Time Out!
May 30, 2009 – 4:04 pm by Dan QuirkNext Saturday the data centre that Clubhouse is served from will be undergoing some maintenance. Therefore Clubhouse will be down for 2 hours from 9.30-11.30 am. Sorry for any inconvenience caused!
Message of the day?
April 23, 2009 – 4:25 pm by Dan QuirkClubhouse 1.0 included a lot of major improvements and as such many of the smaller additions slipped into the update fairly unnoticed. There are 2 imparticular I’d like to draw attention to, “Message of the Day” and our new support section.
“Message of the Day” is one of the first things you’ll see when you login. As we were developing Clubhouse v.1.0 many of you asked for a feature that could take advantage of the fact that club members look at Clubhouse a couple of times a week to see the teams, post messages etc. What a marvelous opportunity to deliver important information to them while they’re there. Well “Message of the Day” is exactly that. It’s the first thing a user will see and allows an admins to put up a message about the most pressing issue at the club, whatever that be. It’s very simple to use, you simply click edit, write your message and then click save.
Just as your club needs to communicate well to run properly we need to hear from you in order to find out if we’re heading in the right direction. Is “Message of the Day” sufficient? What other ways would you like to be able to deliver information through Clubhouse? While we already have a great community of club admins who constantly point us in the right direction we’d like to hear from as many of you as possible. Thats why as part of our update we’ve implemented a brand new support section. There are 2 distinct sections, a knowledge base where I’ll be posting articles and FAQ’s about all things Clubhouse, many of which will be introduced through a post like this, and a public discussion area. In this area you can post a question, a suggestion or pose a problem. We see this as the ultimate sandbox, don’t be afraid to throw in any idea you have, the more of the community that would like to see something the more priority we’ll place trying to implement a suitable feature. Development by democracy! As well as influencing the direction of Clubhouse, we’d like to develop a community feel where old hands can help new admins with advice such as the best way get members on board for example. After all your the experts when it comes to using Clubhouse. Ultimately we’d love to see everyone talking to each other and discussing how you run your clubs, how Clubhouse can help and what you’d like to see improved. I thought I’d get the ball rolling by posing this question again, is “Message of the Day” sufficient?
Let the games begin!
April 9, 2009 – 1:00 pm by Dan QuirkWe’re extremely pleased to announce that today we’ve sent Clubhouse 1.0 live! It’s an exciting moment for us all at Clubhouse HQ and we can’t wait to see it in action. There are improvements across the board, but the major changes can roughly be split into 2 sections :
Those looking to use Clubhouse
A lot of the feedback we have received since we launched Clubhouse was on this issue
“Clubhouse is great, once setup it virtually runs itself but getting 100 people to do anything the first time is tough”.
Consequently, we wanted to improve the conversion process and help club members sign up as easily as possible. Previously, members had to be invited onto Clubhouse. To make this more flexible, we’ve introduced two new features. Firstly, if someone doesn’t respond to their invite we will periodically remind them. Secondly, club members can now come direct to Clubhouse and request to join a Club. An admin can then approve and activate their account. This way, Clubs can allow their members to sign up to Clubhouse in whichever way is most convenient; by gathering email addresses and sending invitations, allowing them to join of their own accord, or a mixture of both. Even if a club member has an invite outstanding and he comes direct, Clubhouse will detect this and activate his account straight away. Simple!
Occasionally, when club admins sent invitations, some wouldn’t make it (known as bounces). Just like mobile phones, people change their “numbers” from time to time or sometimes make a mistake when giving them out. As emails are the main form of communication across Clubhouse, we’ve implemented a service which will detect these bounces. So if Clubhouse can’t send an invite email (or any other email) after trying several times over a given period, we’ll notify a club admin so they can change it to the correct address.
Those using Clubhouse
Two strong themes that occurred again and again among the feedbackwe received were:
“I’d like to use Clubhouse for my junior section”
and
“Clubhouse isn’t quite there for a club of my size - with over 300 people I need a way to drill down”
Clubhouse was originally designed for a senior section of a club with about 75 players. Why? Well you have to start somewhere! Unlike senior sections, juniors age groups tend to operate separately, having their own team manager with players only concerned about their team. Interestingly, this is virtually the opposite of the problem Clubhouse solves with senior teams where there is often a lot of player crossover.
