Organizing without a clubhouse

Moxley Stratton on the tools reshaping how nudist groups connect and grow

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

As social nudism has evolved over more than a century, few models have proven as resilient as the nonlanded club. These groups—without permanent property or facilities—meet in borrowed spaces, natural settings, or members’ homes, organizing social nudity through hikes, house parties, and retreats. Some have been around for decades; others are newer, often attracting younger and more diverse participants. What they share is flexibility, especially at a time when many landed clubs and resorts are struggling to stay open.

But with that flexibility comes a different kind of labor. Organizing events across changing locations, coordinating memberships, collecting payments, and managing communication—all without a physical base—can stretch even the most dedicated volunteers. For these groups, infrastructure doesn’t mean real estate. It means spreadsheets, message boards, mailing lists, liability insurance. The glue is invisible.

GroupFlow is a new software platform designed to ease some of those pressures. Built by Moxley Stratton, a longtime community organizer and software engineer, it aims to support member-based groups that operate without a permanent home. I spoke with Moxley about what it means to organize nudity in the digital age—what younger nudists expect, what older clubs are missing, and how infrastructure itself is changing. 🚀

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Interview with Moxley Stratton

What first drew you to working with nonlanded nudist clubs?

I’ve been going to the nude beaches outside of Portland, Oregon for several years, with my partner Kip. Kip is a life-long, gay nudist. Since 2017, I’ve been heavily involved with a club called SexPositive Portland (SPP). In 2023, I helped organize an SPP nude beach gathering at Collins Beach, on the Columbia River. One of the members with us was also a member of Oregon Men Enjoying Naturism (OMEN), and it just happened that OMEN was having a gathering at the beach as well, so I was introduced to the OMEN folks there. After some email correspondence with them after the event, I helped OMEN transition off of their previous club platform onto GroupFlow. GroupFlow was a great fit for OMEN, because they were struggling with administrative overhead and a platform that was difficult for members to use. After the move, OMEN saw a significant increase in member engagement and a major decrease in administrative work. Members had a much easier time navigating the new platform.

What challenges do these groups face most often?

That can vary significantly from club to club. Some common challenges include: 1. Attracting younger adults and single women, and making them feel welcome and comfortable, 2. Improving member engagement and attendance, 3. Increasing membership size, 4. Streamlining operations, 5. Improving cash flow, 6. Recruiting volunteers, 7. Purchasing insurance.

For most clubs-- AANR clubs in particular-- achieving age balance is a major challenge. How younger adults use technology is different than how older adults use it. For example, younger nudists became adults after text messaging was ubiquitous, and they tend to avoid phone calls. They tend to see email and Facebook as more for “old people”. The sensitivities of younger adults are often different from those of older adults. They tend to be more sensitive to pronoun usage beyond the typical ‘he’ and ‘she’. They want to be able to see member profiles online, so they have a better understanding of who’s going to be at the gathering they want to attend. Or, they might need to know much more detail about the event space to feel comfortable attending, much more than what you might think. Ignoring these differences exacerbates the age imbalance in clubs.

Do you think flexible, event-based nudism is growing right now?

I just don’t have the data to say one way or the other. I see two main ways people enjoy nudism outside their homes: 1. Going to a beach or nudist resort, or 2. Joining a nudist community, which has nude events. For a lot of people, just showing up and getting undressed at a beach or resort for the first time can be intimidating, but if they know a community of like-minded people will welcome them, they’ll have an easier time. A lot of newer nudists I know haven’t made that step from being nude in their home, to being nude at a beach, because there are too many intimidating obstacles: they don’t know other nudists, or it’s a long way to travel by themselves. Again, meeting up with an established club makes it easier.

What problems was GroupFlow built to solve?

The original problem was that Meetup didn’t meet the needs of a maturing organization. SexPositive Portland (SPP) was the first club to use GroupFlow. As mentioned above, I have been heavily involved with them since 2017. In 2018, we transitioned from a simple LLC organization owned by one person to a 501 (c) (7) nonprofit, with a board of directors.

As an event platform, Meetup was serving SPP well as an event platform, but there were problems in other areas. The club needed a proper landing page to display club information to prospective members in a more flexible, richer way than what Meetup was providing. With Meetup, they only give you a little section of text on your group’s Meetup page to talk about your group to prospective members. It does a poor job of conveying your group’s value proposition to prospective members, and the messaging is diluted with all the other distracting groups and ads that Meetup puts in front of people’s eyes. With Meetup, you get one banner image on your home page, and that’s it-- no other images, and no color theme to convey your club’s brand.

SPP built a website that worked alongside Meetup, but that introduced confusion for some members: which platform serves which function? As a member, do I go to the website, or do I go to Meetup?

The other problem with Meetup is that they wouldn’t provide our members’ contact information. Meetup didn’t consider them “our” members. They were Meetup’s members (this is also a problem with Facebook). Later on, with Meetup Pro, contact information was provided, but you had to pay extra for that. So once a member left your group because their dues lapsed, they were gone for good. And, Meetup doesn’t provide a way for people to sign up to your mailing list first without going through the effort of applying and becoming members. Having a mailing list of interested member prospects is an important marketing tool if you want to build interest in your club without requiring them to go through the trouble of applying as a member.

Another limitation of Meetup is the member application form. They give you only five fields to ask questions to your member applicants. If you need to ask more, you can try to combine multiple questions into one field, but that’s confusing to people, and they tend to skip answering some questions. GroupFlow replaces all of that with an application form creator. You can have as many questions as you want, using any of nine different field types. You can run reports on the application data too.

Groupflow’s three pillars | Provided by Moxley

For member communication, email and Facebook alone don’t cut it anymore. You’re going to leave out potential members who choose not to use either of those platforms. Sure, people will use email to apply for membership to a club, but for announcements and other communications, many people just ignore their email inbox. This is especially true with younger generations. Mobile app notifications or text messaging might be the only way to reliably reach them. Younger generations tend to avoid Facebook from the start. Also, Facebook’s algorithm chooses which announcements will be delivered to your members. It’s out of your control who gets notified or not.

Lastly, many members-- especially younger ones, and women-- want to see who is in the group before they attend events. For that, you need member profiles that are easy to create, easy to share, and provide ample privacy guards.

How can tech support values like trust and privacy in nudist communities?

Mentioned earlier, having member profiles helps build trust. Having the system automatically grant and remove member access to those profiles helps people feel at ease, knowing their information is only available to current, dues-paying members who have gone through a rigorous application process.

Eventually, most groups are going to deal with members who turn out to be a bad fit for the community. It’s important to have a mechanism that allows you to ban them, automatically locking them out from all member-internal information on the platform.

Another thing is online communications: many members don’t want to share their email address or other contact information with other members. Having a member-to-member chat system and online discussion forum that works without sharing contact information is key to maintaining that privacy.

What’s your vision for how GroupFlow fits into the future of social nudism?

As a club leader, it’s easy to see what kind of members you’re already serving. I want to challenge leaders to think about the potential members you’re not serving, and think about why that is. I want to see clubs attract more nudists and more diverse nudists. I believe GroupFlow can help with that. 🪐