Curiosity kills the cat and apparently I am the cat because I am curious! So.. hopefully I don't die after asking this question :P 

Why don't you run for Club Presidency? What stops you from running? 
Is it not having the funds? 
Is it not having a layout to use? 
Not having the time to invest? 

What's holding you back? What would make it more "worth it" to you ? 

1 - There's no "prestige." Other than an achievement (or several, I suppose, for multiple terms, etc.) and your name as the president, there really isn't an incentive to run. I'm not quite sure how to make it more prestigious, honestly.

2 - There's usually little to no competition to win a presidency. Not enough players to facilitate that kind of gameplay, maybe? A lot of clubs end up with the same president for a long time (Caveat: not always a bad thing! A lot of those players do a great job of adding contests and keeping a nice layout up). A little bit of friendly competition to win running a club makes everyone more invested. I remember fighting to win Western Club years ago and the vote #s ended up in the 200s! (I won, if you're wondering!). It creates a time and (game) money investment that you want to follow through on and show you're the person for the job. Silly? Probably, but true.

3 - Game and contest prizes have to come out of the president's pocket, typically. For the average upgraded player, that's not a huge deal if the prizes are a few mil. But - if the prizes aren't high enough, there isn't always a ton of participation. Not as much participation = less contests added and less interaction during the presidency.

4 - The coding for club pages is sliiiightly different, so it can be a little daunting for those with nil coding skills to deal with putting a layout up if they have only dealt with player pages. I know those slight changes are necessary for the page to function, though!

5 - No extra incentives for animals to be registered other than being able to enter club shows. Again, I'm not quite sure what incentives would balance being fair versus going overboard. For simplicity, it's also easier to just have a completely open registry instead of requiring breed/point/age/etc. requirements. Maybe the coding for submitting animals to a registry could be changed to only allow "x" (x being a set of criteria) during a presidency, changeable by each new president? This would put the onus on the game's framework to sort the animals, taking out a bit of the time sink currently in place for both the player and the prez.

A few points I've come up with so far in my experience. Might come back and add if I think of anything else :)

I dont really have the personal funds to really fund some cool contests, I hate giving lame prizes and the allowance doesnt provide the funds id like to provide as prizes. I found last time there was no prestige and no one really entered your contests anyways. Competition to win the presidency that was more like HL would be better....In a way its a system that at this point is hard for any one person or group of people to "fix" in terms of drumming up interest. The funny thing is if everyone who says oh theres never any competition to win a presidency just did it there probably would be some competition...I actually don't like as a player that every club every month has open registry basically. I like standards :p but I also like that i can get easy points throwing my animals in every club LOL

Honestly- They aren't really clubs at this point. It's just a nice way to get double point shows.There is very little actual point to any of them. They all have open registry - and when I did run and win presidency's a while ago, and proceeded to set actual requirements, I had several unhappy people.

People have gotten so use to them having complete  open registry ... I dunno.
This has really played into the whole prestige thing.

It's just another thing to have to keep track of .. and it's not really worth it, the way it is now.
Having to wade through 100s of entrants because people don't want to read registration, or just don't care... It's a chore.
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In real life clubs have very strict rules, and actual requirements.
Just sayin'

I seriously really appreciate all of this feedback, y'all! I am taking notes!! 

I am a regular club president of the Layout and Coding Club, but I don't have a lot of time to invest in other clubs. I can definitely concur with the above points that center around the registry requirements.

I also would be more interested in clubs if the registries were more selective and gave players more goals to work towards to get their animals accepted. I think a goal of the clubs that has kinda fallen by the wayside was to encourage higher quality animals by limiting registries, and the prize was double point shows.

But the thing is that unless registries are exceedingly selective so that only a couple animals are submitted and then reviewed every day, accepting them is a huge chore. I use a Chrome add-on that allows me to right-click and select multiple animals at once, but for most players, the brunt of the effort is in clicking every single animal - and that's regardless of whether or not you're accepting or rejecting. So if you're going to be clicking all those animals anyways, why bother making the job even more difficult by having to check each animal for requirements? Why not just leave registration open and accept everybody anyways?

On the other hand, like Scor said, if clubs are too selective in order to enforce restrictive registries and make it easier on the club president, then players A) get upset or B) don't bother with the club at all and just wait for a new president next month.

So yeah, I think the registry system needs a huge overhaul to really adjust how clubs run. I love Araminta's suggestion of providing a built-in system to limit registries. A section in the club page settings area where presidents can set a point minimum and an age min and max at the least. Then when players go to submit their animals, the game itself will check the requirements and then throw up an error if an animal doesn't make the cut. Then that animal isn't even submitted for the president to accept. From those basic requirements, presidents can then set their own additional requirements like specific breeds, min generation, etc. and it should be easier to prune the registry. 