Players can now watch the teams that are relevant to them. This means they will only receive reminders and have to state availability for those games. Selectors can also now tag players into groups. So, for example, the U14’s manager could tag all his players so that he could just deal with them. The tagging system is extremley powerful and flexible. For example, within the “u14″ tag, he could then tag by position or any property he wished to. This would enable the manager to narrow down or expand the group of players using any combination of tags. He could, for example, choose to look at “u14″ and “forwards” when picking his team.
This system of tagging and watching allows not only junior sections, but also clubs of any size, to use Clubhouse. Admins can tag seniors based on squads, teams, ages or anything they wish. This allows them to drill down to the players they wish to deal with in an instant. Equally, on the playing side, users can just follow the teams they are interested in, and can easily change this as they get older or play for different teams.
General
Quite a few of our users play mutilple sports and wanted to use Clubhouse for all their clubs. We’re pleased to announce that Clubhouse now supports users being members of mulitple clubs.
As well as listening to all your feedback over the last six months and acting on it, we wanted to improve the process of gathering feedback, and much more importantly to bring in the people who really know about how to use Clubhouse - you! We have a brand new support section where you can start public discussions with all Clubhouse users. We’re still on hand if you’d like to send us a private message, but in order to really find out what exactly Clubhouse needs to be we’d love to see everyone talking to each other and discussing how you run your clubs, how Clubhouse can help and what you’d like to see improved.
Last but not least, we have changed the design of Clubhouse. Like every other update listed on here, this is a refinement rather than a change. We hope you like it!
Just as with anything new there are bound to be a few teething troubles. If you do see a “Something went wrong screen”, please do fill in the feedback form with as much information as possible. This will speed up fixing the problem. Equally, if you have suggested a feature and it has not made it into this update please do not despair - this is not the end, merely the begginning! We will continue to make lots of updates over the next month.
For now we hope you enjoy what you see.
Spring arrives
March 9, 2009 – 11:26 am by Dan QuirkWell here we are in March, and just as you may be wondering about this questionable start to Spring you may also be asking where are all these promised Clubhouse updates? Just like the player who tries to take on the whole team we set ourselves a fairly large task and with such wide ranging changes we’ve taken the time to get them completely right. Also during development we kept getting some very good suggestions which made the list of work even longer… The good news however is that we’re finally there and the behind the scenes changes have been filtering in over the last few weeks. Our platform has now been completely upgraded, Clubhouse is now more redundant and resisilent than ever before and in addition to that we’ve introduced a new email service, the first step in dealing with all these pesky bounced emails. The even better news is that we will be slowly phasing in all visual updates I talked about in my last post over the next few weeks. Watch this space!
Progress continues…
November 26, 2008 – 6:35 pm by Dan QuirkSince my last post on Halloween I’m happy to report we’re knee deep in developing all the features you have requested. What will change I hear you ask? Well we’ve been listening to you and the most common issue was converting your club to use Clubhouse and getting your members on board. Presently members have to be invited onto a Club account by a Club administrator. To help with this process we will be introducing 2 features, firstly, if someone doesn’t respond to their invite we will periodically remind them. Secondly, members will be able to come to the site and request to join a Club (it won’t matter if they’ve been sent an invite or not) and an admin can then approve them. This way Clubs can allow their members to sign up to Clubhouse in whichever way is most convenient, by gathering email addresses and sending invitations or by allowing them to join of their own accord, or a mixture of both.
While developing the invite system we also decided to deal with bounced emails. We noticed that when club admin’s were sending out invites there would often be a few that did not make it (known as a bounce) usually because there was a mistake in the address. Given that emails are the main way of telling a user they should visit Clubhouse, we felt it pertinent to do something about this. In the future we’ll detect these bounces. If we can’t send an email after trying several times, we’ll notify a club admin.
Over the past few months, as more and more, people have found out about Clubhouse we’ve received a lot of feature requests. With 70 Clubs now on board we have been focusing on the most common requests and aside from the invite system, most people would like to group players somehow. This is particularly relevant when dealing with junior sections. Unlike senior sections, juniors age groups tend to operate separately, having their own team manager with players only needing to state their availability for their team. That being the case we needed a way to run teams separately within a club allowing admins just to deal with their “section”. Interestingly, this is virtually the opposite of the problem Clubhouse solves with senior teams where there is often a lot of player crossover, so we will be creating a feature that can deal with both seamlessly. Players will be able to “watch” the teams that are relevant to them. This means they will only receive reminders and have to state availability about those games. From a selection point of view, admins will be able to “tag” players into any groups they wish so for example, an the U14’s manager could tag all his players, so that he could just deal with them. Within this, he could then tag by position or anything he wished. This would enable the manager to narrow down or expand the group of players they was looking at based on any set of parameters.
