Evaluating Clubistry

Clubistry is a club management platform that brings your member roster, dues collection, renewals, applications, and your club's website together in one place. It is built for how membership organizations actually operate, which means it is flexible enough for kennel clubs, breed clubs, sport clubs, art and craft guilds, historical societies, civic organizations, and other member-driven groups.

This page is written for boards and other decision makers. It covers what Clubistry does, what changes for your club and your members, what it costs, and the questions that usually come up before approving new software. A PDF version is available if you would rather read it on paper.

What Clubistry does

Membership management. Your member roster lives in one place, with custom fields for whatever your club needs to track. You define your own membership types rather than choosing from a fixed list, whether those are regular, voting, lifetime, junior, family, or whatever is specific to your organization. Online applications flow through a review workflow that matches how your club actually approves new members, and you can import your existing membership from a spreadsheet rather than entering people one at a time.

Member self-service. Members log in with their own account to update their contact information, check their dues status, renew, and reach member-only content. Your secretary stops being the update system.

Dues and renewals. Members pay their dues online without leaving your website. Your club connects a Stripe account once during setup, and after that members simply fill in the payment form the way they would at any other online checkout. When someone pays by check or cash instead, your treasurer records that payment against their renewal and Clubistry marks it paid just as it would an online one, so both kinds of member sit in the same system. Lapsed memberships are handled for you. Renewal reminder emails are built in, with five standard notices covering the dues cycle from the start of renewal through the end of the grace period, and you control both the wording and the timing.

Your club's website. Modern, mobile-friendly, and built to WCAG accessibility guidelines. Anyone you give access to can update content without knowing HTML. Pages, news posts, event listings, photo albums, a document library, FAQs, and custom forms are all included. Site search lets visitors and members find what they are looking for without working through the menu.

Roles and permissions. You decide who gets access and how much. Content Manager, Member Manager, Application Manager, E-Commerce Manager, and Report Manager each unlock one area of the Club Management Portal, so whoever keeps the website current never needs to see payment records. A separate Board role opens board-only pages and the full roster view on the site itself, and it does not have to line up with who holds an admin role. Content can be restricted to members only, board only, or particular membership types.

Custom forms. You can build a form for anything your club collects, including event registration, surveys, sign-ups, donations, and member data updates. Forms can take payment, so one form can register an attendee and collect the fee at the same time.

Simple e-commerce. Sell club merchandise, take event payments, or accept donations through your site. A storefront with category pages, a shopping cart, and inventory management is included.

Support. Email support comes with every plan, including the free one, and phone support is available during business hours (8am to 5pm Central).

What Clubistry leaves to other tools

Being straight about the boundaries is more useful than overpromising.

Broadcast email belongs in a dedicated tool. Clubistry does not send newsletters or marketing email to your membership. Tools like Mailerlite or Sender do that job well, and your Clubistry roster can feed their subscriber lists. There is more to bulk email than sending it. Those services keep messages out of spam folders, manage unsubscribes, and report back on how many members opened a newsletter and what they clicked. That is a specialty of its own, and pointing you toward people who already do it well serves your club better than a thin version built into Clubistry.

Official elections belong with a dedicated voting service. Clubistry does not run elections, because services built specifically for that do it better. They handle the parts that decide whether a contested result holds up, including the requirements that apply to your organization under your state's law, ballot verification, and reconciling mailed paper ballots with online ones. When an election result has to stand, that specialty is worth having.

You can still collect a vote the way you would run a poll. Build a custom form, put it on a members-only page, and members complete it once they have logged in. Whether that satisfies your bylaws and the rules your club votes under is a decision for your club to make.

The store is for club sales, not retail operations. It handles merchandise, event fees, and donations. It does not calculate shipping or sales tax, and Clubistry does not handle fulfillment. Clubs use it for club-branded merchandise, ticket sales, and donations rather than a substantial storefront business.

