Clubs · for student organizations
Everything on one page: setting the club up, deciding how people join, structuring a big org, recruiting at the activities fair, and running it week to week. In the order you actually do it, with the reasoning behind each setting — so you can tell which ones matter for your org and which don't.
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in a hurry? read the two-minute version →
The case
The people who would love your org are not reading the activities directory. They are on their phones. Clubs puts your organization in front of them the same way everything else on their phone does — one card at a time — and then gives you somewhere to put them once they say yes.
Your club sits in the same deck as every other project and organization. Students browse it without signing up, and swipe up when they want in. No one has to already know your name.
Ask your own questions — a portfolio link, a headshot, a video of them playing. Answers and attachments land in one inbox where you accept or decline.
Everyone you accept is already in the club chat. No exporting emails, no re-collecting phone numbers, no one left out of the invite.
Confirm a school email and you unlock your school's hub — and the option to make a club visible only to verified students at your school.
Do this first
Five steps, in order. Everything past step five is optional and can be changed later — so don't stall on it. Get the club live, then tune it.
Download Clubs, make your account, then open Profile and find the school email card. Enter your @school.edu address and type the six-digit code it sends you.
This is the step people skip, and it's the one that matters most. Verification is what unlocks your school's hub, the projects-from-your-school feed, and the school-only visibility option you'll want in step four.
≈ 2 minutes, and you only do it onceEverything in Clubs is a project — a one-off shoot, a band, a semester-long org. For you, the project is the club. Four fields are required:
Project Name — the name people search and say out loud, not
the one on your constitution.
Project Location — Online, In Person or Hybrid. In-person
takes a free-text spot, so put where you actually meet: "Campus Center, Thursdays 7pm."
Summary — the pitch on the card. Lead with what a member
does, not what the org is. This text also decides who gets shown
your club, so use the words students actually say — more on
that below.
Cover Media — see step five. This is doing more work than
your words are.
Under Advanced settings there's a Project Type control with three options, and that single choice decides what happens when someone swipes up on your club. Open clubs, tryout clubs and clubs that already run their own form each want a different one.
Full breakdown in the next section →
≈ 1 minute once you know which you wantApplication Requirements is a list of questions you write. Applicants answer them — including with uploads — before you ever see their name in the inbox.
Three is the sweet spot. One that filters for fit ("why this club, specifically?"), one that filters for effort ("upload a video of you performing"), one that tells you how to place them ("what do you want to be doing by December?"). Every extra question costs you real applicants, so make each one earn its place.
≈ 2 minutesPublishing mints a permanent share link — clubsapp.org/p/YOURCODE — that opens your club in the app, or a web preview for anyone who doesn't have it yet. The app can also hand you a share card image of your project, built for an Instagram story.
That link is the only URL your club needs. Bio, flyer, QR code on the table at the activities fair, group chat, email to last year's members — all the same link.
≈ 1 minuteYour cover is the first and often only thing a student sees before deciding. A ten-second clip of an actual meeting, rehearsal or practice outperforms a logo every time — motion stops the swipe, and a real room tells them what they're walking into. Shoot it on the phone you're reading this on. You can attach more photos, video, audio and links further down under Attached Media for anyone who taps in.
The one decision that matters
Four shapes cover almost every student organization. Pick the one that matches how you actually take members today — not how you wish you did.
Interest groups, social clubs, most first-year orgs
Auditions, tryouts, competitive teams, editorial boards
Orgs with a Google Form, a portal, or a university process
Officer boards, invite-only cohorts, closed committees
If you verified a school email in step one, Visibility also offers a {Your School} only checkbox. Tick it and only verified students at your school can see the club. It's independent of the four shapes above — an auto-join club can be school-only, and so can a selective one. Turn it on for anything campus-specific, and leave it off if you actively want students from other schools (most performing arts, most hackathon teams, anything regional).
For organizations, not just clubs
A theatre company is not one group — it's a season, a tech crew, a box office and a board. Clubs models that with a pipeline: an umbrella project with branches hanging off it. Branches are real projects with their own applications, roster and chat, but they're reached through the parent instead of through the deck.
