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Here's a story I've heard at least thirty times.
A governing body decides it needs better communication with its affiliated clubs. Someone commissions a club portal. It costs somewhere between $20,000 and $200,000 depending on ambition. There's a launch event. Maybe a webinar. Definitely an email with login credentials.
Six months later, usage is below 5%. The portal has become a graveyard of unread documents and ignored announcements. The governing body concludes that clubs "don't engage" and starts planning the next portal. Bigger. Better. With more features.
The problem isn't the portal. The problem is the model.
Pull doesn't work for volunteers
A portal is a "pull" system. Information sits there. People have to remember it exists, navigate to it, log in, and look for what they need.
Pull works when the user has a daily habit. You check your email because you check your email. You open Slack because it's running all day. These are habitual systems — they're open by default.
A club portal is not habitual. The club secretary has no reason to log in on a Tuesday morning. She's at work. She's managing her actual job. The portal is one of maybe fifteen platforms she could theoretically check — Facebook, email, WhatsApp, the competition management system, the accounting software, her bank, and now your portal.
She won't check it. Not because she doesn't care. Because it's not in her workflow.
The enterprise world figured this out years ago. Microsoft spent billions on SharePoint intranets. Companies built elaborate internal portals with news feeds, document libraries, and team pages. Usage was consistently terrible.
Then Slack arrived. And Teams. And the principle became obvious: push beats pull. Don't make people come to the information. Bring the information to them.
The portal lifecycle
Every portal I've seen follows the same curve.
Month 1-2: Launch enthusiasm. 40-60% of clubs log in at least once. The governing body is excited. Content gets published daily.
Month 3-4: The drop. Usage falls to 15-20%. The initial novelty wears off. Clubs that logged in once to see what it looked like don't come back.
Month 5-6: The cliff. Usage hits 3-8%. The only people still logging in are the two or three people at the governing body who publish content. Even they've started to question whether anyone reads it.
Month 7-12: Zombie phase. The portal still exists. Content still gets published occasionally. But everyone knows it's dead. Important information goes back to email. The portal becomes a box-ticking exercise for the board report.
Month 13+: Replacement planning. Someone suggests building a new portal. The cycle restarts.
I've seen organisations go through this cycle three times. Different platforms. Same result. Because the platform was never the problem.
What actually works
The answer isn't better portals. It's push communication with a reference library.
Push the critical stuff. Compliance deadlines, policy changes, required actions — these go directly to the responsible person via email or SMS. Not to a generic club address. To the actual human who needs to act. With a clear deadline, a clear action, and a way to confirm completion.
Make it trackable. The governing body needs to know who received the message, who opened it, and who completed the action. Not for surveillance. For governance. If a child safety policy update goes out and 30% of clubs never acknowledge it, that's a governance risk that needs to be managed.
Keep the portal as a library. Documents, policies, templates, guides — these belong somewhere accessible. A portal is fine for this. People will search for a constitution template when they need one. They won't browse your news feed on a Tuesday.
The key distinction: a library is searched when needed. A communication channel is pushed when relevant. These are different jobs. A portal tries to be both and fails at both.
The real-world version
Think about how you actually get information in your own life.
Your bank doesn't expect you to log into a portal to check if your credit card bill is due. It sends you a notification. The portal exists if you want to look up a transaction, but the critical information comes to you.
Your electricity company sends you the bill. It doesn't upload it to a portal and hope you check.
Your kids' school sends a push notification through an app when there's a pickup change. It doesn't post it to the school intranet.
Every system that successfully communicates with busy people uses push for urgent information and pull for reference information. Governing bodies are the last organisations on earth still trying to make pull work for everything.
The objection
"But we need a single source of truth."
Yes. You do. And that can be a well-organised document library. It does not need to be a portal with a news feed, a dashboard, a calendar, an events page, a discussion forum, and a notification centre.
Every feature you add to a portal is another reason for a volunteer not to log in. The cognitive load of navigating a complex portal is exactly what busy people avoid.
A Google Drive folder with clear naming conventions is a better "single source of truth" than a $200,000 portal that nobody visits. I know that's an uncomfortable thing to say. It's also true.
What to do instead
If you're a governing body thinking about communication with your clubs:
- Audit your current communication. How many messages do you send per week? How many require action? How many are informational? How many are urgent?
- Separate the streams. Action-required messages go via direct push (email to a named person, with tracking). Informational content goes via a digest (weekly, not daily). Reference documents go in a searchable library.
- Track acknowledgement, not just delivery. Knowing you sent an email is meaningless. Knowing the club president opened it and confirmed the action — that's governance.
- Kill the news feed. Nobody is scrolling your portal's news feed. If something is worth communicating, it's worth pushing directly.
- Accept that clubs are busy. They're not ignoring you out of malice. They're ignoring you because they have 200 members, a leaking roof, and a registration deadline tomorrow. Meet them where they are, not where you wish they were.
The intranet is dead. It's been dead in the corporate world for half a decade. The sooner sport catches up, the sooner governing bodies will stop spending money on platforms nobody uses and start spending it on communication that actually reaches the people who need it.
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