NOVA Running Club
During the 3 years I served on the Board of Directors of NOVA Running Club as Webmaster (2022 through 2024), we spurred team growth, improved the team member experience, automated manual Board member tasks, and ultimately bolstered the club's foundation for future success beyond the tenure of any one Board member.
Member registration
Our original member registration process involved a series of Wordpress web forms, the data from which would be sent in an email, which our Membership Coordinator would copy/paste into our membership Excel spreadsheet. We replaced this with a membership database that we custom built in Airtable.
The new registration flow is a simple 1-page Airtable form that feeds directly into our Registrations table. We built a “Membership Processing” Airtable Interface where our Membership Coordinator approves the submissions, which creates a record in both our Members table (for new members) and our Memberships table (for new and renewing members). Whereas in our previous spreadsheet we tracked only the latest membership renewal date, we now keep a record of all of a member’s previous membership renewals.
With Airtable Automations, digest emails get sent each week to various board members providing them with the information they need to do their job (a list of t-shirt requests gets sent to the gear coordinator, a list of new member social media handles gets sent to the communications coordinator, and a list of new members and their photos gets sent to the membership coordinator).
Our “NOVA Board Read-Only” Interface provides custom views such as birthdays by month (our newsletter coordinator includes these in our weekly email), emergency contacts, club growth numbers, and a gallery view of our newest members (so we can make sure we say hi at practice).
Race results
The club collects race results from our members for inclusion in the weekly newsletter and for year-end top performance award consideration. Previously a few Board members would snag these from Strava each week, but that became untenable as the club grew; we needed a better way, and for this we also turned to Airtable.
Our new self-reporting Airtable race results submission form feeds into our Results table. The first person who submits a result for a particular race needs to enter its full information (race name, date, distance), which triggers an Airtable Automation that creates an associated record in our Races table. All the recent Race records populate a dropdown at the top of the results submission form, so when anyone else who ran that race submits their result, they can simply choose the race from the dropdown (the form is essentially self-healing). This saves time and effort for our members, but it also allows us to group our results by race and sorted by place, which is how the newsletter coordinator would previously have to manually format them.
A digest email of the past week’s results gets sent to the Board and Coach each Monday for possible shout-outs in the Coach’s message. And we have Airtable Interfaces for both the results firehose (all results, most recent first) and for results by year grouped by distance (for year-end awards).
Website
Once we built out our member registration process in Airtable, what remained of our website was essentially a static site, but with all the Wordpress bloat that caused site performance to be slow and site changes to be cumbersome. I replaced this with a fresh, clean, no-frills site that is version-controlled in GitHub, built using Jekyll (a Ruby-based static site generator), and deployed on Netlify. It’s simply a collection of text files written in Markdown.
We geared the site toward prospective members, and we first came up with our one sentence that tells who we are and what sets us apart: The Northern Virginia Running Club (NOVA) is a leading DC-area professionally-coached running team dedicated to promoting running and racing for its 250 members. Then we redesigned the site with a primary goal in mind: to show prospective members that there’s a place for them on NOVA and to encourage them to come join us for a practice to try us out.
The new site is streamlined and pared down, with 23 fewer pages than the previous site. To improve the site even further we analyzed each email sent to our Membership alias over the year, bucketed them by theme, and then updated the site to address the questions being asked. This led to a reduction in inquiries that the Membership Coordinator needed to respond to.
The site’s new structure, messaging, and performance, as well as its improved SEO rankings as a result, drove new prospective members to find and try NOVA. After the site launched, the responses to our “How Did You Hear About NOVA Running Club?” question on our new member registration form showed an increase in people indicating they learned about us from our website.
Team calendar
Of all the inquiries sent to our Membership alias in 2023, a leading 32% of them were categorized as “When/where is practice?”. We tackled this information gap head on by finally creating a shared team Google Calendar, maintained by our practice scheduler. Club members can now embed our calendar directly in their personal calendar, and we also feature the upcoming schedule on our homepage.
We sensed a unmet need for a way for team members to connect with each other outside of practice, so we created a NOVA Running Club chat in WhatsApp. We first created a separate chat for the Board to test it out, and once we found that it worked well, we created one for the whole team. Looking back it’s hard to fathom what we ever did without it. Members use our WhatsApp to find weekend running buddies, coordinate which races they’ll run and cheer at, share photos, and plan other social events. Club leaders use the chat to promote our events and, most importantly, spread the word about last-minute announcements. With our WhatsApp chat, we’ve switched from one-way communication model to an interactive one, and it has brought our club closer together as a community. It has also served as a valuable feedback loop.
Logo refinement
I have a great respect for pre-existing logos and branding, and I wanted to keep the spirit of our NOVA marks intact. Our circle logo was a 2-color design that didn’t reduce well to small sizes or 1-color screenprinting applications, so we refined it in a similar vein to the 2011 Starbucks logo rebrand.
The updated logo replaces the outer circle with bigger text in that same circle shape. Gone are the dots, the year, and the acronym. And increased in size is the state of Virginia, and even moreso its foreground runners.
The udpated circle logo was originally used for a special Lululemon team jerseys at club nationals, and now it’s on all new club uniforms.
NOVA 5K graphic identity
For our team’s longtime annual weeknight summer 5K race, in 2023 for the first time we introduced a graphic identity for the event inspired by August evening heat. The primary element was a custom race bib, which included the competitor’s first name if they pre-registered early enough (this spurred a surge in sign-ups!). The “O” of the NOVA 5K wordmark is a sun, a nod to the design of some of the team jerseys designed in our club’s early days. The background evokes a late summer sunset, channeling the vibe of our event.
In addition to bibs, we used these graphics to market our event on Instagram and the website, and also as a trailside sign.
Passwords app
As part of my handoff to the next Webmaster, we’ve migrated all our logins to a shared vault with strong system-generated passwords. Most importantly, we’re able use the vault as our MFA Authenticator; no more “hey, did you just get sent a 6-digit code? What is it?” madness!
In conclusion
Behind every well-functioning running club is a Board of individuals who work very hard to make the club a positive experience for all members. As Webmaster, my goal was to find ways to inspire delight among our members, implement technology to help the club run more smoothly, and to lighten the manual workload required of our Board members. I feel really proud of my contributions to the club over the past 3 years and I’m looking forward to spending more time running for NOVA and less time running the website for NOVA ;)