Create the umbrella first — "Riverside Drama" — and set it up like any other club. Then create each team as its own project, and in Advanced settings set the Pipeline parent to the umbrella. That's the whole mechanism.
A project with a parent is automatically hidden from the deck and from search. So you can run Spring Musical, Tech Crew and Publicity without three near-identical cards competing for a stranger who just wanted the main org. One front door, many rooms.
Each branch has a Branch type that decides what happens at the umbrella when the branch takes a member:
Ask to join — the accepted student gets a prompt asking whether they also want to join the parent. Use this when the umbrella is the community and you want everyone in it.
Admin promotes — parent admins get a message asking them to confirm first. Use this when the umbrella is your leadership, your members-of-record, or anything where being on the list means something.
Three shapes that cover almost everything
The umbrella is the thing anyone can join. Branches are where the real commitments live. Set branches to Ask to join so anyone cast into a show also lands in the community.
Never gate the front door. The open club is how people find you; the selective branch is how you field a team. Use Admin promotes on the branch so the roster of record stays yours.
One org that never ends, branches that do. Give each branch a Project Window so the dates ride on the card and nobody applies to a conference that happened in March.
The parent needs the best cover, because it's the only one strangers ever see — branches are invisible to the deck by design. Don't branch what could be a channel: if a group doesn't need its own application and its own roster, it wants a channel inside the club, not a project of its own. And set the branch type deliberately — left unset, an acceptance on a branch stays on the branch and never reaches your umbrella roster.
The part that replaces your other five apps
Channels are in beta and not switched on for everyone yet. Everything below is built and describes exactly how it works — but if you don't see a Channels section in your project yet, that's why. It's worth reading now so you know what to plan for.
A chat is a terrible filing cabinet. The rehearsal schedule, the officer vote, the sign-up sheet and the roster all scroll away by Wednesday. Channels are purpose-built surfaces you add inside your club — each one a real tool, not a pinned message.
Channels appear when you create a project and in the Channels section of your project afterward. Clubs reads what you wrote about your org and suggests a handful — accept those, or browse the full menu, which is organised by what you're trying to do rather than by feature name: Plan, Coordinate, Create, Decide, Play and Health.
Every channel gets a name and a purpose line you can rewrite, so "Minutes" can be "Senate minutes" and read like it belongs to you.
There are around a hundred channel types. Installing forty of them is the fastest way to make your club feel abandoned — empty channels read as a dead org.
Install the ones that replace something you're already doing badly somewhere else. Add the sixth the week you actually need it. A club with five busy channels looks alive; a club with twenty empty ones looks like it folded in October.
If you install nothing else, install these five. They cover the four things every club does every single week — tell people things, meet, take attendance, and decide something.
Then add what your org actually is
Real channel names, grouped by the kind of organization that gets the most out of them.
Ranks and who sees what
Channels come with Discord-style ranks. Create the roles your constitution already names — Exec, Officers, Leads, Members — and assign people to them from Manage roles in the Channels section.
Each role carries permissions: Manage channels, Manage roles, Manage members. Give your officers the first one and stop being the only person who can set anything up.
Press and hold a channel and choose Who can access to limit it to specific roles. A channel with no roles set is open to the whole club — which is the right default for most of them.
Lock these three and leave the rest open: Ledger (money), Minutes if your board discusses people, and any Decisions channel where a vote isn't public yet. Over-locking a club is how you end up with members who never open the app.
Every channel needs an owner and a rhythm. Announcements gets posted to on Sundays by the president. Schedule gets next week's dates added on Fridays by whoever runs logistics. Roster gets cleaned once a month. A channel nobody is responsible for is just a folder — and if you assign the rhythm to a role rather than a person, it survives your officer turnover in April.
Getting members
Everything below is free and takes a few minutes. Do the first three before your fair, the rest during the first two weeks of the term.
