♣For clubs and associations

With Aurora Hive Sites, and in this order:

1. Create the website via the wizard — name, purpose, contact, theme.
2. Fill in the “Legal” area completely — for registered associations, this includes the register court and register number, and for donation receipts, also the tax number, the exemption notice (Freistellungsbescheid) and the purpose as stated in the articles of association.
3. Publish.
4. After that, donations, members and newsletter — one after the other.

Point 2 before point 3: a club website without a complete legal notice (Impressum) can attract a formal warning (Abmahnung).

The most common mishap in club life, and it can be avoided. Record in one place:

• Where the domain is registered and who has access there. This is the most important point: without access to domain management, a website is effectively lost.
• Who has accounts for Aurora Hive Sites.
• Which addresses are stored as recipients on forms — otherwise enquiries go to a mailbox that nobody reads any more.

Create accounts for offices, not for people: “board@” survives the change, “max.mueller@” does not.

In four steps:

1. Set up a payment method — without it, the donation form accepts nothing.
2. Create a project with a specific goal and target amount.
3. Place it on a page as a block — only then do visitors see it.
4. Test with a small donation of your own to see whether it appears in the list.

Step 4 is often skipped and is the most important: it checks the whole chain through to the receipt.

Complete details in the Legal area: address, tax number, exemption notice and the purpose as stated in the articles of association. If anything is missing, the receipt is invalid.

At the start of the year, you generate the donation receipts for all donors of a year in one go as PDFs.

Check one generated receipt completely before you send hundreds — the donor submits it to the tax office, and every mistake is noticed there.

Create one member by hand to get to know the fields, and then import the rest.

The real gain is not the feature but the fact that there is only one list instead of three versions in three mailboxes — accessible to everyone on the board.

Clean up the Excel file before importing: members who have left, duplicates, outdated addresses. Whatever you take over, you will be maintaining afterwards.

You generate an SEPA file from it — the file your bank needs for collecting direct debits. The prerequisites are a stored IBAN and annual fee.

You need a written mandate from the member. Without a mandate, the collection is not permitted and can be reversed for up to 13 months.

Check amounts and mandates before every run: a mistake affects all members at the same time.

For club matters — invitations to the general meeting, information required by the articles of association — yes; this follows from the membership.

For advertising and general circulars, you need consent, even from members. And for the newsletter, the following applies anyway: the list fills up via the sign-up block, and double opt-in is mandatory.

The clean way: keep member communication and the newsletter separate. They have different legal bases.

Via a form that you place on a page as a block. Keep it short — every required field costs registrations: name, a way to get in touch, number of people. It rarely needs more.

Enter recipients who receive an email with every registration. Without recipients, the responses sit silently in the admin — and with an event, that is only noticed when nobody turns up.

For recurring events, it is worth looking at the editorial calendar: it shows where everything clusters.

Recognisable people need consent, and you should be able to prove it. Special rules apply to events with many people, but they are narrower than many assume.

Practical in everyday club life:

• Announce that photos will be taken, and give people a way to avoid it.
• If in doubt, choose images in which nobody is individually recognisable.
• Remove on request — someone who does not want to be on the page is entitled to that.

With children, the threshold is higher: there you need the consent of the parents or guardians.

Four things, and none of them takes long:

• A complete website with four pages — home, about us, contact, legal.
• One post a month. Regularity beats quantity.
• One form whose recipients are kept up to date.
• A look at the subscription when the storage bar fills up.

Everything else — donations, members, newsletter, several languages — comes when someone is there to maintain it. A half-maintained feature is worse than none.

That is exactly what Aurora Hive Live is for: click the text on the finished page, change it, save — without access to the admin.

Two sentences you should pass on: every change is public immediately, and when you click, you see the original text, so you can go back if you make a mistake.

For pages where a wrong sentence would be expensive — membership fees, details from the articles of association, the donation account — the route via Aurora Hive Sites remains the right one.

Five points that are realistic for a small club:

1. A privacy notice that matches what the site does — it is extended automatically when you enable forms, newsletters or donations.
2. Do not embed third-party services that transfer data without asking.
3. Keep member data to a minimum and limit access to the board — especially bank details.
4. Set deletion periods and stick to them, including for members who have left.
5. Keep a record of processing activities; you already have most of the details for it.

This is not rocket science, but it is work that someone has to take on.

Only if someone maintains it permanently. An outdated second version does more harm than good — it then shows events and fees from the day before yesterday.

If you do it: a few pages in full instead of many halfway. The home page and contact are enough to begin with.

For clubs with a particular audience, the second language may be something quite different from English — in one project of ours it is Amharic, and there exactly that version is the reason the site is read at all.

Yes — via its address or as an export file from WordPress, WIX and others. Everything imported ends up as a draft.

Use this state to tidy up. Three things that regularly come along from old club websites and should not:

• Images without cleared rights.
• Outdated legal texts — use the newly generated ones.
• Pages about events from 2019.

What you want to keep are reports and pictures from club life. Everything else is ballast.

The plan you see under Subscription — with bars for websites, pages and storage.

Only two things cost extra, and both can be controlled: AI translation suggestions and, depending on the set-up, fees charged by the payment service for donations.

What costs nothing: building, designing, publishing, writing posts, forms, member management.

In this order:

1. The ⓘ next to the field and the tour in the area concerned.
2. This help centre — the search searches everything at once.
3. “Report a problem” in the program, if something does not work.

For the questions no program can answer — whether a consent is sufficient, whether a receipt is valid — your tax adviser or solicitor is the right person. The programs prepare it; they do not decide it.