Grafham Water Fly Fishers Association

Simplified the member application process,  delivered a more efficient way of managing membership ongoing,  improved member communication and provided an excellent platform for managing Club events.  Clubmate combined with a new website has moved GWFFA into the modern world and the new image has seen a significant increase in membership.

Founded in 1981, Grafham Water Fly Fishers’ Association is a friendly and inclusive club. We aim to promote fly fishing on Grafham Water and encourage our members to enjoy some of the best fly fishing in the UK. 

We make a point of sharing our experiences and helping members to get the most from their fly fishing with a series of social fishing days, a club championship comprising boat and bank matches, and entry into national competitions.

Before Clubmate, we had a manual membership system that was managed using an Excel spreadsheet. Members made payments in various formats; BACS, cheques, and cash and matching up who had paid which fees was time-consuming, as was chasing members that hadn’t paid at all.

Member data was maintained in the spreadsheet by our membership secretary. As with any manually managed process, mistakes were made due to simple human error resulting in emails not being received.

Membership management in general was very admin-heavy. It wasn’t helped by the fact that members were very poor at providing requested data. We had to continuously prompt them and trust that they’d contact us with the right information… which didn’t happen in most cases.

The club captain spent a great deal of time chasing things and relied heavily on email to communicate with members, organise bookings, and arrange and follow up on event attendance. None of which was a straightforward process. They also had to deal with trips to the bank to deposit cash and cheques collected over the season.

We needed a solution that would allow us to better our membership management and keep member communication under control. Data management was also something that needed to be addressed because spreadsheets aren’t fully secure, nor did they provide much visibility for the committee. We also wanted to improve event management, along with handling less cash and giving anglers the ability to sign up directly from our website.

Another club recommended Clubmate to us and we had a very good initial meeting with one of the Clubmate sales team. The on-demand webinars were great too because our committee could see the software in action without having to organise a time we were all free to sit in on a 1-2-1 demo.

We appreciated the fact that the software is designed for the angling community and our needs. It became clear during the demo that their bookings area would solve our problems with event management, minimising work for the club captain straight away. 

We felt Clubmate’s fee was very reasonable. Since we’re affiliated with the Angling Trust, we got a discount which made it even more cost-effective for the club.

The biggest concern we had was how our older members would adjust because, like many clubs, we have several members over the age of 65 that aren’t used to using an app. We also had questions as to how it’d work with the new website we’d launched, but it turns out we needn’t have worried about either of these things.