Sailing Federation Software for Affiliated Clubs and Members
For federations of yacht and sailing clubs: affiliations and dues, officials' qualifications, regatta entries with offline check-in and weighted assembly votes.
Who this is for
- You run a national or regional sailing federation, an association of nautical clubs or a class association
- Your members are clubs, each with its own contacts, plus individual sailors
- Regional committees handle part of the work and need their own view of their clubs
- Race officials, judges and instructors hold qualifications that expire
- Once a year club delegates meet in an assembly and vote, often carrying proxies
A sailing federation is an association whose members are mostly other associations. Clubs affiliate and renew every year, each with a secretary, a commodore and a treasurer who change more often than anyone updates the file. Individual sailors join directly or through their club. Regional committees run their own calendar. Race officials and instructors need current qualifications. And once a year the delegates of every club meet to approve the accounts and elect the council.
Most federations still run this on a spreadsheet of clubs, a mailbox for affiliation forms, a bank statement matched by hand and paper proxies counted at the door. Yacht club membership software does not help much, because it is designed for one club and its berths, not for a body of clubs. What is missing is sailing federation software: software for sailing clubs' associations that treats a club as a member, a regional committee as a chapter and the assembly as a formal meeting with a quorum.
SupaMaritime Guild runs that federation layer: affiliations and dues, individual members, qualifications, events and governance. It is not club operations software. Berth bookings, bar and restaurant tills, launch scheduling and marina billing stay in the tools your clubs already use.
Where the day breaks down
The club list lives in a spreadsheet
Each club has a secretary, a treasurer and a commodore who change after every club election. The federation finds out when an email bounces, and three regional committees keep three different copies.
Affiliation renewals are chased by email
Renewal letters go out as attachments, clubs pay by bank transfer with a vague reference, and someone matches each payment to a club by hand before the season can start.
New clubs apply on PDF forms
The statute, the board list and the letter of support arrive by email in pieces. The council decides at a meeting, and nobody can later say at which stage an application stalled.
Officials' certificates expire unnoticed
Race officers, judges and instructors are tracked in a sheet, if at all. An expired qualification is often discovered when the notice of race is already published.
Registration desks depend on a signal
Championship entries arrive by form and email, printed lists go to the desk, and the club wifi does not reach the pontoon where sailors actually queue.
Assembly proxies are counted on paper
Delegates arrive with proxies from other clubs, the quorum is counted by hand at the door, and a disputed vote comes down to whose tally sheet is right.
Built around the workflow, not bolted on top
SupaMaritime Guild gives the federation one register for clubs and individual members, and connects everything else to it: affiliation applications, dues invoices, qualifications, event registrations, email campaigns and the assembly. Your staff work in one console, clubs and members update their own details in a white-label portal, and regional committees work as chapters of the same federation.
Clubs and individual members in one register
Clubs are organisation members with their own contacts; sailors are individual members. Tiers, custom member fields and full membership history, with a member portal where clubs keep their own details up to date.
Affiliation applications with review stages
An online form with documents and references, review stages that match your statute (office check, regional committee, council) and approval only at the final stage. Approved clubs receive a verifiable seal.
Affiliation dues and automatic renewals
Renewal invoices issued ahead of the new period, card and SEPA payments into the federation's own Stripe account, dues reminders, refunds and an accounting export for your bookkeeper.
Qualifications register for officials and instructors
Race officer, judge and instructor qualifications with expiry dates, reminders to staff at 90, 30 and 7 days and on the expiry day, and staff verification of every uploaded certificate.
Regatta and event registrations with offline check-in
Sessions, member and non-member tickets, waitlists and group registrations for club teams, QR tickets, and a check-in app and kiosk that keep working without a connection.
Assembly, proxies and secret ballots
Bodies and meetings with the quorum frozen at opening, attendance with proxy weight derived by the server, motions, secret ballots with receipts, minutes and a numbered resolutions register. On Pro and Enterprise.
Illustrative example: one season at a regional sailing federation
This is an illustrative scenario, not a customer case. A fictional regional sailing federation has 42 affiliated clubs, around 3,000 individual members, four regional committees and 60 race officials, judges and instructors. It runs a youth championship in June and its annual assembly in November, where club delegates vote and may carry proxies from other clubs.
Before SupaMaritime
After SupaMaritime
Affiliation renewal letters go to 42 club secretaries as PDF attachments; bank transfers are matched to clubs by hand in a spreadsheet until March.
Renewal invoices are issued automatically ahead of the new period. Clubs pay by card or SEPA into the federation's Stripe account, and those who have not paid receive dues reminders.
Two clubs changed their secretary after their own elections. Federation mail keeps going to the old addresses until someone notices.
Each club is an organisation member with its contacts. Club secretaries update their details in the member portal, and the fields the federation chooses wait for staff approval.
A new club applies with a PDF form, its statute and a letter from the regional committee, spread across four emails. The council decision is recorded only in the minutes.
The new club applies online with documents and references. The application moves through office check, regional committee and council stages, and approval issues a verifiable seal.
The officials' list is a sheet last updated two seasons ago. A week before the championship, a judge's certificate turns out to be expired.
Officials' qualifications sit in the register with their expiry dates. Staff see the judge's certificate among the expiring ones 90 days ahead and ask for the renewed one in time.
Championship entries come from a web form and from emails; the registration desk works from a printed list and ticks names off by pen on the pontoon.
