Exeter & District Angling Association

Provided with an effective way to manage members, generated extra revenue, increased membership numbers & day ticket sales.

The EDAA now controls over 26 miles of fishing in and around the Exeter area, covering canals, ponds and rivers. The Association aims to provide low-cost, varied fishing for local anglers. 

For the specimen pike and carp angler, there is the Exeter Ship Canal, with pike in excess of 30lb and carp to 40lb plus, whilst not an easy water, the rewards can be great for the dedicated specialist angler. As a point of historical Interest, the 6-mile long canal was constructed in 1563 and the first ship canal to be built in Britain.

The match fishing side of the Association is a buoyant one, with regular open matches held year-round. In addition, the Association has an active inter-association section with matches being held on our, and neighbouring clubs waters in Devon and Somerset.

I was co-opted onto EDAA’s committee to assist with bailiffing issues and as a link to the Angling Trust. Soon after joining the committee, I noticed that the junior memberships were growing steadily thanks to the Learn to Fish Open Days (made possible by the Angling Trust, the club president and other trained coaches), whilst the adult membership base was steadily declining. The club was actively looking for ways to save money rather than thinking about ways to grow the adult membership base.

Like many other clubs, we had an ageing committee that suffered from a change in people’s lifestyles in which they were moving on from angling or retiring from serving on the committee. This meant that it became difficult to run the club efficiently; membership details were kept in different places and we didn’t have a means of contacting members directly to follow up on things like missed payments or permit information.

Not only did the club operations need improving, but we also needed to give our members easy access to buy a membership or a day permit whenever they wanted as opposed to being limited to the opening hours of the local tackle shops.

To begin with, the main goal for us was to make sure that we knew who our members were. Once we had streamlined our operations, we could begin to focus on making fishing easy and accessible for our members. This involved making sure the member data we had was up to date, slowly switching to online payments and getting used to digitally communicating with our members regularly. 

Thankfully, Clubmate is an end-to-end solution that allowed us to address all of our pain points and even helped us to create a brand new club website that new members could use to join online.