Your association's monthly magazine online
Turn the club or association magazine PDF into a flipbook members can read on the website — every issue, for free.
Clubs and associations produce more documents than they have people to publish them: the programme, the members' magazine, the annual accounts, the minutes, the anniversary book. Usually one volunteer maintains the website, and everything waits for that person. A flipbook breaks that dependency — the document lives in a shared Drive folder, and whoever makes it can replace it.
What to publish this way
- The members' magazine. Designed in spreads, read on the sofa, and cheaper than posting it.
- The season programme or fixture list, replaced whenever a date changes.
- The annual report and accounts, available before the general meeting so members can actually read them.
- The anniversary book. The one document a club prints once and then wants to keep available forever.
- Minutes and policy documents, behind a PIN for members only.
Members only, without a members-only website
Most clubs do not have a login system, and building one is out of proportion for a monthly newsletter. A PIN on the flipbook is the pragmatic middle ground: share the code with members, and the pages cannot be loaded without it. The check happens on the server, so forwarding the link does not open the document.
Change the code once a season and you have something that is good enough for a members' magazine without any infrastructure. It is not a security system for sensitive personal data — for a member list with addresses, think twice about publishing it at all.
Keeping the volunteer bottleneck out
The setup that survives a change of committee looks like this:
- One shared folder in Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive, owned by the club rather than by a person.
- One file per recurring document — magazine, programme, accounts — with a fixed name.
- One flipbook per file, embedded once on the website.
- Editors replace the file; nobody touches the website again.
The word "owned by the club" is doing real work there. A folder in a departing secretary's personal account is the most common way this arrangement fails a year later, and it fails silently: the embed keeps working until the account is closed.
The archive nobody has to maintain
Old editions are part of what a club is. Give each edition its own flipbook and gather them on one page: twenty years of magazines, readable, without twenty years of PDFs to download. There is no limit on how many flipbooks you make, and public editions can be found by people looking for the club's history.
If older editions contain members' addresses or photographs of children, keep those private or behind a PIN. Publishing an archive is a decision about the people in it, not only about the documents.
Sending it out
A link in the newsletter email works better than an attachment: it does not bounce, it opens on a phone, and if a mistake slips through you can replace the file instead of sending a correction to two hundred people.
A QR code works for the noticeboard in the clubhouse, on the back of a printed programme, or on a poster — pointing at the flipbook, so the paper version always leads to the current document.
Try a live example
A members' quarterly with the season's results, the membership numbers and three quotes for the roof. Share the link in the club WhatsApp and everyone can read it.
Frequently asked questions
How do we keep a magazine for members only?
Put a PIN on the flipbook and share the code with members. It is checked on the server, so forwarding the link is not enough to open it. Change the code once a season.
Who should own the files?
The club, in a shared folder, not a committee member's personal account. That is the most common way this quietly breaks a year later.
Can we publish an archive of old editions?
Yes, one flipbook per edition with no limit on the number. Keep editions containing addresses or photographs of children private or behind a PIN.
Does someone need to edit the website every month?
No. That is the point. Replace the file in the shared folder and the embedded flipbook shows the new edition.
Is it free for a small association?
Yes. There are no ads in your flipbook and no watermark over your pages.
Can we use a QR code on the clubhouse noticeboard?
Yes, pointing at the flipbook. Replace the file later and the printed code still leads to the current document.