Frome & District Angling Association

Tripled their membership base, increased revenue by 300% and moved the club into the 21st century.

Established in 1931, our association used to run matches for hundreds on the River Frome. Today, we offer affordable angling and the opportunity for our members to enjoy the superb local rivers and still waters. Members can go fly fishing for trout, river coarse fishing and fish in our peaceful still waters.

Our club had been lacking in organisation for some years. We had no database of members and no way to communicate with them. As you can imagine, it was an ordeal to keep track of who’s paid for their memberships, collecting the money and keeping our bookings in order without having some sort of database for that information.

We didn’t have one centralised place that a possible member could visit and get all the information they wanted to know about Frome Angling Association. Things like membership prices, location, types of fishing available and so on.

It was clear that we needed to start growing our memberships beyond the traditional methods to drive some revenue. The best way for us to do that was by having a Frome Angling Association website that gave visitors all of the information they needed, followed by a way for them to join online in a way that was fast and simple. 

The main objective was to find a solution that would drag the club into the twenty-first century and help us to get more members. Without making a change, we were at risk of using all of our reserves – at which point the club would cease to exist.

What attracted us to Clubmate initially was their websites for fishing clubs. We didn’t need a hugely expensive site with all the bells and whistles – just something that looked clean, digestible and had the functionality of selling memberships online.

Sure enough, Clubmate was able to give us a website that showcased our fantastic association and helped us to sell our memberships online. Perhaps the biggest bonus was that it was incredibly affordable!

After the websites caught our attention, we realised the Clubmate software would take things one step further. We quickly had an end-to-end system that managed our club – from marketing to prospective members through to the operational side of things. Implementing Clubmate to manage the back-office tasks such as managing members and payments meant that within weeks, we had a solution that was easy for our team to learn and use day-to-day.

There were no obstacles when deciding to introduce Clubmate. Our committee was all for moving the club forward, so it was really a no-brainer.

I’ve already been recommending Clubmate to many other fishing clubs. When systems like this exist, there’s no excuse for clubs to be using administrative systems from the 1950s. If you’re considering getting started with Clubmate, just do it!