I’m a club admin and I was excited when I saw this feature pop up on my phone - Score! This will be useful! And then I was disappointed. The feature says “Get a snapshot of who attended, and use that info to grow your Club.”, but this is very misleading. Here’s why:
- It uses as +/- 15 minute window from the event start time to find riders who joined. That’s a HUGE mistake. We often have 40+ people show up for rides and always allow 5-minutes grace period before starting, THEN we gather everyone together to provide ride information, THEN we organize into pace groups, etc. Sometimes we manage this within 15-minutes of the official ride start time (really gathering time). Sometimes we don’t. The time window needs to be longer. Alternatively, you need to let club administrators set the time window. Or you need us to have a separate publicly listed start time (i.e., what is shown on the event RSVP) and an anticipated start time (e.g., 10 minutes later) that Club Admins can set behind the scenes.
- The feature certainly DOES NOT tell me “who attended” as claimed. It only provides a count (which is really inaccurate) given the +/- 15 minute window mentioned above. Our best information for how many people attended is our group photo at the ride start, but I would love to better be able to track who actually rode with us that day - and over time. I know many of our riders by name and face, but certainly not all of them. Especially for newer riders.
- I noticed that I can no longer change the event description after the ride has ended. Why is that a problem? BECAUSE IT IS THE ONLY PLACE WE CAN PUT LINKS. We like sharing photo albums from the ride after it is over, but unless you are a “verified club” you cannot post links in the Event Discussion or even in club posts. The Event Description itself is the only place we can post a link.
Thus far, the only “insights” we’ve received are wildly incorrect ride attendance counts (even among people who posted their rides to Strava due to the +/- 15minute window) and loss of the ability to edit the Activity Description after the event is completed (i.e., the only place we can post a link - for instance to photos from the ride).
I would love for this feature to become useful to our club, but for the time being, it’s a swing and a miss.