Helmr — group management, minus the admin headache

I spend a fair bit of my spare time on the water — I'm an RYA dinghy instructor and help run training at Nantwich & Border Counties Sailing Club. Clubs like that run almost entirely on volunteers, and the admin side of it is a mess more often than not: membership renewals chased over email, certifications tracked in a spreadsheet someone's terrified of losing, event sign-ups scattered across three different tools that don't talk to each other.

A while back I started building something to fix that for our own club, mostly as a favour. It's since grown into Helmr — a proper platform, now on version two, live and being used for real.

Helmr covers the things a membership-led organisation actually needs, in one place rather than four:

• A member CRM that tracks certifications, roles and duty rosters, with the boring compliance checks handled automatically instead of chased by a volunteer with a clipboard.
• A member portal and app, so people can manage their own membership, see what's on, and get hold of the right person without an email chain.
• Instant communication — broadcasting a weather alert or a last-minute race change to the right people, not a mailing list nobody reads.
• Event handling for anything from a regatta to the annual dinner: logistics, guest lists, resourcing, all in one calendar.
• Automated billing, so membership renewals and event fees collect themselves instead of being someone's least favourite job.
• A page-builder website on top of all of it, so a club's public face and its admin aren't two separate systems fighting each other.

It started with sailing clubs specifically — that's where the itch was — but the same shape of problem shows up in sports clubs, community groups and plenty of small non-profits, so that's where it's headed too. There's an AI layer planned as well, in the same spirit as Waymarq: useful if you want it, invisible if you don't.

The thing I like most about building Helmr is that it's tested by actually using it — on a real club, with real volunteers, real members, and a real committee who'll tell me exactly what's annoying them. That loop of build something, watch someone genuinely rely on it, fix what's actually wrong rather than what I assumed was wrong, is probably my favourite part of this job.

Have a look at helmr.co.uk if you run something similar and the admin side has got out of hand.