Clubfeed · A Club App Instead of a Group Chat
News and dates from the club, in one place, members only.
Starting point
Club communication mostly happens in group chats. That works for arranging a lift to the match and fails at everything else. What matters drowns in small talk, dates get scrolled past, and a vote turns into a pile of replies somebody has to count by hand. Worse, a group chat has no roles: everyone can post, so everyone does, and the people who only want to know when training starts leave. Then there is the question of access. In a chat group every phone number is visible to everyone, and whoever leaves the club stays in the group until somebody notices. The club has no list of who is actually reading along. And finally, anything older than a few days is gone. Someone who wants to know in May what was said about court maintenance in March will not find it. Any replacement has to be lighter than the chat it replaces, or nobody moves.
What we built
Clubfeed is a members app with three kinds of entry. News carries a read marker and can be flagged as important. Dates collect a yes, a no or a maybe, and the answers stand counted beside them instead of buried in comments. Polls come in three forms, a yes or no question, a multiple choice and a free text answer, they can run anonymously and carry a deadline. Three roles decide who may do what: admin, editor, member. New members only get in by invitation, either through an allowlist of email addresses or through a code with a limited number of uses, and a sign up is approved before it counts. The technical point is where that protection sits. It lives in the database as row level security, so a member cannot fetch another member's answer at all, rather than merely not being shown it. Knowing the address gets you nowhere. Administration has its own area with a member list, a merge for duplicate entries and one form each for news, dates and polls, including the results. The app is built mobile first, runs as a progressive web app and installs to the home screen without an app store.
Result
The study shows what a club gains by leaving the group chat: a place where the important things stay findable, a vote that counts itself, and a member list that is correct. The difference shows on day three, not on day one. What was written in March is still there in May, and whoever joins later reads it instead of asking. It was built on the example of a tennis club, with court maintenance, training times and the club championship, and it fits any club with the same problem. For us it is the proof that a small, well cut app beats a large one that tries to do everything, and that access control is a decision in the database, not in the interface.
Project facts
- Category: Web Design
- Industry: Vereins-App / Community
- Duration: Konzeptstudie
Systra Studios
Gasselstiege 30L, 48159 Münster
Telefon: +49 151 11098288
E-Mail: info@systrastudios.de