AgoraOur story
Why we built Agora
It started with a letter I should never have received.
The moment it broke
I'd been part of a club for years when I got a letter saying I was at risk of lapsing — not because I hadn't paid, but because my dues record had vanished from their software. It took two weeks of back-and-forth with the membership office to sort out. Nobody was at fault. The software just didn't work.
The dues problem was the smallest part of what I found. Talking to the membership director during those two weeks, I started seeing the full picture. The waitlist lived in a spreadsheet. Applications came in by email. Member records sat in one system, dues in another, court bookings in a third. Communications went out through whatever tool the last person had set up. Staff were manually moving data between systems every time anything needed to happen.
Sound familiar?
What we learned
I started talking to more GMs, membership directors, and boards. Different cities, different club types, different sizes. All running the same way: waitlist in one place, member records in another, dues in a third. The person handling renewals doesn't see the same data as the person at the front desk. The tools don't connect, so staff and volunteers do.
When I asked what a good week looked like, the answer was usually the same: export from one tool, cross-reference with another, send an email to confirm something that should already be in the system. Straightforward work, repeated in every direction, all week.
What Agora does differently
Agora is one system for the full membership operation: waitlist, applications, member records, dues, communications, renewals, facility booking, check-in. The fragmentation is where the actual work goes. Every time something lives in a separate tool, a person has to move data between them by hand.
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Waitlist to membership in one flow.
Applications, offers, acceptance, and onboarding all move through one place. Staff don't re-enter names or track status across separate tabs.
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Dues that know who the members are.
Notices go to the right people, delivery is logged, and collection status is current. Staff can pull it any time, not just when a board meeting forces the issue.
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A member portal that answers questions before they become calls.
Members can see their payment status, facility bookings, and club updates without calling the front desk. The front desk stops fielding the same questions all week.
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One place to see what's happening.
The GM and the membership director look at the same data. No exports, no cross-referencing. The current state is in the system.
Get in touch
You can reach us at hello@agora.club. For clubs in the early stages of evaluating Agora, we respond personally — this is not a ticket system.
Want to see how this works in practice? Book a walkthrough and I'll show you the real workflows you run every day.