Spond How-To

We use Spond to manage communication and events among members actively involved in the club in the current season. This page is mainly about how we use it; for more general queries, Spond's own help pages are very good.

You can log in to Spond here.

Getting onto Spond

When you become a camdisc member, you should receive an email with a link to join the Spond group, which requires downloading the free app *.

When you sign up to the Spond group, you don't need to fill in your date of birth or address (we can't get rid of those boxes), although you may not join if you are under 18.

Spond is free to use, has no 3rd party ads, has a decent privacy policy, and doesn't tie you in to any kind of wider social media network.

* If you do not have access to a smartphone, it is possible for an admin to add you manually; get in touch. You can receive notifications by email and/or SMS, and use much of Spond's functionality via the web app, but we've found the mobile app to be much more reliable.

Subgroups

Within the camdisc Spond group, there are subgroups which make it easier to manage particular groups of player. You may be added to some subgroups when you join, and/or be shuffled around later. If you think your subgroups are incorrect (e.g. gender matching, experience level) reach out to an organiser.

Subgroups can have their own posts, polls, events etc. - if you can't find a post you think you saw before, check in your subgroups too.

Events

Some of our sessions are always on and open to everyone, in which case we are somewhat flexible about attendees who do not mark their attendance on the Spond event. However, some events have a maximum capacity, or only occur if enough people are interested, or require payment collected through Spond (if we need to book a venue); in this case, marking attendance is required.

Even in the more casual case, it is very helpful to organisers if you mark your attendance- it makes it much easier for us to plan sessions targeted at the number of attendees and level of play. You may receive reminder notifications if you haven't responded; declining an invitation silences notifications associated with that event.

You can sync your Spond events to your phone calendar (which may then sync to e.g. your google calendar).

Availability Requests

Spond can also take Availability Requests for events which may or may not happen, or to see who is available and then select invitees from those (e.g. asking who is available for a competition and then selecting a squad). This may mean you get two "invitations" for the same engagement - one as an Availability Request, and then later one as an Event to confirm attendance.

Under-18s

Accounts for members under the age of 18 are tied to guardian's account, who can review all of their communications and event participation.

More information about how Spond handles members with guardians can be found on Spond's website.

Notifications

We try to make sure there's lots of ultimate going on! If you're finding there are too many notifications, we hope you won't just switch off entirely - the Spond app offers a great deal of control over which notifications you get. As well as controlling which notifications you get globally, you can also manage them at the level of the group, subgroup, event series (for e.g. recurring training sessions), or single events. More info on Spond's help page.

Refreshing groups

Spond groups have limited space and, over time, accrue members no longer actively involved in the club. As such, we occasionally create a new group and port over all players who want to stay involved; this also allows us to better target active players for relevant communications.

Leaving the Spond group

Group members must be removed by an admin, as doing so erases your personal data including attendance history and debts. If you press the "leave group" button you will be prompted to send a message to an admin, who will remove you as soon as possible.

Make sure you clear any debts before sending the message. Also, the recipient isn't shown any context about the message, so you need to use your words to make the leave request! Lastly we're always open to feedback about how you think the club could be better.