Creating a website for your club has a two main advantages:
Focus point
Having a website means people can find you. This is likely something you want, for a number of different entities: potential members looking to get involved, potential sponsors looking to give you money, potential professors looking to help you out, potential speakers looking for information, etc.
This is especially true when you (or other people!) want to give a way for people to find out more about your forecasting club in some specific scenarios — for instance, you can link to your club’s website on a poster, or in an email to other clubs. You can imagine two people talking about your club and wondering how to get more involved — you probably want to direct their attention to an easily accessible resource where they can learn more and get involved. That resource is called a website.
External legitimacy
Having a website provides a pretty huge signal of external legitimacy. It shows people that you’re a club that actually does things, and shows that you are at the very least sufficiently competent to build a website, which filters out a surprisingly high number of clubs.
Having external legitimacy is helpful for getting new members, retaining existing members, onboarding sponsors, doing outreach to speakers, and close to every other outreach goal you might have as a forecasting club.
We’ve built a template for you. You can copy it, fill in the details of your club, and be done (or customize it to your heart’s content!).
Here’s what the template looks like — the password is forecasting-clubs. If you’d like to use it as a template, shoot us an email (see Reach out) and we’ll help you get it set up. From start to finish, I’d guess it would take between 15 minutes and 1.5 hours to have completely set up your website, depending on how experienced you are with website creation and how much other prep you’ve built.
Some specific things to make to sure have:
What you are
This can be pretty simple — e.g. “We are the Example University Forecasting Club, focused on improving our ability to probabilistically predict the future across a wide variety of domains.”
What you do
Again, this can be pretty simple — e.g. “We primarily compete in Metaculus and OPTIC tournaments and run calibration exercises. We also have a club fund on Kalshi to trade prediction markets.”
Who you are
A quick list of you and the other organizers (see Finding co-organizers if you don’t have any).
Contact info
Your club email (see the first section on How to: do email effectively) is a great to use, but you can use your personal email if you prefer.
Call to action
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who’s really interested in getting engaged. Ask yourself: what do you want them do?
Probably, the answer looks something like “give us their email for an email list,” or “sign up for our next event,” or even just “shoot us an email to grab lunch sometime.” Whatever it is, put the answer out in front — as frictionless and easy as possible for the potential member to use as possible.
Everything else is commentary. Some other things you might consider having: