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Moving your club to RunClub HQ
Almost no club arrives empty. You have a roster somewhere, members paying you somehow, a website with 10 years of news on it, and last season's results in a spreadsheet. This page says what comes across, who does it, and when.
Moving a club is something we do with you, during your pilot, before any member sees anything. You will not be handed an importer and left to it.
Who can do this?
Importing your England Athletics roster: Club Admin or Membership Manager. Importing the Direct Debit mandates your club already holds: Club Admin or Treasurer. Everything that starts with a file — a spreadsheet, another system's export, a WordPress site — is ours to load, as part of setting your club up.
What a concierge migration is
You send us what you have. We load it into your club, tell you what we could not read, and you check it before anybody is invited in. There is no upload box on a settings page and no file format you have to produce. The hard part of a migration is never the loading; it is deciding what the old data meant, and that is a conversation rather than a button.
Two of the paths below are exceptions, and you run them yourself, because both read from a service your club already owns — England Athletics and GoCardless. Neither needs a file from you.
The arrival paths
Most clubs arrive by more than one of these at once. A club affiliated to England Athletics, collecting by Direct Debit, on a WordPress site, uses three.
| What you have | What comes across | Who does it | Where to read more |
|---|---|---|---|
| An England Athletics affiliation | Name, date of birth, URN and claim status for every athlete England Athletics shows as currently registered with you | You, or us while we set your club up | Getting your members in |
| A spreadsheet of members | Whatever your file holds — we read it with you first | We do this with you | From a spreadsheet |
| An export from another membership system | Your roster, and as much of the detail around it as the export carries | We do this with you | From another membership platform |
| A GoCardless account already collecting | Every live Direct Debit mandate, matched to the member it belongs to | You | From GoCardless |
| A WordPress club website | Members, events, club records, payments, messages, documents, news posts and pages | We do this with you | From WordPress |
| A club archive from another RunClub HQ | Households, members and their addresses | We do this for you | From a club archive below |
| An old site's web addresses | Redirect rules, so links people have bookmarked or search engines hold still work | Content Manager, or us | Your club website → Keeping your old site's links working |
| Past race results | Results recorded against the event they were run at, with anything unmatched held for review | Events Manager, or us | Results and club records |
From a club archive
Every club can take a copy of its whole club as a zip of spreadsheets — see Download your data. The same file can be read back in, which is how a club moves from one RunClub HQ to another, and how we load data we have already shaped into that format for you.
It is a command we run, not a page in your admin panel. That is deliberate: an import writes hundreds of records into a club on somebody's judgement about whose file it is and whether it belongs there, which is not a decision to take behind a drag-and-drop box.
Today it reads three of the files in the archive — households, members and member addresses. Anything else in the zip is reported back as not read, rather than quietly dropped, so the gap is visible to whoever runs it. If your club is moving this way, ask us what that means for you before you plan around it.
Two things it deliberately leaves alone. Nobody gets a sign-in: email addresses stay in the members file, and the report says how many people arrived having had one, so inviting them is a decision somebody makes rather than a side effect. And an address arrives unverified, even if it was verified in the club it came from — a postcode check somebody else did is not one we can claim to have done.
What never comes across
Whichever path you arrive by:
- Sign-ins. Nobody can sign in until an account is invited, and an invitation is always something you send. A roster is not a mailing list.
- Passwords. Nobody's, ever. Members do not have one — they sign in with a link or a 6-digit code by email.
- Consents. What a member agreed to on another system, on wording you no longer hold, is not a consent record you can rely on. Consents are collected once, at first sign-in. See Consents.
- Email addresses from England Athletics. England Athletics does not share them with clubs, and we do not invent them.
- Anything your old system will not export. If you cannot get it out, we cannot bring it in. Ask early rather than late — sometimes there is another way at it.
When each of these happens
Migration is the first half of a pilot, not a step at the end of it.
- Before you sign in for the first time, we create your club and load whatever roster you gave us a source for. See Running a pilot → What we set up before you start.
- In your first week, check the roster and work through anything the import held for you. This is the step nobody else can do: you are the only person who knows who left.
- Once a season and its fees exist, give your committee sign-ins and have one of them join end to end — see Running a pilot → Step 5.
- Shortly before you go live, connect GoCardless, import the mandates you already hold, and decide where your club's email comes from. See Going live.
- On the day you switch your old site off, put the redirects in, so nothing anyone has bookmarked breaks.
Welcome emails come last, in batches you control, and never automatically — see Bulk-welcome imported members.
If something has come in wrong
An import from a file can be undone while nothing depends on it — the whole file, or one row — and then brought in again; see From a spreadsheet → If something comes in wrong. A member record that ended up duplicated can be merged from the members list. What is much harder to undo is an email sent to 400 people, which is why welcome emails are held back until you ask for them.
If the numbers in an import preview do not look like your club, stop and tell us before you run it. Getting help covers how to reach us and what to include.
See also
- Getting your members in — the England Athletics roster import in full
- Running a pilot — the order that keeps a trial safe
- Going live — the readiness checklist we work through together
- Download your data — the other half of the round trip
- Give an imported member a sign-in — recipe