I recently posted this on the FC United of Manchester Facebook page before the game, here is one response. Refreshing to post something that gets 70 likes and positive responses for a change!
As an FC fan who lives in the south I get my football fix at various clubs in Sussex. I’ve had experience with your website when trying to find your fixtures. I’ve always thought it is without a doubt the worst club website I’ve experienced. Glad to see I’m not alone in that feeling.
However “the rights of fans” has to be the best fanzine name in the country!
Yup, I am going to rip the website to pieces, but before you turn away in a strop doing that you never have anything positive to say thing, why not try learning something. It is not a crime for something to be shit. The crime is doing nothing about it.
It is surely something that as someone who writes a lot about fan ownership and Lewes FC should do. Check on other fan owned clubs, see not if they do it better, how they do it better etc. But there has been so much going on at Lewes FC over the years there has never really been much point in chasing after things to write because frankly, stories land on your lap anyway.
But if I was on the board at Lewes FC, I’d make the time to see how, in just about every other case, other clubs do fan ownership so much better. I knew we were crap at it but having started looking around more I begin to realise just how crap. Complacency, inertia or arrogance, or all three, we are beginning to see, as the financial mess at Lewes unravels, what we could and should have been learning from others and have no excuse not to try and replicate.
In principle what I write about below is of prime importance. It is not just that the FCUM website is better that the Lewes FC website as a functional tool, not a failed propaganda exercise. It is of monumental importance to how the leaderships past and present have failed Lewes FC and the stupidity of building a fan owned club being bank rolled by private finance.
In short, this is obvious to everyone, if you have an annual blank cheque every year to balance the books you are under no pressure to run and build a club in a self-sustained, sensible and efficient manner. The fact the new board have been left ‘with the cupboard’ bare speaks of the total lack of foresight of the previous board members and leadership.
With the forthcoming game in the pointless whatever tournament against FC United of Manchester I thought this would be an informative website to check up on.
A club formed by people who walked out of their own football club because of the disgusting way it was run will want to run a very tidy ship and will be people of strong principles. I’m saying nothing! Indeed, that is exactly what they do and frankly put Lewes Football Club and our attempts of promoting fan ownership etc to shame. I will drive my point home by dealing with the face value of our different sites, but I can assure you as brilliantly fit for purpose the FCUM site is in this respect, over the Lewes FC site, trust me when you delve into the real workings of the club it puts Lewes FC to hyper shame in respects of the principle of fan and community ownership and doing it well.
I know everyone bangs on about how important social media is these days, indeed it is. But at the end of the day when you Google a football club it’s a website that comes up and that is your entry point into that club. That is where all the information is. Social media tells the story but you have to scroll back and back and back and back to work out what the story is, whereas with a website it is in your face. This is what we are, this is what we do. It is the hub, the information, fundraising, awareness, drawing the community in, drawing local sponsors in.
There is not much point in crying over spilt milk, but I will anyway.
For the last three years or so Lewes FC have been paying, for a club our size, a bewildering amount of money out on a leadership bureaucracy who were supposed to power Lewes Football Club into bigger and better places. My how we talked the talk. All totally misguided of course and a complete failure. None more so than despite what must have been at least half a million pounds pumped into human resources over this period and we couldn’t even come up with a proper website for our purposes. One that is representative of anything to do with fan ownership and the town of Lewes. We got the pointless ‘club strategy,’ (what a hoot that was!) nobody except the club bubble gave a shit about, but a decent website to promote what we are doing, no we’re far too big and clever for that.
A football club website these days is the landing page for people interested in the connected club. Its value is enormous. It must draw people in and immediately engage then with the what the club perceives it is all about. You have seconds to engage.
Importantly, if you are trying to attract, in the case of Lewes FC, big deal sponsors this is where interested parties will go to see how things are done. A website is the shop front for this and perhaps the reason we failed to land these sponsors is because the website is shit.
The FC United of Manchester site on the other hand is really smart.
It is maybe not as slick and well presented as the Lewes FC website, but doesn’t that say so much about Lewes FC. All mouth and no trousers.
On the landing page there is a rotating section to the top half.
4 of the 5 screens are all about fund raising. Season tickets, Fund the Foundation, a donation scheme, function room hire and how to become a member. Instantly you are drawn to a pro-active entity that is trying bloody hard to raise funds. A seductive energy pervades. I signed up, I am a member of FCUM because after years of ineffective fan community ownership at Lewes FC, privately financed, it simply felt cathartic to finally be in one that does what it says on the tin. I digress. Oh and my mighty Palace did the double over Man U this week so a bit of a thank you gift!
To the bottom half of the site are the current nine posts of club activity, as I write, varying from an opinion piece of the halting of FA Cup replays to buying players shirts.
Immediately below that is a landing page for a Commercial Partnership Brochure. This is a brilliant sales pitch to local businesses.
To the left of all this is the drop downs, half are given over to raising funds. Volunteering, business, sponsorship, events and hospitality, pitch hire, fund raising. A click on fundraising a Christmas hamper of self-sustainable options for budding philanthropists!
Donate development fund, fund the foundations, barrels, foreign currency, holiday draw, pound for the ground, FCUM lottery.
A page is given over to the value the club hold their volunteers in, elsewhere on the site, to drive the point home the site estimates how much money the volunteers are saving the club a year. One won’t go into the details but as club stalwart and volunteer PJ recently wrote, it would just be nice to get a thanks.
So what about the Lewes FC site?
Where FCUM main page is given over to almost entirely promoting the financial sustainability of the club, the true community ethos and news through the five scrolling screens and the nine recent informative news stories, how do we compete?
Dross.
On Lewes of the 14 ‘blocks’, not one is about the Lewes community, one is become a member and another is season tickets and another 3g. Here we represent the collective result of three years of paying a huge bureaucracy to build a self-sustained football club. Yup a group of school children could have come up with 3g, season tickets and membership for a website.
7, yes 7 are sloganeering, you know that stuff that was going to bring all the sponsorship and international members in but was a total complete and utter failure. FFS, it look like a pseudo Pravda!
One story is given over to current football.
Match day info, clothing and of course the managerial vacancy are just run of the mill fills.
The drop downs where FC United are totally pro active in raising funds, volunteering and community endeavours, how do we fare? Ingeniously, we have a drop down for tickets of which there are none and as a community club the endeavours of our great leadership have collectively managed to get Become a Member. Other than that, the customary moribund dross you expect from a dull and pointless website with zero energy or attractions that say, come see what we are doing here, we are Lewes, we are fan owned, come and help, we are in the financial shit. Help!
It stands as a monument to our failure. The new board have been in place for 6 months, when are they going to deal with this? The new board are certainly moving the ship around very slowly, but too slowly. Some decent ideas but I see no massive strategy that is going to push the club forward and re-engage the town, bring locals and businesses back to the hub of the club. The board need to get the website sorted and use it as a vehicle to drop the ridiculous branding that has failed and reinvent it. Forget the slick appearance it needs to be functional and let’s face it, just like the FC United website. Use the website to relaunch the club with the real community and Lewes gusto that our Bonfire societies have. Lewes put on the biggest bonfire celebrations in Britain through volunteering, just why has the club ignored this resource on our doorstep. The website represents all you need to know and see about a community club that ignores its community.
The Rights of Fans. 