Activity Exchange - How we can Help your Club

How Activity Exchange can Help your Club

We all know that the Internet has great potential for helping people to communicate and organise if only we can work out how to take advantage of what it has to offer.

Large and well-organised clubs can succeed in getting a web site up and running but this can create an excessive dependency on a few skilled members who might lose interest in the club and so leave the club struggling to cope. The Internet is awash with abandoned sites with out of date content which reflect badly on the organisations they are representing.

Activity Exchange has been conceived specifically to address these problems.

To do this it sticks to the following basic principles.

It is free
It does not need any more than basic computer skills
It provides a web page for each club with description and contact information
It has an automatically updated online Activities or Events Diary
It allows the details or all the information about Activities to be kept private
It can be used with or without a clubs own web site

Activity Exchange is free as this is in harmony with the voluntary unpaid tradition of the clubs that it is intended for. It is hoped that its modest running costs can be met from charges for non-core activities and from donations. Free.

All changes and additions to a clubs information or activities is done through simple and easy to use web forms.

Activity Exchange has been running for over nearly four years now and it has proved to be remarkably robust and reliable. There is no sign that its security has ever been breached.

Activities and other information have three levels of visibility.

Public - Anyone on the Internet can see all the details. This is great for your regular club night or other activities where privacy is not an issue.
Private - Anyone on the Internet can see the Title and Date/Time of the activity but a club password is needed to see the details. This is the default and it is great for showing the world what your club is doing and so why they would want to join.
Hidden - only people with a club password even know this exists.

Activity Exchange provides three levels of Password

User - to see private details
Organiser - to add content
Master - to manage the information about the club

These passwords are cumulative in that an Organiser password acts as a User password and a Master password acts as an Organiser and as a User password.

There are two kinds of passwords. Group Passwords are the same for all the club and are automatically changed, normally monthly, by Activity Exchange. Group Passwords. The other kind are Personal Passwords that belong to one person and are not routinely changed. Personal Passwords.

Activity Exchange addresses two audiences.

Potential Members who can easily find out about your club and your activities by using the standard Search Engines such as Google (http://Google.com).
Current Members who can find up-to-date information about your clubs activities and use it to add or submit their activities and more.

Some other features are...

	Photo Albums	you can have as many albums as you want with as many pictures in each as you want. This is a great way of advertising your club and of providing feedback to your members about activities. Visibility can be Public, Private or Hidden.
	People	you can list People to do with your Club. This can be just for the officers of the club such as Chairman, Secretary etc. or it could be for all members. Visibility can be Public, Private or Hidden. People List.
	Web Hosting	Activity Exchange provides free Web Hosting to clubs that put their activities onto Activity Exchange. Web Hosting.
	Secure Hosting	Activity Exchange provides for password protected areas of your own web site so you can safely use your web site to publish such items as committee minutes. Secure Hosting.
	Activities Links	you can link from your web site to Activity Exchange and so allow Activity Exchange to provide an up to date list of your Activities on your web site. Links for Your Web Pages.
	Credit Cards	you can arrange for members to pay for events by Credit Card. Credit Card Payments.
	Location Maps	by adding the Post Code or Grid Ref to an Activity you can allow a map of that location to be available. Activity Location Map.
	Email Groups	Activity Exchange provides each Club with a free email group with no ads. The content of your emails is not interfered with. Alternatively, Activity Exchange works very well with email groups such as those provided by Yahoo (http://yahoogroups.com) or SmartGroups (http://smartgroups.com). You can arrange to have details of new or changed Activities sent to these groups for distribution and discussion. Commercial Email Groups do not do the same job as Activity Exchange. Reasons.
	Web Email	visitors can simply fill in a form to enquire about the club or an activity. You can link to this capability from your own web site.
	Guest Clubs	you can make a closely affiliated club a Guest Club that means that any of its passwords will act as a User password for your club so they can see, but not change or add to, your content. This is perfect for Sub-Clubs.
	Activity Sharing	you can easily send an invitation to other clubs to come to an activity of yours. The invited club is simply sent an email and they can decide if they want to take the offer up. They do not have to be using Activity Exchange themselves. Share Activities.
	Discussion Groups	each club and each activity gets its own Discussion Group.
	Bulletin/Newsletter Production	you can use Activity Exchange to prepare your Diary Listing or a Grid of your Activities. This can be a real boon. How to Make a Diary Listing, How to Make an Activities Grid.
	Web Site Links	you can link from your clubs page on Activity Exchange to your clubs web site. You can also link an Activity to a web site about the venue or a web site or some pages that provide more information about the activity.
	Bulk Upload	you can put all your activities into a spreadsheet and email it to Activity Exchange where it will be automatically processed. Bulk Import.
	Freedom	if a club wants to it can escape from the Bulletin or Newsletter cycle. No longer does everything have to be planned well in advance.
	Empowerment	you can empower your members to put on activities as and when they want to. This can make it easy for members to simply share whatever they are doing, sometimes at quite short notice. Not all clubs will want to do this.
	Submit	you can allow members who have only the User password to Submit an Activity for subsequent approval. Activity Submit.

If you want to start using Activity Exchange for your Club then simply follow this link Add Club.

For an example of a real club that uses Activity Exchange please see http://NottinghamIVC.org.uk.

If you have a question that has not been answered here then please email the Activity Exchange or use our Feedback Form Feedback

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