What Claude can and can't do here

A connected tool can help staff find information and prepare work in the club account. It signs in as the staff member who connected it (not as a separate account), so it can do only what that person's role allows, and what it does is recorded under their name. Admins decide whether connected tools are on at all, and whether they may make changes or only look, in Club → Staff & tools. To set one up, see Connecting Claude to your club.

A connected tool is not the same as an API key. A key is a password for one of your own programs and has no person behind it; a key can never run an action that needs approval. See API keys and the public API.

Anything that sends a message to members, moves money, or changes settings, roles or how someone signs in waits for approval on the website before it happens. The approval goes to the person who asked, using the connected tool: only they can open and approve their own requests, not another staff member. Review the action details before approving it.

Two things happen right away instead of waiting for approval, so it helps to know them before you connect a tool:

• Everyday changes such as notes, tasks, tags, schedules, and rosters.

• Recording a check you describe against an invoice, up to a daily total for connected tools that your club sets in Club → Staff & tools → Approval limits. Money going out still waits for your approval.

Between those two sits a middle step. For many smaller changes (adding a camp week, creating a draft offering or workflow, editing a custom field, unsubscribing a newsletter subscriber), the tool first tells you exactly what it is about to do and asks you to confirm in the chat. Nothing happens until you say yes. A few of those turn into a website approval when the change would reach further: for example a custom field that members would now see, or subscribing someone who had unsubscribed.

Some steps are never available to a connected tool, because they have to be done by a person on the website:

• Running the camp lottery draw, and changing allergies and pickup contacts on a household's family members.

• Running a workflow's test run (dry run). A tool can write a workflow, but it only turns on after you have done the test run yourself.

• Replacing an offering's private preview link, or making an offering unlisted for the first time, because the new link is shown once and only in the browser.

Each help article for these screens has an Asking Claude to do it section that says what a tool can ask for there: Camp, Registrations and prices, Workflows, Custom fields, Messages (newsletter subscribers) and Agreements and waivers.

A connection also has an end date. It lasts up to 180 days even if nobody disconnects it, and anyone can end it sooner from the member portal under Account → Security & devices (on a phone, the ☰ menu).

Do not use a connected tool to bypass club policy, staff permissions, or member privacy. Open the underlying club record to verify important details. See Approving an action.

A connection problem can happen after a change has already been saved. If a request says it is still in progress, that its outcome is unknown, or that we couldn't confirm whether it went through, open the underlying club record to check what happened. Do not ask the tool to repeat it with different wording or make the same change in another screen. Contact support to resolve the original request before trying again. This is especially important for credits, payments and messages to members. Once support has checked, they can clear the request so it can be made again.

A refusal is different: nothing went wrong, the club said no. If the tool asks for exactly the same change within ten minutes, it gets the same answer again without the change being tried. Fix what the refusal said, then ask again after ten minutes.

There is one exception. When the tool first shows you what it is about to do and asks you to confirm (or to approve it), a refusal at that last step is not remembered, so the tool can show you the situation as it is now and ask you to confirm again straight away. A few refusals come after part of the change was already made (for example, a camp cancellation that went through but whose refund could not be sent): the refusal itself says where to finish the job, and confirming again does not repeat what already happened. A change that did go through is never done twice: if the tool asks for it again, it is told what already happened.

A connected tool can read your website pages and email drafts and write new drafts of them. A few rules keep that safe:

• It can't publish a page. When it asks to, the request waits on the Approvals page for someone on your staff. If the page's draft changes before anyone approves, the request goes stale and nothing is published. Sending an email to members waits for approval in the same way. So does turning on the automatic "Registration open" email for a lesson batch, or changing a batch's name or description (the name is that email's subject): the request shows how many members will get it and the subject line.

• It can't overwrite newer work. It has to read a page or an email draft before changing it. If someone saved a change in between, its change is refused and it has to read the latest version first.

• It can't bring in pictures from the internet. It can look through your club's media library by each picture's description and place those pictures. A picture address it writes itself becomes an empty picture spot for you to fill, in the text and in a page's Banner, Image and text, and Photo gallery sections, unless the page or message already showed that picture. Describing your pictures well when you upload them helps it pick the right ones. See Images, GIFs and stock photos.