No app required
Most school announcements start life as an email — to a listserv, to an advisor, to the whole chapter. Clubs Contact lets that email be the post. Register the address you send from, mail it to submit@clubsapp.org, and it lands on the feed with a cover and dates. It's free, and nobody has to install anything.
Sign up at clubsapp.org/contact with an email and a password — no phone number. Add the address your announcements come from and confirm it. School domains are approved automatically, which is the whole reason this is easy at a university.
≈ 1 minute, once, everWrite it like you'd write it to a person. The subject becomes the name, the body becomes the description, an attached poster becomes the cover, and an attached .ics sets the dates more reliably than any wording could.
Forwarding works too: a forwarded announcement gets unwrapped and read as the original, so an activities office can pass along what an org sent them without rewriting a word of it.
≈ as long as sending an email, because it is onePublished — it's on the feed, with a link so you can check it reads right. Draft saved — something important was missing, so it wasn't published half-right; the reply names what's missing and links to a page to finish it. Updated — you emailed about something already posted, so it edited that instead of creating a duplicate.
That last one is the useful one at a school: when a room changes or a rehearsal moves, send the correction and the post follows.
usually within a minuteUse the app — you get more control and it takes about as long. Contact is worth it when the announcement already exists as an email you were sending anyway, or when you're posting on behalf of someone who wrote it.
This is the one. An activities office forwarding a term's programming will get more onto Clubs in an afternoon than any amount of asking student officers to post it themselves. Register the office address once and forward from then on.
Mail from an address that isn't registered is dropped silently — not bounced, not held — which is exactly what keeps the feed clean, and also the reason "nothing happened" almost always means the address wasn't confirmed. It also has to be about something actually happening: newsletters and general chatter get read and set aside rather than posted. And there's no scheduling — an email posts when it arrives.
After they join
The admin view of your project is where you spend the semester. Here's what's in it.
Every applicant's answers and attachments in one list — read the essay, watch the audition tape, open the portfolio, then accept or decline. Accepting adds them to the roster and to the chat in the same action.
Every accepted member is in it. Send text, photos, video, voice notes, files and links with previews. Reply to a specific message, react to one, and run a poll when you need the room to pick a rehearsal time or a t-shirt design.
Message an individual member without leaving the club — for the "can you actually make Thursday" conversations that shouldn't be in front of forty people.
The Admin section lets the owner add one co-admin — send the invite link or pick someone off your roster. They get the full admin view: applicants, members, editing, archiving.
Do this on day one. A club whose only admin has finals, mono or a study-abroad semester is a club that stops accepting members for three weeks.
Change anything about the club at any time — swap the cover mid-semester, rewrite the questions when you reopen applications, extend the window. Archive it when the year ends. Members can be removed, and users can be blocked and reported anywhere they appear.
Post the week's meeting in the chat on Sunday. Poll anything with more than two options instead of reading forty replies. Reopen applications mid-semester with a fresh cover — the second wave of students is real, and most clubs never go looking for it.
Copy these
Same product, eight setups. Find the one closest to yours and start there — each of these has a matching channel set above.
Student activities offices & advisors
Clubs is student-owned by design: every organization belongs to the student who created it. You get a dashboard over the top of that — apply once, and your campus is wired up.
Apply for a school dashboard → Already approved? Sign in
School verification works off email domains. If your students land on the wrong school — or no school — it's usually because a domain isn't mapped yet. That's especially common where students and staff sit on different domains, or where a subdomain like students.university.edu exists alongside the main one.
Apply for a school dashboard and list every domain your students actually use. Approving you maps all of them at once, so verification starts working campus-wide — including the student subdomains that are usually the reason it wasn't.
A hub with two tiers: your school's own topic feeds, and cross-school ones shared with verified students everywhere. Feeds are post-and-reply with New and Top sorting, so they behave like a board, not a chat.
Fourteen topics get created for a school automatically — general, music, film, art, design, writing, tech, games, theatre, fashion, food, sports, activism and research — alongside a projects-from-your-school view.
The highest-leverage thing you can do is get incoming students to verify their school email during the same session where they download things. Verification is the gate on everything school-specific; a student who skips it sees a generic app.