We hope to be putting all these updates live through January. As you can imagine, these features will add a huge amount to Clubhouse and we are just as excited as you to see them in action. We look forward to hearing all your comments, refining these features and making Clubhouse even better.
Although a lot of our work has been on functionality, we will also be updating the look of our site and part of this is bringing the showcase site design into the main application…. with a few improvements. For a sneak peak, have a look here
Protecting children
November 12, 2008 – 2:08 pm by Dan QuirkVarious members both new and old have raised the issue of child protection on Clubhouse recently. It is a very important issue and one we take extremely seriously. We have members as young as 6 or 7 using Clubhouse. For those who run junior sections or are interested in using Clubhouse to help run them here is a brief summary of the methods already in place to secure details, and the further steps we plan to take to secure private information.
Firstly clubhouse is a closed system, you have to be a member of a particular club to be able to see any contact details in the club’s directory, i.e. you have to login with a username and password. The only way you can become a member of that club is either if an admin sends you an invite or you request to join ( to be introduced shortly ) and an admin approves you.
Secondly a user can choose to hide their contact details from all but the club admins when they create their account. We are shortly going to introduce a policy for children under the age of 16 where their information is hidden by default and they have to choose to share it with the rest of the club.
Thirdly we have strict policies on data access & control and we recruit to the highest standards at QMTech. Fourthly we are all to undergo CRB checks. And fifthly we will be introducing something known as SSL encryption meaning that all communication over Clubhouse will be encrypted and completely secure.
As always, but particularly on this issue, any feedback would be warmly welcomed.
Happy Halloween!
October 31, 2008 – 9:17 pm by Dan QuirkDusting off the vampire teeth and spilling the fake blood everywhere can only mean one thing, it’s halloween, summer is well and truly gone. The means winter sport; cold frosts on a saturday morning and usually more abuse than a referree can stomach. For us at Clubhouse HQ it means our first season in winter sport and we’re loving it. We’ve now welcomed on board sports such as lacrosse, rugby, football, and shinty and were proud to say over 40 clubs now use Clubhouse.
What have we been doing over the last couple of months I hear you ask? Well other than patiently carving a pumpkin for the big day, we’ve been listening to you. Each sport has it’s own intricacies and as such we’ve been engrossed in development to bring the magic of clubhouse to all team sports. We’ve revamped the invite system to make it much easier to invite people and have a raft of features we plan to implement over the coming months.
Clubhouse hits 20!
August 26, 2008 – 11:38 am by Dan QuirkThe last couple of weeks have seen plenty of activity here at Clubhouse HQ, we have new staff arriving, new features in the pipeline, and our membership has grown rapidly. Our first foray into promotion has led to some rapid growth, with over 20 clubs signing up. Some notable arrivals include Charlesworth Cricket Club ( Derbyshire ), Burnage Metro Football Club, Hoddesdon Cricket Club ( Hertfordshire ) and Manchester Korfball Club. We look forward to working with all these clubs and welcoming many more!
For those who missed the Manchester Evening News piece, they have kindly pusblished it online aswell,
Clubhouse picked by the BBC
August 18, 2008 – 12:54 pm by Dan QuirkOver the last month or so we have slowly started spreading the word about Clubhouse. Part of this was taking Clubhouse to one of the leagues that my club, Brooklands, play in. I’m happy to say that 4 clubs have signed up and in the process Clubhouse has attracted some nice attention from the good folks at the BBC and the Manchester Evening News. You can read the BBC article here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/content/articles/2008/08/15/150808_clubhouse_feature.shtml
The MEN will be publishing an article in their technology section on Tuesday the 19th of August. Look out for it!
Response times plummet!
July 17, 2008 – 4:55 pm by Dan QuirkClubhouse has received some heavy traffic over the last few months and now the major development is finished we have recently set about tuning the application. The good news is response times are now under half of what they were!
You can see our response times and uptime, through our monitoring service, Pingdom.