How to communicate with club members

A club is, in the end, a group of people who need to know what is happening and feel kept in the loop. Almost every complaint a committee fields traces back to a communication gap: “I didn't know that was on,” “nobody told me it had changed,” “I never saw that email.” Members rarely complain that the programme is bad. They complain that they were left out.

Treating communication as a core committee responsibility rather than an afterthought is the mindset shift that fixes most of this. The clubs that run smoothly are not the ones with the best events. They are the ones where members always know what is going on.

The most common failure is scattering communication across too many places: a bit on Facebook, a bit in WhatsApp, a poster on the noticeboard, the occasional email. When information lives everywhere, members trust nowhere. They cannot tell what is official, what is current, or where to look, so they stop looking.

Pick one channel as the single source of truth for official club communication, and tell members plainly: if it matters, it will be here. The channel needs two properties. It has to reach members where they actually are, which today means a notification on their phone, and it has to keep official notices separate from casual chatter so they do not get buried. A busy group chat fails the second test badly, which is the whole argument of the Comnly versus WhatsApp comparison.

Not every message deserves the same treatment. Lumping them all together is why members either miss the important ones or get fatigued by the trivial ones. There are broadly four types, and each wants handling differently.

1. Casual updates

Photos, results, news, the general life of the club. These build belonging and should be frequent and low-stakes. Nobody needs to acknowledge them.

2. Informational notices

What is on, when, where. These need to reach members reliably and usually pair with an event so members can RSVP and get a reminder.

3. Critical, must-read notices

The AGM, a subscription change, a safeguarding update, a closure. These are the ones you cannot afford a member to miss, and the ones where “I posted it in the group” offers no protection if it was never seen. Critical notices should be sent so that you can prove who has read and acknowledged them, which is exactly what the critical notices feature is built for.

4. Time-sensitive blasts

The match is on tonight, the bar is open late, a last-minute change. These need to go out immediately and land as a notification, because their value evaporates within hours.

The fastest way to train members to ignore you is to send every message to the whole club regardless of relevance. The 28-year-old who keeps getting notices about the over-60s lunch, and the senior member who keeps getting the colts training updates, both learn the same lesson: most of this is not for me, so I will stop paying attention.

Targeting fixes this. Send the senior section their events, the new members their onboarding, a single team their fixture change, and the whole club only the things that genuinely apply to everyone. Members do not need every message personalised. They need to feel that what reaches them is relevant. Three or four audience segments is plenty for most clubs, and the mechanics are on the push notifications page.

There is a sweet spot between too quiet and too noisy, and both extremes cost you. Go silent for weeks and the club fades from members' minds; the next message feels out of the blue and gets ignored. Send several messages a day and members mute you, after which even the critical notice goes unseen.

A reliable rhythm is a handful of touches a week: a casual post or two, the notices and event reminders as they arise, and the occasional poll. The aim is to be a familiar, welcome presence rather than either a stranger or a nuisance. Targeting helps here too, because a member only counts the messages they actually received, so good targeting lets the club as a whole stay active without any single member feeling spammed.

The difference between “I think I told everyone” and “I know who read it” is the difference between hoping and managing. For casual posts it does not matter. For the critical notices it matters enormously, both practically and for the committee's own protection.

When a subscription change, a rule change, or a safeguarding notice goes out, you want a record of who has seen and acknowledged it, and a simple way to chase the handful who have not. That turns a vague “we did communicate it” into an auditable fact, which matters if a decision is ever questioned at an AGM or by a governing body. The critical notices feature records exactly this.

Even on the right channel, a badly written message gets skipped. A few habits make club communication land.

• One message, one main point. If there are three things, that is three messages or a clearly structured one, not a wall of text.
• Put the what and the when in the first line. Members decide whether to keep reading in about two seconds.
• Make the action obvious. If you want an RSVP, a payment, or a reply, say so plainly and make it one tap.
• Keep the tone human. A notice that reads like a person wrote it gets read; one that reads like a circular gets ignored.
• Do not bury the important bit at the bottom. Members often do not get there.

1. Early week: post what is on, targeted to the members it applies to, with an RSVP where relevant.
2. Midweek: a casual post that keeps the club present in members' minds, a photo or a bit of news.
3. Day of an event: a short reminder to the members who said they were coming.
4. As needed: critical notices sent with acknowledgement, and time-sensitive blasts when something changes at short notice.

This is a rhythm, not a rulebook. The value is in its predictability. Members who know the club communicates reliably start to rely on it, and a channel members rely on is a channel members read.

The judgement in all of this is yours: what to say, who it is for, and how the club should sound. No tool decides that. What a tool decides is whether the message reliably reaches the member and whether you can tell that it did.

Comnly is built to be that single trusted channel. It sends targeted push notifications so the right members get the right message on their phones, keeps official notices clear of the casual chatter, fires event reminders automatically, and records who has read and acknowledged the critical notices so you are never relying on hope. It is the communication layer the rest of the committee's work sits on.

If you want to find out how well your club currently communicates before changing anything, the free Club Communication Health Check scores you across six pillars in about five minutes, with the result shown instantly and no email gate.