More and more clubs are establishing themselves on the Internet. Many people use the very powerful Search Engines to find information on the Internet and this can bring your club to the attention of a whole new audience. It's also a great way to regularly update information for your members. This is very easy to do today at minimum cost:
- Check with your National Governing Body whether there is an area within their website where member clubs can publish their own pages
- Use the free space offered by most Internet Service Providers to create and host your own club pages
- Or approach a local computer company to host your club website for a modest fee, and recruit a computer-literate member to create and build the pages.
The secret of a good website is that you keep it regularly updated. You might want to consider publishing different pages with the following information:
- Introduction to the club - who you are, what you do
- The range of activities offered by your club, and club facilities
- Calendar of events such as coaching sessions, matches, tournaments
- Results and reports from recent matches, competitions and events
- Membership information - how to apply, elligibility, criteria
- Contact information for key officers
Of course, if you have the time and know-how, you can provide a much wider range of online facilities including member discussion forums, team lists, coaching information, committee papers, and do on.
More and more clubs are now publishing an electronic newsletter by email. If you collect the email addresses of your members you can either send them all a simply formatted email using your email software or use any of the various commercial solutions (such as ListServ - link can be found in the "see also" panel) to run an automated email bulk distribution system.
Online results
Another excellent use of the web is to publish your league and competition results online for all your players (and opponents!) to see. These services enable you to create an area for your club competitons and to upload the results after each event; many of them automatically recalculate the rankings. Links to www.leaguepro.com and www.fixs.co.uk can be found in the "see also" panel.
