrawal of a random amount under $1.00 into your account. One of the tasks you must complete before the site can go live is to verify this amount, which confirms for us that your bank account information is correct. To do this, call your bank a couple of days after you complete the initial bank information screen and a bank representative can tell you the amount. Or check your bank's web site if you have online access to your account.
Your setup fee includes conversion of your existing membership database into ClubExpress's online database. This is not a required task; if your membership is relatively small, you can re-enter the data manually into the system.
But for larger clubs, we are happy to convert your data for you. Once you have signed up, contact our Customer Support team to make arrangements to send us your data file. We accept data in a number of common formats, including Microsoft Access, Paradox, Excel, Quattro Pro, and Text (Comma Separated Values, one member per row.) If your data is in a different format, please call us to discuss.
The following link displays a PDF document with the information we need in the import file. Please review it and edit your database accordingly before sending the database to us.
Bulk Load Specifications
When we import the membership database for you, these members have a special status called "Bulk Loaded". They are not active and they don't get notified. This status gives you a chance to review the data to make sure it's complete. When you are ready to go live, call us and we will send a welcoming email to every member in the database with an email address, telling them about the new site and inviting them to visit and update their information. This email will contain a system generated username and password for each user, and a special flag will require users to change that password once they log in. Like all emails sent by the system, this one can be customized to your specific needs.
If you also have non-member mailing lists of people you keep in contact with, we can import those for you into the non-member database built into your web site.
Once all the tasks on the Setup Check List are complete and your web site is active, you can configure one or more Internet domains that you own to point to your new web site. See the administrator manual for instructions on how to do this. And once it's done, please call or email us. There's a couple of manual things we need to do at our end to make everything work correctly.
In addition to the required tasks, there are many other tasks which are not required but which you may want to complete before making the site public. These include defining Interests and Committees, and completing other modules that you will make available to members and visitors (Event Calendar, News, Documents, etc.) These are accessed from the Control Panel link on the menu.