Newport Reservoirs Fly Fishing Association
Customer Story
KEY BENEFITS
Provided insight into key club data, allowed members to join and renew online, enabled the club to collect membership payments online.
Newport Reservoirs Fly Fishing Association - Our Story
Newport Reservoirs Fly Fishing Association is ideal for both the experienced fly fisher and beginners looking to explore fishing. Because the reservoirs are so well established, the fly life is fantastic, with plenty of buzzers, sedges, silverhorns, damsels and cranefly present. Nymph and dry fly fishing is particularly productive throughout the season.
Two boats are available on the lower reservoir for the use of members and their guests. A warm welcome awaits all visitors and there are toilet and shelter facilities on site.
It was hard to keep track of memberships.
Before using Clubmate, all payments for our memberships were paid by cheques in the post or cash in hand and permits were paid in person at the club by putting cash in the lock box. Running the association this way caused several issues for us; it was difficult to monitor which anglers had paid for memberships and our bailiffs found it tricky to verify genuine memberships on the bank.
Why we chose Clubmate.
We wanted to be able to give members the option of paying online since that’s how everyone pays for things these days. Online payments also mean that we could stop holding cash at the club and make it safer for the committee – not to mention lowering the number of trips to the bank to deposit cheques.
Clubmate stood out to us because it seemed simple to navigate for the end user, even for the less tech-savvy members. We had a demo and the rest of the committee got on board straight away because they understood how much it would help.
Clubmate has been a revelation for the NRFFA.
Now that we’ve used the system for a while, there are lots of features I like, namely the communication and reporting tools. I can easily communicate with our members via email or text if there’s any news or rule changes, whereas previously it’d have been nearly impossible to make sure every single member got the message. What’s great is that if an angler replies to one of our outgoing messages, we can access them from one place in Clubmate which gives the entire committee visibility over what’s happening at the club.
I can provide things like membership growth reports to fellow members of the committee without trawling through paper lists and manually gathering figures as I did before. It’s given us some great insight and it makes it easier to see where we need to focus our efforts going forward.
As a bonus, we’re able to use Clubmate to offer boat bookings so that members no longer have to travel down to the reservoirs just to book a boat (which avoids them being disappointed when they find out we’re fully booked!)
Clubmate has been a revelation for the NRFFA. The majority of our members have embraced the change and now happily buy permits online, so there’s very little admin for us to do now.
The team behind Clubmate have been very helpful during setup. They took the time to listen to how we operated and helped us get everything in place. No question is too difficult for their support team. It brought us peace of mind knowing that the experts were there if anything went wrong.
Would we recommend Clubmate?
Yes, I’d definitely recommend Clubmate based on the ease of use for members alone. It’s ideal for any fishing club no matter how big your membership base is or how tech-savvy your members are.
If you’d like to learn more about Clubmate and how it could benefit your fishing club, please get in touch (we don’t bite!):
0333 987 4677
or click Book a Demo, leave your details and we’ll call you!
CLUB NAME
Newport Reservoirs Fly Fishing Association
CLUB WATERS
Ynysyfro Reservoirs
MAIN CONTACTS
Andrew Hoffrock
WEBSITE
KEY CHALLENGES
Holding cash at the club,
Bailiffs struggled to verify memberships
Memberships were reconciled manually
Too much admin work overall
Interested in becoming a member of NRFFA?
Visit their website for joining information.