Fylde Angling Society

Saved time on member admin, improved member retention, streamlined match booking system, cost effective group communications & modernised club processes

Fylde Angling Society was formed in 2012, but is also an integration of an established club which starting out as a small works club, the club has grown through the years with an ever growing band of members eager to participate in the ancient art of angling.

Our history reads well and we think we are doing all the right things to promote our sport to the highest level by fair and affordable means.

However, managing the administration of memberships, organising club matches and the multiple runs to the bank was becoming more and more time consuming.

Our society runs in excess of 45 matches each year, so the process of manually collating attendee numbers for each match, keeping track of cancellations and making sure everyone was kept informed was a real pain.

When it came to renewal time, understanding when members have lapsed and being able to remind them of when their fees were due (in a cost efficient way) was challenging to say the least. Plus the demand from members for online payments was getting ever stronger.

We are all volunteers at the club and we’d all prefer to spend our free time fishing rather than processing admin, so we knew something needed to change.

That’s when we started researching cost effective options for moving the club forward whilst also reducing our workload.

During our research we came across Clubmate, set up a demo and then talked through how our club operated and how we wanted it to change in the future.

They instantly understood the problems we faced and had solutions for all of them. In hindsight, this probably shouldn’t have been much of a surprise considering they only work with fishing clubs & fisheries!

After deciding to go ahead, their team went to work configuring our account for us and uploading all of our existing member data from a spreadsheet.

Using their reports, we now have instant visibility of which members have paid and more importantly, which ones haven’t. Armed with this information we can use Clubmate to send a group message ‘reminding’ lapsed members to log on and renew. The results have been positive so far.

As a club that prides itself on being inclusive, we are delighted that going online hasn’t alienated some of our ‘less tech savvy’ members.  We still offer the same paper based process as before but instead of one of us updating the club spreadsheet we can now log in to Clubmate from anywhere and update the database with a couple of clicks. The percentage of manual membership has reduced dramatically though, and I’m sure this trend will continue over time.

We feel fortunate that our club has a forward thinking Committee and if we believe that something can be improved, we are not held back by a lack of willingness to change, which we know others might.

Our advice to those that are sitting on the fence is to go for it, move your club forward and you’ll be better for it. Don’t let the fear of technology get in the way, Clubmate is really easy to use and the support you get from the team is great, they are always at the other end of the phone if you need them.

There’s no getting away from how Clubmate helped us become more efficient. Not needing to worry about wasting time on basic tasks lets us focus on developing the club and enjoying matches. To us, these are the things that matter the most. Plus, getting the chance to cast a line into the water ourselves! With Clubmate’s constant support, even after the initial set up, there are plenty more hours in the day to do what we love. 

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!):

hello@clubmate.co.uk

0333 987 4677