The club has been very fortunate with 5bbc.org

Our most recent web site was developed for us at a very generous discount. The one before it, free from a past President who was an IT guy. 

We had an RFP process to see what it would cost to rebuild it and it ranged from $20K-$40k and would have required a level of volunteer support from the club to manage and relay requirements that we simply do not have at this time.

We have decided to move to a club membership management system provided by a third party vendor that has many cycling and other clubs that it supports.

The vendor we have seleted is ClubExpress which brings many benefits, a few enumrated below:

• an 800 number for support for our Web Admins and our members,
• they bill us monthly in a model scalable based on the number of members we have,
• discounted because we are member of League of American Bicyclists and
• they have customized it to meet our needs.
• It also will save us money on things like our election system and email system (mailchimp) which are included in what we pay them.
• And our annual expenses will be less than our best years with our current support structure (a Drupal programmer).

Things may look and work a bit differently, though they have made the new site look almost identical to our old one and brought many additional features at relatively very low cost.

We will all have to adjust - but overall, it should let us focus on the only three things that REALLY important to this club: Rides, rides and - more rides!

The plan is to roll this out in stages.

1. You will receive an e-mail from the new system (ClubExpress) asking you to set up your profile. This will happen while we are still using the current system. Please handle this as soon as possible and remember to be as complete as possible. Most member data has been transferred to the new system. Emergency Contact information was not transferred over. Please double check and update your information and be sure to add your emergency contact back. This should happen this week.
2. We will have an overlap period during which leaders will receive support from our web team to bring their rides over. Those of you on those rides will be asked to help test by registering for the rides a second time on the new system. We'd appreciate your help but it is OK if you cannot, the old web site will prevail and manage your participation in rides until we confirm that it has been sunset and the new system is fully operational. This period is planned for April 1  - April 30
3. The old system will remain avaliable to leaders in order to access old rides and all members and club followers will now be established in the new system. This is targeted to take place May 1 barring any unforeseen problems. At that time, 5BBC.org will point to the new system. In the interm period, 5BBCclubexpress.com will be the new system's URL. It will be in the e-mail you receive.

One of the benefits listed above is that we will no longer need to pay for mailchimp as there is a built in e-mail management sytem. 5BBC Members will automatically be set up to receive emails within the system. 

If you are not a member of the 5BBC but have signed up to our newsletter, you will continue to receive emails from the new system and are welcome to set up an account - you will be invited to do so as part of this process. You can also take no action and then over time, manage your subscription to our occasional newsletter from within the e-mails you will receive from the club. Please note we have launched a $3 per month trial membership. Consider signing up and riding with the club! Spring has sprung and our spring training program is gearing up as we type.

Thanks for your patience and support as we work our way through this transition.

If you have some free time and an IT background or interest in helping with the team supporting the new web site, please step up and reach out to president@5bbc.org