Second: get your org leaders to publish before the activities fair, not after, and to bring a QR code to the table.
Once you're approved you get a view of your club scene: which clubs exist, who runs each one, how many members they have, what started this month, and which email domains map to you.
It deliberately stops there. No member lists, no applications, nothing students write to each other. A dashboard that could read student group chats would make Clubs worse to be a student on, and the orgs you're trying to support would move somewhere else. Approving organizations and exporting membership don't exist either — tell us if you need them.
Forward the announcements orgs already send you and they become projects on the feed — no app, no retyping, no chasing a student officer to post it. That's Clubs Contact, above ↑
Being straight with you: none of the below is live today, so don't plan your semester on it. It's what's being built next, and it's aimed squarely at orgs that outgrow a chat.
Channels and ranks are built and in beta, but not switched on for every account yet. That's the next thing to land, and it's the one that changes most about how an org runs day to day.
Voice inside the club, so an officer meeting doesn't need a separate link pasted into the chat ten minutes late.
On the way. Until then, anyone without an iPhone can browse and use Clubs on the web.
Ownership transfer between officers, a bigger exec board, org approval and membership export for activities offices — on the table, none of it built. Say which one you need at supportclubs@gmail.com.
Straight answers
Nothing. Clubs is free, there are no ads, and there's no paid tier for organizations.
To join, chat and apply — yes, and it's iOS for now with Android on the way. Anyone can browse Clubs on the web at clubsapp.org/app without signing up, and your /p/ share link opens a web preview of your club for people who don't have the app yet.
No — you can create and run a club without it. But verification is what unlocks your school's hub, the projects-from-your-school feed, and the school-only visibility option. If your org is campus-based, do it.
That means your email domain isn't mapped yet. If you work at the school, apply for a school dashboard and list every domain — including student subdomains like students.school.edu. If you're a student, email supportclubs@gmail.com and we'll sort it out.
Yes. Set Visibility to Invite-only and the club disappears from the deck and from search — the only way in is an invite link you send. Separately, school-only keeps a club visible but limits it to verified students at your school.
You can add one co-admin. Open the Admin section of your project and tap + Invite a collaborator — either share the generated link, or pick someone already on your roster. They get the same admin view you have: reviewing applicants, accepting and removing members, editing the club, archiving it.
Two things to know. The invite button only appears while you're the sole admin, so it's one co-admin, not a whole exec board. And the link is single-use and expires in fourteen days — send it to the person you mean, not the group chat. Only the original owner can invite; there's no way to transfer ownership yet, which is the strongest argument for creating the club from an account the org keeps rather than a graduating senior's personal one.
Named roles for a full exec board are on the roadmap.
Channels are in beta and aren't switched on for every account yet, so most people won't see the Channels section at all today. Nothing is wrong with your club, and you don't need to do anything to be ready — when it turns on, you add channels to the project you already have.
Ask whether the group needs its own application and its own roster. A competition team that holds tryouts and has a different set of people is a branch. The social committee, which is just eight of your existing members planning things, is a channel.
Branching too eagerly is the common mistake: every branch is a separate roster to recruit for and a separate chat to keep alive.
Archive the project when the year ends, or keep it and refresh it: new cover, new summary, reopened applications. Anything with a real end date — a production, a competition season — is better modelled as a branch with its own Project Window, so the umbrella org can just carry on.
Yes — that's Clubs Contact. Register the email address you send announcements from, then mail or forward them to submit@clubsapp.org and they become projects on the feed. It's free, needs no phone number and nothing to install, and it's the usual answer for a student activities office with a hundred emails a term.
Yes, unless you've turned on school-only. Leave it off deliberately if you want a cross-school audience — performing arts, hackathon teams and regional orgs usually should.
Members can be removed from your club, and any user can be blocked and reported from their profile or from a message. Reports come to us. For anything urgent, email supportclubs@gmail.com.
Get the app, verify your school email, and publish your club before the fair instead of after it.
Questions, or want your school's email domain added? supportclubs@gmail.com
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