New Zealand edition. This guide is written for volunteer-run clubs in New Zealand. Where rules differ — grants, tax, incorporation, safeguarding — follow the New Zealand-specific pointers below or check with your national body.
AI assistants stopped being a novelty the day they learned to use tools. An assistant that can read your actual club data — members, orders, pages, fixtures — answers a different class of question than one that can only talk in general terms. "How should a club chase lapsed members?" is a blog post. "Which of our members lapsed, and draft the renewal email" is an afternoon of committee work done before the kettle boils.
The technology that makes this possible is called the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — an open standard that lets an AI assistant connect to a piece of software and use a defined, permission-checked set of tools. This guide explains how it works in plain language, then walks through connecting an assistant to a ClubHelix club step by step, with the guardrails a volunteer committee should insist on.
What MCP is, in club terms
Think of MCP as a service hatch for your club platform. Instead of giving an assistant your password and letting it wander around the admin (never do this), the platform opens a small, well-lit hatch with a fixed menu of things an assistant may ask for: summarise the membership, list recent orders, fetch this page's content, save a draft news post. Everything not on the menu simply doesn't exist as far as the assistant is concerned.
Three properties make this club-safe:
- The menu is fixed by the platform, not the assistant. An assistant can't invent a "delete all members" option; if the platform didn't put it on the menu, it can't be asked for.
- Every request is authenticated and permission-checked. The connection uses a token tied to a named admin, and each request is re-checked against that person's current role — not the role they had when the token was created.
- It's revocable in one click. Lose a laptop, or just finish the project? Revoke the token and the connection is dead everywhere, instantly.
What a connected assistant can do in ClubHelix
ClubHelix's MCP endpoint gives a connected assistant two kinds of tools:
Reading (always available): a membership summary (totals and paid-up counts — aggregate numbers, not personal details), recent shop orders, your website's pages and their content, and a search over the club's own audit log.
Drafting (only if you allow it): an assistant can prepare work for a person to review — a draft news post that waits unpublished in the News admin, a draft email that waits unsent in the broadcasts composer with no audience selected, or a draft page edit that appears in the page editor as a proposal to restore or discard. Nothing a connected assistant does can publish, send, or change what members see. That's not a setting; it's how the hatch is built.
Before you connect: three questions for the committee
- Who is the named owner? The connection acts as one admin. Pick someone accountable (secretary or registrar, usually), because the audit log will record the assistant's activity under their name.
- Read-only, or drafting too? Start read-only. Add drafting once the committee has seen a month of useful answers and understands the review workflow.
- What's the expiry? Treat tokens like keys to the clubhouse: 90 days is a sensible default, with a calendar note to re-issue. "Never expires" is for clubs that also never change the padlock code.
Step by step: connecting Claude to a ClubHelix club
You'll need to be a full admin of your organisation, on a plan that includes API access (see pricing), and using an MCP-capable assistant — Claude is the one we test against.
- Create the token. In your club admin, open System → API & webhooks and find AI assistant access (MCP). Name the token after where it will live ("Claude on the secretary's laptop"), pick an expiry, and leave Allow drafting off for now. Click Create token.
- Copy it immediately. The token is shown exactly once, then only a fingerprint is stored — the same one-time rule as an API key. If you lose it, revoke and re-create.
- Add the connection in the assistant. The page shows the exact command for Claude; it boils down to giving the assistant your club's MCP address plus the token in an authorisation header. Paste the command into a terminal (or follow your assistant's "add connector" screen) and you're done. The token travels in the connection settings — never paste it into a chat message.
- Test it. Ask: "Who are you connected as, and what can you see?" The assistant should report your club, the named admin, and a read-only scope. Then try a real question: "Summarise our membership."
- (Later) allow drafting. When the committee is ready, create a second token with drafting allowed and delete the first. Ask the assistant to draft a news post about the weekend's results — then go and find it waiting, unpublished, in your News admin.
The security model, for whoever asks hard questions
Every committee has one person who (rightly) asks "but what stops it doing X?" Here is the honest answer for ClubHelix, in their language:
- Scoped to your club only. A club-issued token is pinned to your organisation. Ask the assistant about any other club and the request is refused — first by the application, and beneath that by the same row-level database security that separates every club's data on the platform. There is no configuration in which your token reads someone else's members, or theirs reads yours.
- It stops working when you do. Every single request re-checks that the token's owner is still an admin of the club and the club still holds the required plan. Demote the admin, downgrade the plan, or revoke the token — the connection dies mid-conversation.
- Rate-limited and logged. Requests are throttled per token, and every read and draft is written to the club's audit log with the owner's name and the token used.
- No passwords involved. The token isn't your password and can't be used to sign in to the admin. It opens the service hatch and nothing else.
Our AI safety and privacy checklist generalises these into questions you can put to any vendor, not just us.
What to actually use it for
The clubs getting value from a connected assistant use it for unglamorous things, weekly:
- Committee prep: "Give me the numbers for Thursday: membership by status, anything unshipped in the shop, and what changed in the audit log this week."
- Renewal season: "How many members lapsed versus this time last season? Draft the renewal email." (Draft — the registrar picks the audience and sends.)
- Website hygiene: "List our pages and flag any that still mention the old venue. Draft corrected versions of the two worst."
- Handover: an incoming secretary can simply ask how things stand instead of reverse-engineering a predecessor's spreadsheets — a genuine fix for the no-time club problem.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need a developer to set this up?
No. Creating the token is a normal admin-page action, and connecting the assistant is pasting one command. If your club has ever set up a club email address, this is easier.
Which AI assistants work with it?
Anything that speaks MCP over HTTP with an authorisation header — the standard is open. We test against Claude (including Claude in the terminal and desktop app), and the connection screen shows the exact command for it.
Can the assistant see personal member details?
The membership tool returns aggregates — counts by status and payment standing — not names, emails or medical details. Order listings show what an admin would see on the orders screen, because the token acts as that admin. The principle throughout: the assistant can never see more than the person it acts for, and usually sees far less.
What happens if someone steals the token?
They'd hold a time-limited, read-mostly key that can't sign in to the admin, can't publish or send anything, is rate-limited, logs every action to your audit trail, and dies the moment you press Revoke — or the moment the owner's admin role is removed. Compare that with what a stolen admin password could do, and the design goal is obvious: make the AI path safer than the human path it replaces.