Clubs enter their teams as group registrations. Sailors receive QR tickets, and volunteers scan them with the check-in app, which queues check-ins offline and syncs when the signal returns.
At the assembly, proxies are checked on paper at the door, the quorum is counted by hand and the minutes circulate as a Word file that keeps changing.
Attendance and proxies are recorded before the assembly opens, the quorum is frozen at opening, motions go to secret ballot with receipts, and the minutes cannot be changed once approved.
Facts you can check
Days before expiry, and on the day itself, when staff are reminded about officials', judges' and instructors' qualifications.
Each delegate's voting weight is derived server-side from the proxies they hold, never typed in by hand.
The check-in app and kiosk keep scanning QR tickets without a connection and replay the queue when it returns.
Regional committees as chapters: none on Free, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise.
Running the federation assembly with weighted proxies and secret ballots
The annual assembly is where a federation is most exposed. Club delegates approve the accounts, elect the council and vote on rule changes, and each of those decisions can be challenged if the quorum or a proxy is questioned afterwards. Paper proxies and a hand count at the door are the weakest link.
In Guild, the assembly is a meeting of a governance body. Delegates are checked in before the meeting opens, proxies are recorded against the delegate who carries them, and the voting weight beside each name is derived by the server from those proxies, with a per-person cap set in the quorum rule. When the meeting opens, the quorum is frozen: whether the assembly was quorate is a fact about that moment and does not drift as people arrive or leave.
Motions can be put to a vote, including by secret ballot. On a secret ballot the federation can count every vote but cannot see who cast which one; each voter receives a receipt, nobody can vote twice, and ballots cannot be edited or deleted. Minutes are written in the console and locked once approved, and decisions go into a numbered resolutions register. Ballots are cast in the staff console today: the member portal does not yet have a voting page.
Regatta registrations and check-in on the pontoon, alongside your scoring software
A championship has two halves. One is the racing itself: entries by class, courses, scoring and results. The other is everything around it: who registered, who paid, which club a team belongs to, who has checked in at the desk, who is coming to the prize-giving dinner. Guild does not score races or publish results. It runs the second half and leaves the first to your race management and scoring software.
Each event has sessions (the racing days, the briefing, the dinner), tickets with member and non-member prices, capacity and waitlists. A club can enter a team as a group registration managed by one person. Every registrant receives a QR ticket, and paid tickets are charged to the federation's own Stripe account.
At the desk, volunteers use the check-in app on their phones or a self check-in kiosk. Both keep working when the signal drops on the pontoon: check-ins queue on the device and replay safely once the connection returns, so nobody is checked in twice. Attendance per session then feeds the event statistics and the comparison with the previous edition.
Sailing federation software for regional committees and affiliated clubs
Most sailing federations are federations twice over: clubs are grouped into regional committees or zones, and those committees have their own officers, calendar and correspondence. Software for a single yacht club has no place for that level, and a flat membership list hides it.
In Guild, each regional committee is a chapter of the federation. Clubs and individual members belong to a chapter, lists and counters respect it, and email campaigns can be segmented by chapter, tier or country, with consent enforced at send time. Custom roles such as regional delegate or treasurer get their own permission grid, and every console role uses a plan seat.
Clubs appear in a public or members-only directory with an interactive map, so a sailor can find an affiliated club along the coast and contact it through a relay that never exposes addresses. The directory, map, events calendar, application form and seal can be embedded on your existing website (all widgets and a custom domain from Pro), and the platform runs white-label under your brand with the interface in six languages.
Keeping race officials, judges and instructors qualified
A federation vouches for the people it appoints. When a race officer runs a championship or an instructor takes juniors on the water, the federation is implicitly saying that their qualification is current. That promise is hard to keep when certificates live in personal inboxes and in a sheet nobody owns.
Guild keeps one qualifications register for the whole federation. Qualification types start from maritime presets such as STCW, RYA and national licences, and the federation can add its own, such as race officer, judge or instructor levels. Each qualification carries issue and expiry dates, members upload their certificates from the portal, and staff verify or reject them straight from the register.
The register is organised around the question that matters: who is about to fall out of date. Expiring, expired and still-to-check qualifications are separate tabs, and staff are reminded 90, 30 and 7 days before expiry and on the day itself. Guild does not track training courses or CPD credits; it tracks whether a qualification is valid and verified.
How this compares to the alternatives
Generalist membership software for associations and clubs, not specific to sailing. Guild imports a Wild Apricot export directly and can run alongside it through embeddable widgets during a transition.
Software for the day-to-day operations of private clubs. A different category from Guild: it serves a single club, while Guild serves the federation layer above the clubs.
Regatta entry and results platform. It covers the racing side of a regatta, which Guild does not, so the two can be used side by side.
Race scoring software. Guild has no scoring or results engine, so a federation can keep its scoring tool and use Guild for registrations, check-in and communications.
Frequently asked questions
What is sailing federation software?
Is Guild yacht club membership software for running a single club?
Can clubs and individual sailors be members of the same federation?
How are regional committees handled?
How does voting at the assembly work, and can delegates vote from their portal?
Does Guild score regattas or publish results?
How much does Guild cost for a sailing federation?
Can we move our club list from a spreadsheet, and take our data back out?
See it in your workflow, not a generic demo
We'll walk through built for sailing federations.
Start on Free, move to Pro at €199/month for governance and chapters, or to Enterprise for more than five regional committees.