Club Mode is live on DetectID — verified clubs get free Premium

Club Mode is live on DetectID. Verified UK detecting clubs now get twelve months of free Premium for their owner and two admins, every member gets a month of free Basic on first join, and every find can be tagged to the club it belongs to. This is Phase 1 of a bigger push to make DetectID the natural home for UK clubs.

We’ve been quietly talking to club captains for a few months. A consistent theme: clubs do their identification on Facebook, their records in a spreadsheet, their meet-planning over text, and their member newsletters in MailChimp. Five tools, no shared truth, and nobody keeping a long memory. Club Mode is our attempt to fix that without making clubs pay for the privilege.

What ships in Phase 1

• Twelve months of Premium for the club owner— the captain who registered the club. Auction comparable prices, historic OS maps, Roman roads, KML/CSV export, the lot. Lands the moment the club is admin-verified and the owner clicks Claim my owner perk.
• Twelve months of Premium for two nominated admins— pick the two trusted club members who do the heavy lifting. They each get the full Premium toolkit so they can help run the club’s identifications.
• One month of free Basic for every joining member— full collection, edit history, field mode, live session tracking. One-shot per detectorist (lifetime), so we’re not subsidising people gaming the system across multiple clubs.
• Find tagging— mark any of your finds as belonging to your club. Shows as a small star-pill at the top of the result page. Internal use now; the club roster sees aggregate stats next.
• Anti-abuse baked in— one active admin/owner grant per detectorist (no stacking by joining multiple clubs as admin), one lifetime member grant per detectorist, three active perks per club hard cap, and demoted admins lose their perk immediately.

Why we’re doing this

Stuart Fletcher — a tester of ours who’s in multiple clubs — pitched roughly this deal a couple of weeks ago. His argument was simple: clubs are the single best growth channel for DetectID, because every UK detectorist worth their salt is in at least one. Get the club captains and committees on side, and the rest follows. He suggested the perk structure. We agreed. Here it is.

The wider bet: clubs aren’t just an acquisition channel. They’re a product. Clubs need a shared roster, a shared map of recoveries, a way to track which finds need a PAS visit, and a way to send a weekly update without standing up MailChimp. Phase 2 is about building that.

Phase 2 — the admin dashboard

In build now. Visible to the owner and two admins:

• Member roster — who’s active, who’s lapsed.
• Aggregate stats — finds this month, by period, by ruler. The same chart you see on your personal collection, but for the whole club at once.
• Privacy-blurred club heatmap — where the club’s finds come from. Admin-precise for admins, 1-km blurred for members, hidden for non-members.
• Treasure-Act watchlist — any club find flagged under the 1996 Act surfaces here so the admins can chase the PAS recording.
• Club newsletter — opt-in weekly digest emailed to members: top finds this week, total finds YTD, period spread, a captain note slot.

Phase 3 — the full club product

• Members-only feeds — for clubs that don’t want their best fields advertised on the public community page.
• Club-branded sharing — finds shared with the club get the club’s colours and credit.
• Cross-club leaderboards — opt-in. Which club’s pulled the most medieval hammered silver this quarter, etc. Driving healthy rivalry.
• Custom club branding — logos on member profiles, club colours on the map pins, optional clubs banner on shared finds.

Getting your club on

Register your club at /clubs/new. Then email admin@detectid.co.ukwith the club’s FID/NCMD affiliation details. We verify by hand within a working day, after which the owner sees a Claim my owner perkbutton on the manage page. Nominate two admins, point members at your club’s page, and you’re running.

The full mechanics — what the perks include, how anti-abuse works, what to ask yourselves before signing up — live in our Club Mode guide.

What we’d love from you

Two asks. First, if you’re in a club, talk to your captain or committee about whether DetectID makes sense for the club. We’ll verify any FID/NCMD-affiliated club, and we’ll work with unaffiliated clubs case-by-case.

Second, tell us what report you’d want monthly. The Phase 2 dashboard is being built around the answers clubs give us. Email admin@detectid.co.ukwith the one report that would actually be useful to you, and we’ll prioritise.