Start a club: how petitions work
A club begins as a proposal your neighbors sign. Here's what you're deciding when you write one, and what your neighborhood gets to decide instead.
A club starts as a petition, not a form
There is no "create a club" button, and that's deliberate. You write a proposal, neighbors sign it, and once it hits a signature goal a neighborhood organizer turns it into a real club. The petition does two jobs at once: it proves there's genuine interest before anyone commits, and it gives you a shareable page to rally people around while you're still gathering them.
The proposer becomes the club's first organizer — not the person who approves it. If you start it, you run it.
Name it — the name becomes the web address
Go to Start a club and fill in the name and a short description of what the club is about. The name matters more than it looks like it does: it becomes the club's web address, and that address survives every later rename, so it's worth a moment's thought. The description is optional here and easy to rewrite once the club exists.
Choose the affiliation
This is the choice that decides what your club can do later. Picking your neighborhood gets you its boundary for approving members, access to its facilities, and its organizers as backup. Independent means none of that, and the freedom that comes with it. You can only pick a neighborhood you actually live in. Choosing one may also bring up its terms for starting a club — read them and tick the box; we record what you agreed to and when. It isn't permanent, though: once the club exists you can ask to join a neighborhood, or ask to leave the one you're in, from Manage → Neighborhood. Their organizers decide.
Followed a link your neighborhood shared? Then there's nothing to choose — the form is already committed to that neighborhood, and says so at the top. You don't need an account either: enter your address so we can check it's inside the boundary, and we'll email you a link to publish. There's still a way out if you meant an independent club — it's the link under the address fields.
Signatures needed and visibility — usually not yours to set
These two fields are yours only on an independent petition. For a neighborhood club, the neighborhood's organizers decide how many signatures you need, and they can require every club to be public or private, so whatever you type here is replaced by their policy — which is why a form that's already committed to a neighborhood doesn't show them at all, and states the goal it's counting toward instead.
A neighborhood can also turn petitions off entirely, in which case it won't appear as a choice at all.
Decide what a signature costs
On the petition's settings you control what each signer has to provide. First name, last name, phone, and address can each be off, optional, or required, and you can add one custom question of your own. Ask for less and signatures come faster; ask for more and you'll know who these people are before day one. Email is always collected, since it's what a signature is keyed to.
A required field with no answer blocks the signature entirely rather than saving a partial one, so only require what you truly need.
Choose who can see who signed
Three options, and this is a promise you're making, so set it before you start sharing. Public shows a list of first names on the petition page. Managers only shows the public a count and lets you see the list. Anonymous shows only the count, to everyone, including you, permanently. Names are always recorded behind the scenes so nobody can sign twice, but anonymous means nobody ever gets to look.
All of these settings stay editable while the petition is open, from the petition's own edit page.
Then share it everywhere
The moment your petition is live it gets a short link built for texting and flyers, a social preview image themed to match, and a listing in your neighborhood's clubs directory alongside real clubs. That link keeps working forever, by the way: after the club forms it quietly redirects to the club's page, so nothing you shared during the drive ever goes dead.
Neighborhood organizers can also email the petition to the whole neighborhood — once per petition, so ask them to send it when your pitch is final.
Still stuck, or have a different question?
Send us a message and a real person will reply to your email.