On Monday, March 25, 2019 at 8:53:25 PM UTC-6, wrote:
My US based club has a messy system of making announcements and shared discussions. We are in the torture of reply all emails. The good news is we want to go to something else.

What communications systems work for other clubs?
We would like to be able to make announcements of what days we operate which vary due to the weather and availability of instructors, tow pilots, and towplanes.

Maybe it should include scheduling features.

It might be good to be able to have sublists of users:
1. Just board members.
2. Just tow pilots.
3. Everyone, including interested former members and potential new members the most open public list.
4. Just voting eligible club members.
etc.

Ways to share images, and polls/voting in addition to stories might be good.

Several members expressed a strong dislike of Facebook due to privacy concerns.

so examples of possible solutions:

Mail Chimp,
Constant Contact
Google Groups
Yahoo Groups (appears to be suffering a long painful death by lack of fixes)
Forums such as phpBB that XCSoar uses https://forum.xcsoar.org/index.php


I would hope it could work well with mobile phones. Maybe it should also include the ability to send and receive SMS text?

Please share what works for any club you are part of.
Chris

My club uses a combination of Slack slack.com, Click n' Glide clicknglide.com, and Mail Chimp for its newsletter. We are phasing out Yahoo Groups.

Slack is great for regular communication. It has the ability to divide conversations into various topics like xc, safety, airfield, youth, including locked conversations for the executive and instructors. It has an iphone/android app and web interface. We use the free service that only allows so many messages and photos/documents before they are deleted.

Click n' Glide is great for scheduling flying days. It has the ability to email to members in a group but you must use the website to reply. If you are used to Yahoo Groups it is not very intuitive.

One of our members uses Mail Chimp to make a weekly newsletter during the flying season. It is great but does require some effort for someone to put together content.