No ad network, anywhere on your site
Your club's public pages carry no advertising network, no ad server and no retargeting pixel. Not on a free plan, not on any plan. Nothing in the product places an ad, and no setting turns one on.
Our position
We will never sell your members’ attention.
Plenty of club software is paid for twice — once by the club, and again by the members who get advertised to. We only charge the club.
Why this needs saying at all
When a club runs on software funded by advertising, the club stops being the customer. The people using it are. Their attention is the product being sold, and the club is the reason they have to turn up.
That arrangement has a particular cost in community sport, because a club can make its app effectively compulsory. Registration, the draw, the wet-weather notice and the team sheet all live in one place, so a fourteen-year-old and their parents cannot opt out of it. Whatever is shown alongside those things is shown to a captive audience of minors — and the club that required the app gets to answer for it.
We think that is the wrong shape for a club platform, so we built a different one. ClubHelix is paid for by clubs on a subscription, and that is the entire business model. There is no second revenue stream that needs your members’ eyes.
What we promise
Six commitments, each one a property of how the product is built rather than a policy we could quietly change.
Nobody pays us to reach your members
We have no advertising inventory to sell, because your members are not an audience we own. There is no ad marketplace, no cross-club sponsor pool and nobody bidding for space in front of your juniors.
Nothing about a member decides what they see
We build no behavioural profile of anyone. A member's age, postcode, team, payment history and attendance are the club's records for running the club — they are never inputs to what gets shown to them.
Your sponsors are yours
You find the sponsor, you set the price, you sign the agreement and the money goes straight to your club. We take no cut of a sponsorship and never place a sponsor you did not choose.
Your emails carry our name nowhere
A broadcast from your club arrives branded as your club. There is no ClubHelix logo, no “powered by” line and no promotion of anything of ours — just your message and the unsubscribe link the law requires.
The product cannot be talked into it later
There is no setting that turns advertising on, and no way to paste a tracking tag into a page. The content editor strips scripts on save and again on render, so a well-meaning committee member cannot add one by accident either.
“But we have sponsors on our website”
So you should — sponsorship is how a lot of clubs stay affordable, and ClubHelix has a full sponsorship module for running it. A sponsor logo on your page is advertising in the plain sense of the word, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The difference is whose it is.
- You choose every sponsor, every tier and where each logo sits.
- You set the package price and keep every cent — sponsorship money never passes through us, so there is no platform fee on it.
- Sponsor links are marked as sponsored in the markup, which is what search engines expect of a paid link.
- Sponsor logos are plain images on your page. They carry no script, no tracker and no click beacon, so a sponsor learns nothing about your members.
- Contact names, notes and agreement values stay in your private CRM and never render publicly.
The local bakery on your home page is a relationship your club owns. An ad network deciding what to show your under-14s is not the same thing, and no amount of shared vocabulary makes it one.
Two things we do, said plainly
A promise is only worth reading if the exceptions come from us rather than from someone who went looking. There are two.
We count visits to your site — without knowing who anyone is
Your public pages report how many people visited and which pages they read, so you get visitor numbers and we can tell whether the platform is working. Two things do that counting: our own analytics, and the privacy-preserving audience counter built into our hosting provider. Both are cookieless and neither builds a profile — nothing is stored in anyone’s browser, no identifier is created, and nobody is followed between sites or between days. Our own counting uses a salted fingerprint calculated inside our database with a salt that rotates daily and is then discarded, so yesterday’s visitors cannot be matched to today’s. Raw records — including the IP address, kept for investigating abuse — are deleted after 30 days, and the long-term totals keep no IP address, no device details and no visitor identifier at all. None of this is an advertising network, and none of it is sold or shared for advertising.
We advertise ClubHelix — on our own pages, never on yours
We buy search advertising to reach committees looking for club software, and our own pages carry the conversion tag that makes that spend measurable. Being exact about where it runs: our marketing pages on clubhelix.com, the template gallery, and the account area where someone manages their own login and subscription — which any signed-in person can reach, not only a treasurer. It is not mounted on club public sites or club admin at all, so a member reading your draw or a coach entering a result is not tagged by it. Advertising our own product to club committees is a different thing from selling your members to somebody else, and we would rather spell that out than let it read as a loophole.
The rest of the position
Not selling attention is one half of taking member data seriously. The other half is how it is stored, who can reach it and when it is destroyed.