Running Club Membership Systems – Leveraging the Cloud

We are seeing more and more Running Clubs making the move to RunSignup Clubs. We noticed an article in The New York Times this morning about how The Cloud is impacting organizations. It can be easily applied to Running Clubs:

Ed Lazowska, who holds a chair in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. “One critical advantage of the cloud is that sharing becomes dramatically easier.”

This central concept of having a single, shared view of a Running Club is such a huge improvement over the old methods of the membership coordinator volunteer keeping a spreadsheet of all the membership information.  Spreadsheets have lots of issues like data consistency, different people having different versions, the “master” being available only to one person at a time, etc.

One of the issues clubs always seem to face when starting off with RunSignup Clubs is importing their old spreadsheet data.  This is when many of the issues with spreadsheets are really discovered. For example, importing that date fields for membership start and end will often have different formats and be inconsistent.

To prevent further inconsistencies, we strongly suggest making the move and getting rid of that old spreadsheet. Some clubs have tried to keep the old spreadsheet in sync with the system – trying to update the spreadsheet when they get their daily membership update emails from the system. This just continues to cycle of data inconsistency and potential confusion.

The Cloud is bringing lots of new methods that improve many aspects of our daily lives. Take advantage of the Cloud for your Running Club.

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