For your Welfare Officer

Security & children's data

Last updated 9 September 2026

This page is written to be forwarded. If you are taking ClubKeeper to a committee, send this to your Welfare Officer and your Chair — it answers the questions they will ask, including the ones with uncomfortable answers.

We don’t read your safeguarding records — and you’ll know if we ever do

Concern records are excluded from ordinary support access entirely. Every other part of the platform has a route in for us to help you with it; this is the one place that route does not exist. Reaching one requires a separate, deliberate exception, not a shortcut through the same door as everything else:

• Access is a 60-minute grant, not a permission. It requires a written reason, it is recorded permanently, and it expires on its own without anybody remembering to close it.
• Your Welfare Officer is told as it opens — not afterwards, and not by us mentioning it later. A club should never learn from ClubKeeper that ClubKeeper read its child protection records.
• You see it on your own screen. Every time support enters your club it lands in your activity log, labelled as us, alongside everything your own committee did.

Where your data is held

• All club data is stored in the United Kingdom (London region).
• The application itself also runs in London, so a request carrying a child’s record does not travel outside the UK to be served.
• Every connection is encrypted in transit, and passwords are stored only as scrypt hashes — never in a readable form.
• One exception, stated plainly: error diagnostics go to Sentry in the EU(Frankfurt). These are crash reports, not club records — the page you were on, your account’s internal ID, your IP address and a browser version. Identifiers for children, guardian invite links and single-use access tokens are stripped out of them before they are sent. Sentry is named in our privacy policy as a processor. Frankfurt is inside the EU, so this transfer relies on UK adequacy rather than on the safeguards that policy describes for transfers outside the UK and EU.
• After a successful two-factor check you may choose to trust that device for 30 days. On a trusted device you are asked for your password but not for a second code during that window. It is per-device and per-browser, and signing out or revoking a session ends it.

Who can see a child’s details

• ClubKeeper accounts are for adults aged 18 and over. Children do not have logins; a parent or guardian holds the account and records their child’s details on their behalf.
• Children have no logins. An adult cannot message a child through ClubKeeper, because there is no child account to message. That is a property of how it is built, not a setting somebody could change.
• Guardianship is scoped to your club. A parent’s access to their child is held against their membership of your club, so it cannot follow them anywhere else.
• Medical notes and emergency contacts reach a coach on matchday — deliberately. A coach whose player is having an asthma attack should not be navigating a menu. They are not included in ordinary lists, exports or pages that have no use for them.
• Two-factor authentication is required for every role that can manage a club: Admin, Treasurer and Welfare Officer. It is enforced on every session — pages and data exports alike — not just asked for. Coach and Team Support can turn it on too, voluntarily.

Qualifications and DBS

ClubKeeper mirrors what your county FA holds; it does not replace it and it does not file anything on your behalf. We track that a check exists and when it expires, and chase it before it lapses. We do not want, and should not be sent, the contents of a DBS certificate — the register itself is the record, and holding certificate content creates risk for your club rather than reducing it.

It warns; it never blocks. ClubKeeper will not stop a child playing because an adult’s paperwork lapsed. It tells the people responsible, early and repeatedly.

Photographs

Photography consent is asked fresh every season rather than held as a standing setting, and it is four separate answers rather than one tickbox — team photos, club social media, local press and livestreaming are genuinely different questions and families answer them differently.

Anything not recorded reads as no. A child with no registration for the current season is treated as restricted on every channel, and coaches get the list that actually matters on a touchline: who must not be photographed.

If you leave

• Your data is yours, on the way in and on the way out. Every significant record — members, players, finances, qualifications — exports to CSV at any time, without asking us.
• No minimum term, and no setup fee.
• Safeguarding records are retained to the standards your governing body expects rather than deleted the moment a subscription lapses. A platform that deletes a live case because a card declined is not one a club can rely on.

What we are still working on — stated plainly

The rest of this page describes what is true today. These are not, and it is better you read them here than discover them:

• Database-level tenant isolation is in progress and not yet in force. Separation between clubs today is enforced in the application and by tests, not by the database itself.
• A limited company is being incorporated. Until it exists, your contract and your data processing agreement would be with an individual. We would rather you waited for the company than signed with a sole trader.
• Professional indemnity and cyber insurance are being arranged, and the cover will be stated here once bound.
• We are one person. That is a genuine limitation and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can commit to is a reply within one working day, and the same working day for anything affecting money. Accessibility reports are the one exception, at five working days — not because they matter less, but because they usually need reproducing on the device before there is anything useful to tell you. That is set out on our accessibility statement.

Ask us anything

If your Welfare Officer or Chair has a question this page does not answer, email jason@clubkeeperapp.com. A named person will reply within one working day — not a form, and not a sales sequence.

Or write to us:
34 Delorean Way
Brackley
Northamptonshire
NN13 6BF