I do think the clubs have just become so basic and open and non-restrictive, players just don't have interest in them anymore. If players who have an interest in being club presidents make more of an effort to make the clubs more selective and elite, there would be more competition and interest. No challenge = no fun. That said, because this has been the system for a while and players have gotten used to it, there may def be a period of negativity towards/inactivity with clubs where the community tries to readjust to a rise in standards.

Basically, presidents have to force the change we want to see in clubs. And we would have to stick to it. Barring any programming changes or rehauls of the registry system, persistence and standards are the best we players can do to make the clubs more interesting, in my humble opinion. 

To be completely honest, I think the easiest solution would be to scratch clubs and focus on the breed embassies. Make it so that they can accept animals on a selective basis, and give them the shows with double points. That also serves the purpose of make breed embassies actually, well, DO something on the game.

My issue with clubs is it's just a circle. No one participates because the clubs are stagnant/give low prizes. Presidents then don't care because no one participates. They're just ... there. They need something to liven then up again, make people excited and care. 

I love this post. I also love all the suggestions. I never though I'd say this, but getting rid of the clubs and just having breed embassies kind of make sense. The only drawback to that, is that the ambassadors remain the same forever (or for a while), and if they aren't active, then neither would be the embassy.

I wanted to make the registration restrictive during my last presidency, but as others stated, it's so time consuming to go through hundreds of animals to see if they meet the requirements that its easier to just accept them all. A built in selective system would be amazing. This would be so that we could easily accept those that meet the cut, or at least cut down on the amount of animals we'd have to look at.

Competition is like null/void as well. I remember (back in the day) when there was extreme competition for presidency, but somehow, that died off. Maybe because there was no incentive for the players to continue running. 

I'm all for making the clubs (or embassies) better and I'm excited to see where these suggestions might lead. 

Hey guys! These suggestions are AMAZING. Sat- Thank you for posting this and taking the time to look into it all! 

I'm also taking notes and will be messaging all new club Prezies on June 1st about some changes! Thank you ALL for your imput and keep the suggestions coming! 

No prob, Koni! 
As someone who is currently running 12 clubs - I felt it was time to look into this and figure out how we can make things better! I am always wanting to improve things and build on things! 

Thank you - seriously - to EVERYONE who has commented on this post. All of your feedback is incredibly helpful! 

I am on the same page as everyone here. I know that I for one, had pretty big participation the few months I was bookworm's president because I would host bingo games! Even for small prizes like a mill HPD or animal CSS was enough incentive for that participation, I think perhaps clubs need more creative events than just "solve this puzzle for x hpd"

Secondly, I also think that we need to look at bringing the prestige back, and players look at things as a goal to meet instead of getting upset when open registry is no longer there. For example, when I was president of mythical horses I imposed the restrictions of....must be a mythical horse. People were really upset by this which confused me since it's mythical horses, Arabians don't belong there. So if you wanted to be part of mythical horses, start a mythical horse breed! I think that's another small issue of the game, everybody sort of breeds what they want, and often are the only breeder. Clubs having different restrictions could bring a different dynamic to the game as a whole, if people were up to the change. We need more mythical breed players! (Sorry that kind of got away from me)

I like the idea of breed embassies having some sort of perk to them, like shows exclusively for them, but I also think that completely scratching the clubs isn't the best idea. I think we should remember why we had clubs in the first place (:

To be honest, the clubs have seemed to become rather useless with how they are gameplay-wise rn.

I mean yeah they have their own personal shows and run contests sometimes, but with open registries and no real perks beyond the shows and contests, I feel like there isn't really any excitement over them. There are no real perks from animals registering for the clubs and no real prestige either (no like omg you're dog is part of the rare breeds dog club omg so cool).

I know I'm running for the Sporting Dog Club simply because it's something that interests me irl too. I own, breed, train, and have even done a bit of competition hunt trials with my setters so it's a personal interest of mine. I do plan to restrict the registry for the club a tad and probably provide some information as well as a few contests. But with this being my first presidency (if I win) I guarantee I'll be learning more of the details along the way.

I'll say, too, the other reason it's annoying when clubs have a restricted registry is that when I'm registering, I can't see any of the info about my animal. I'd love if we saw what presidents see when they accept. That way I'd know if the animal I'm registering has the right points-to-age ratio or whatever!

Maybe the money that the HA brings in can be divided up amongst all the club's each month? There's A LOT of money on there that's just sitting there!