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Download your data
Your club's data belongs to your club, and you can take a copy of it whenever you want. There are two jobs on this page: taking a copy of the whole club, and answering one member who asks what you hold about them. Both produce a zip file. Most of what is in it is spreadsheets that open in Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets or anything else that reads a CSV; your written content and your uploaded files come out as files rather than rows.
Who can do this?
Both jobs: Club Admin. Nobody else, including Treasurer and Membership Manager — taking every member, payment and result away in one file is a different act from working with them on screen, so it sits with the same small group who could close the club. Adding a member's health information to their copy needs the emergency information permission as well, which a Welfare Officer holds.
Just want a team sheet?
The membership roster downloads on its own from the console's Members tab, filtered to the age categories and genders you need — see Members and households → Export the roster to a spreadsheet. More of your committee can do that than can take a copy of the whole club.
Taking a copy of the whole club
Go to Settings → Download your data and choose New export.
You pick which files you want — everything is ticked to start with, and you can untick anything you do not need. A secretary who wants the roster for a mail merge does not have to download twenty years of event entries to get it.
Thirty-one files are available. Twenty-eight of them are spreadsheets:
| File | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Members | Everyone on the roster, including juniors and prospects |
| Households | Who belongs with whom |
| Member addresses | Postal addresses, kept separate so the roster stays one row per person |
| Emergency contacts | Names, relationships and phone numbers. Not health information |
| Consents | What each member agreed to, when, and on which version |
| Seasons and fees | Your pricing structure, season by season |
| Subscriptions | Current and past memberships |
| Invoices | Every invoice, its status and what it came to |
| Invoice lines | What each invoice was made up of, line by line |
| Payments | Every payment attempt, its status and its reference |
| Events | The whole calendar, with dates, places and prices |
| Event participations | Entries, check-ins and results |
| Club records | The record board, with holders and evidence links |
| Affiliations | England Athletics registrations, season by season |
| Member notes | Notes the committee has written about a member |
| Communication preferences | What each person has asked to be sent, and not sent |
| Poll responses | Who answered which poll, and when |
| Renewals | How each household's renewal went, season by season |
| Prospect journeys | How somebody got from first enquiry to joining |
| Refunds | Money sent back, with the reason and when it settled |
| Payouts | Money arriving in the club's bank from the payment provider |
| Payment methods | What each member pays with, and their Direct Debit reference |
| Expenses | Claims made, and how each was approved and paid |
| Manual entries | Money in and out that the treasurer recorded by hand |
| Planned payments | What the budget expects to pay and receive, and when |
| Affiliation remittances | What the club has paid England Athletics |
| Finance categories | The category names the finance files refer to |
| Budgets | Each budget, line by line, with its membership assumptions |
The other three are your own words and files, and they are described under what your website content looks like below.
| File | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Website pages | Every page of your website, as a Markdown file |
| News posts | Every news post, as a Markdown file |
| Documents | Your document library, as the original files, with an index |
Every column in every spreadsheet is written down in what is in your data export, so the spreadsheets can be read years from now by somebody who has never seen our software.
Preparing the file takes a minute or two for most clubs. The page updates on its own, and the row moves to Ready to download when it is finished.
Collecting the file
Choose Download on the row. The Available until column shows the date the file is deleted — seven days after you asked for it.
The file is deleted after seven days
This is deliberate. A zip containing your entire membership should not sit on our servers indefinitely. Download it, keep it somewhere your committee controls, and prepare a fresh one whenever you need it — there is no limit on how often you can ask.
The row itself stays after the file has gone, so the club can always see that a copy was taken, by whom, and whether anyone collected it.
Carry the preferences across before you email anyone
Communication preferences holds what each person has asked not to be sent, including mailing lists they have left. A club that moves to another system without them will email people who asked not to be emailed.
What your website content looks like
Your pages, your news and your documents are not records, so they do not come out as spreadsheets.
Pages and posts each become a Markdown file — a plain text file that opens in any text editor and imports into most website software. Each one starts with a short block between --- lines holding the title, web address, publication date and author, then the writing itself.
Pictures come too, in a files folder, and the links inside each page are rewritten to point at those copies. A page still shows its photographs after your old website has gone.
Some parts of a page were never fixed text
Parts of a page are filled in automatically when somebody visits — the next few events, the latest news, your membership prices. There is no wording to save for those, so the file carries a short note where each one stood, saying what it showed. Nothing you wrote is left out, and anyone rebuilding the page can see where those parts belonged.
Your documents keep their original names and formats — a signed policy has to still be that file — and files/documents/index.csv says what each one is, which folder it was in, who looked after it and the date on the policy.
What is deliberately not in it
Passwords are never stored in a form anyone can read, so they cannot be exported. Sign-in codes and session records are security data rather than club records. Health information is covered below.
Answering a member who asks what you hold about them
A member has the right to ask what data you hold about them. Open their record from Members, choose Download their data, and you get a file to send them.
It contains a summary page they can open in a browser, written for someone who is not on the committee, and the same information as spreadsheets behind it. The summary says what is held, how much of it, and what is deliberately absent, so a member who reads nothing else still gets an answer.
Their copy also holds two things the whole-club export does not: the messages the club has sent them, and any support requests they have raised. Both are far too large to be useful across a whole club and exactly the right size for one person.
Every kind of record gets a file, including the ones they have none of. A payments file with nothing in it says "we hold nothing here" more clearly than a missing file, which reads as an oversight to anyone checking whether you answered properly.
Money follows whoever pays
Invoices and payments are recorded against the person who paid. If a parent pays for a junior, those records are in the parent's copy, not the junior's. The junior's membership and what it cost are in theirs either way.
Including their health information
Health information — conditions, allergies, medications and emergency instructions — is left out unless you tick Include their health information and say why.
That is the safer default for the common case, where a member is simply asking what you hold. When someone genuinely asks for everything, tick the box, and the file will contain it. Either way the bundle tells the member that health information exists and whether it was included, so leaving it out is never mistaken for holding nothing.
Including it is recorded against the member
Ticking the box is recorded in the same place as revealing health information on screen: who released it, when, and the reason you typed. The member sees your reason on the summary page in their copy.
You need the same permission you would need to read that information on screen, so a Club Admin who is not also set up for emergency information will not see the tick.
What we do, and what your club does
We provide the export. Your club decides what to keep, for how long, and what to send to whom — you are the ones who hold the data, and a request from a member is yours to answer. If you are unsure how to respond to one, ask your club's own advice; we cannot answer it for you.
If you are moving to another system and want help getting the files into it, message us and we will do what we can with you.
The same archive can be read back in, which is how a club moves from one RunClub HQ to another — see Moving your club to RunClub HQ → From a club archive for what that reads today and what it deliberately leaves behind.
Troubleshooting
The download says the file could not be found
The file was deleted after its seven days, or a member of your committee prepared it so long ago that it has expired. Prepare a new one — it takes a minute or two, and nothing is lost.
I cannot see Download your data in Settings
Only a Club Admin sees it. Ask whoever set your club up to give you the role, or to prepare the file for you.
An export is already being prepared
Your club can prepare one whole-club export at a time. Wait for the one in progress to finish, then start another. Member data requests are not affected — you can answer one while a club export is running.
See also
- Activity log and platform usage — where exports and downloads are recorded
- Consents — what each member has agreed to
- Welfare officer — how health information is handled day to day
- What is in your data export — every file and column, explained
- Moving your club to RunClub HQ — the same files, read the other way