Data export runs through reports rather than one file. You can export member data including membership and renewal status, custom form submissions, applications, and e-commerce records from the reports in each area, and the roster has its own CSV download right on the page. A single unified “download everything” export is on the roadmap and not built yet, so your data is exportable today, just through several reports instead of one.

What changes for your members

This is usually the first thing anyone wants to know. Here is the honest answer.

Members get their own login. They update their own contact information, see their dues status, and renew online.

Renewals move online, and offline still works. A member who prefers to write a check can keep writing checks, and that payment gets recorded in the system. A member who would rather pay by card can do that. Nobody is forced to change how they pay.

The website gets easier to use. Members find things without asking. Member-only material like the roster, minutes, and documents sits behind a login instead of scattered through old email threads.

Nobody is migrated against their will. Members who prefer paper forms and offline methods carry on that way. The system runs online and offline members side by side.

What changes for the board and officers

Officer transitions stop losing data. When your treasurer or secretary changes, the records stay in the system. New officers pick up where the old ones left off, and the roster is no longer on somebody's laptop.

Responsibility spreads across several people. Different people hold different administrative roles, and they do not all have to be on the board. A volunteer who looks after the website can have exactly that access and nothing more, so the club is not depending on any one person.

There is less administrative work overall. Renewal reminders go out from the system. Member self-service cuts down the “please update my address” email. Applications arrive through a defined review workflow instead of a paper pile.

Updating the website stops being a specialist job. Whoever holds content access can post news, add an event, or correct the hours, and more than one person can hold it. No waiting on the one person who knows how.

You can see where the club stands. Reports answer the questions that come up between meetings, like who has lapsed, how the membership breaks down by type, and who signed up for the last event. Member lists, form submissions, applications, and e-commerce transactions all export as well.

Cost

There are three plans, and each can be paid monthly or annually. Most clubs pay annually, which brings the rate down.

Bronze Silver Gold
Monthly Free $59 $199
Annually Free $649 (save 8%) $2,099 (save 12%)
Members Up to 40 Up to 2,000 Over 2,000
Transaction fee 4% 1% 0.5%
Custom domain $10 a month Included Included

Every plan carries the full feature set, so a small club on Bronze is evaluating the real product rather than a trimmed-down version of it. Most member-driven organizations fit comfortably in the free tier or Silver.

There are no setup fees and no per-member surcharges. There is no contract either, so you can pay month to month and cancel whenever you want.

Two separate fees apply to money taken online, and it is worth budgeting for both. Stripe charges its own processing fee on every transaction, a percentage of the payment plus a small flat amount, and publishes its current rates at stripe.com/pricing. The Clubistry transaction fee in the table above is charged on top of that. Both apply to dues, application fees, and store orders alike.

How to try it before you decide

One person signs up for the free Bronze plan and works in a real site rather than a demo environment. If your club goes ahead, that same site becomes your live site, so the settings and content you build while evaluating are work you keep. The test data is a different matter. Sample membership types, test members, and practice applications are there to be deleted once they have done their job, and real content can sit alongside them in the same site while you work.

Work with sample data first. Leave the default sample pages in place while you look around, or start building your real content if you already know you want it. Set up one or two sample membership types and an application form for each. Set the renewal dates to a deliberately short cycle, a few days or a week, so you can watch a whole renewal happen instead of waiting a year to see it. Submit test applications. Run test members through a renewal and see exactly which emails go out and on what schedule. Record a manual payment against a renewal to see how a check-paying member is handled.

If you want to see the money side end to end, connect a Stripe account, create a membership type with $1 dues, and pay it with a real card. You will see how it arrives in Stripe and how Clubistry handles it on the way back.

Two things belong in a particular order. Set up your member custom fields before you build applications, because application forms draw on those fields. And leave importing your real membership until near the end. Beyond a few board members, loading people early usually means deleting and re-importing them later once the rest of the setup settles.

