Ten years ago, as a new member of the AGA Board, the first member inquiry I received was from Trevor Morris, currently the AGA Board Chair. Trevor, representing the Western Massachusetts Go Club, reached out about their chapter website. It was previously hosted on usgo.org, and had unexpectedly gone offline months earlier. His unsuccessful attempts to get information about the service's return highlighted a significant challenge for us.
This incident underlined the reality of an all-volunteer workforce. The AGA's necessary reliance on volunteer labor, while invaluable, came with its own set of challenges. Despite having talented, dedicated volunteers, the transient nature of volunteer work meant services could vanish, and customer service responses could be inconsistent.
Faced with these challenges, we looked to best practices adopted by similar-sized membership organizations, leading to a pivotal decision last year. We partnered with ClubExpress for membership software and transitioned our ratings servers to cloud services. This move, while difficult, marked a significant step towards more reliable and supported services, albeit within the confines of a commercial system.
A notable benefit of this transition is our enhanced ability to support chapters in creating their own web pages, the service we once offered to Trevor. With ClubExpress, chapters can now easily build websites using user-friendly tools, without needing HTML knowledge. Features like event calendars, photo albums, social media feeds, and more, are readily available. The San Diego Go Club and the Houston Go Club are recent examples of this functionality in action. We encourage all chapters to explore these offerings – just email contact@usgo.org for assistance in getting started.
We're excited about the additional services we plan to roll out to support our chapters, individual members, and our mission to promote Go in the U.S. Keep an eye on this blog for future updates!
... and just for fun, generated by DALL-E