Most of this is training, not just evaluation. Building pages, pulling reports, and working through site settings are the same skills your admins will use every month afterwards. The setup documentation lays out the full pre-launch order, including when to upgrade your plan and when to switch your domain across.

You do not have to work it out alone. Clubistry is always happy to schedule a walk-through with your club. It is a video call where we go through the whole back end with you and answer whatever you want to ask. That can be before you start, partway through when you have hit a specific question, or in front of your whole board so everyone sees the same thing at once.

If you decide against it, delete the site. There is no cost and no obligation.

Questions that come up

What happens to our data if we leave Clubistry, or if Clubistry goes away?

It comes with you either way. Member records including membership and renewal status, custom form submissions, applications, and e-commerce records all export from the reports in each area, and they are available whenever you want them rather than only on the way out. Your website content lives on Clubistry's infrastructure, so moving elsewhere would mean rebuilding the site, but your membership data goes with you. A single unified export is on the roadmap.

Who owns our data?

Your club does. Clubistry stores it on your behalf. The specifics are set out in the Terms of Service.

Is our data secure?

Yes. Data is encrypted in transit and the infrastructure follows standard security practice. The Privacy Policy and Terms of Service cover the details.

Can members see each other's contact information?

Only as much as you choose to share. The roster is visible to signed-in members rather than the public. Your admins decide which columns it shows, and each member decides on their own profile whether their email, phone, and address appear there. Board members can be given a fuller view for board work, or held to the same privacy choices as everyone else, and that is a setting your club controls.

How long does it take to get set up?

It is possible to build a whole club site in a day. Most clubs take a few weeks, and some take a few months. What drives the difference is how many people are sharing the load, how many pages your site needs, how many documents have to go up, and how many applications you are building.

The bottleneck is almost never the software. For most clubs it is pulling the content together and getting photography sorted.

Clubistry can help with that work for a fee, and it does not have to be the whole job. Bulk document loading is a common example. A club moving well over a thousand documents is far better served by a direct database import than by uploading them one at a time, and that is something we can handle for you. Get in touch if you would like to talk through which parts would help most.

How much time does it take to run once you are live?

Most clubs find their treasurer, secretary, and webmaster together spend less time on Clubistry than they used to spend on spreadsheets, email threads, and paper forms. There is a learning curve in the first few weeks and a time saving after that.

What if we need help?

Email support comes with every plan and phone support is available during business hours (8am to 5pm Central). There is documentation for the software itself, plus articles on the questions clubs keep running into, like how many membership tiers to offer or what belongs behind a members-only login.

Does it work for our kind of club?

Clubistry serves membership organizations broadly, including kennel and breed clubs, dog sport clubs, art and craft guilds, historical societies, civic and volunteer organizations, and professional groups. Custom member fields, multiple membership types, and configurable applications mean the system adapts to your club's rules rather than asking your club to fit a template.

Do our members need to be tech-savvy?

No. If your members can renew a magazine subscription online, they can use Clubistry. And the ones who would rather stay offline still can.

Can we import our existing roster?

Yes. You can import your current membership from a spreadsheet or CSV file.

What if we want to change how things work later?

Most of it is yours to change whenever you want. Website content, custom fields, roles, and who can see what are all adjustable by your own admins, and you will not need a developer for any of it.

Membership types, dues amounts, and renewal dates deserve more care. Change those between renewal cycles rather than partway through one. Renewals are generated in advance, so altering the membership type underneath them can shift dates on renewals that already exist. Clubistry locks some of those settings while renewals are open, which catches the worst cases, but the safe habit is to make that kind of change in the quiet part of your year.

What is coming next?

On the roadmap are a dedicated event system with recurring events and attendee tracking, and improvements to the media library.

Talk to us

You do not have to decide from a web page. If something here raises a question, or your board wants that walk-through of the back end, we are easy to reach. Questions about cost, data, or whether Clubistry suits your particular club are all fair game, and asking commits you to nothing.

Get in touch

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