Horsham and District Angling Association
KEY BENEFITS
Provided a centralised member management system, brand new club website, significantly reduced costs, ability to start selling branded club clothing.
Horsham & District Angling Association - Our Story
Horsham and District Angling Association was founded in 1907 by A J T Kempson and is affiliated with the Angling Trust. They pride themselves on being a friendly angling club catering for all styles of coarse fishing, ages and abilities.
Their numerous waters are in beautiful, picturesque surroundings. As a member of HDAA, you will have access to 4 lakes, 4 ponds and a 2 mile stretch of the River Arun. Members can borrow exchange tickets to use at the waters of several other clubs, giving them access to scores of other waters completely free.
Managing our memberships was very labour-intensive.
Prior to using Clubmate, managing and organising memberships was a very labour intensive process. It was up to me to collect information from new joiners and write out membership information by hand, which took hours and hours. It was quite a stressful process, made even more so because I was the only person responsible for this task. Managing memberships the old fashioned way also worked out to be quite costly because we had to pay for a lot of printing and stationery.
After operating this way for some time, it was clear we needed to make a change. We needed to make member management simpler and less reliant on individual human involvement; something that would almost run itself and could be easily handed over to the new volunteers. Ideally, the solution we chose would provide us with a club website to make us look more professional to anglers looking to join and serve as the go-to place for information on our club.
Why we chose Clubmate.
We chose Clubmate because we liked the fact that the club management system could be connected to a club website so that anglers could join through the site and their details would automatically appear in our system. That alone was going to be a huge time-saver for us.
As we learned more and more about Clubmate, we discovered that they could facilitate club merchandise for us, which is something we’ve wanted to do but simply couldn’t take on (what is usually) such a big task. Clubmate could take care of everything for us: the online shop, fulfilling orders – the whole process. Plus, for every sale, we’d earn a commission on top – every little helps!
Some of the club officers were hesitant to get started at first and the committee was concerned about the older members of the club getting to grips with a new online system, but the benefits of implementing Clubmate far outweighed these potential barriers.
Clubmate continues to be a fantastic solution for our fishing club.
Clubmate continues to be a fantastic solution for our fishing club. I like the way that the system can be tailored to meet our specific membership requirements, allowing us to control who joins and in what capacity – a feature that was particularly useful since we only offer night permits to specific members. My favourite feature of the whole system is the fact that I can send emails to entire membership groups at the touch of a button – sending out newsletters is a breeze now!
Initially, it did take us a little while to set everything up, but once the initial work was done we could get on with using the system properly. We’ve been able to significantly cut costs because we no longer need to print pages upon pages of membership forms, send out membership cards via the post or run a P.O. box. Everything is done online.
Like a lot of other clubs, we have a community bank account which we pay any cash into. The bank that we use wrote to us recently and told us that we would be charged for all cash and cheque transactions from now on, so the switch to Clubmate came at exactly the right time. Yet again, Clubmate has saved us money because we now only deal with membership tariffs online. Many banks have charges like this, so it’s another cost that can be avoided by using Clubmate.
As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to rear its head in unpredictable ways and with no definite end in sight, the ‘risk’ of handling cheques and cash, going into town, visiting banks and getting membership cards and newsletters printed would have been a logistical nightmare!
In fact, we almost didn’t get cards printed at all at the beginning of the pandemic since everything was shut due to restrictions. With online memberships from Clubmate, all of these risks can be avoided, we can remain unaffected by any further Covid-19 restrictions and we can continue to keep our members and volunteers safe.
The Clubmate team are always friendly, easy to contact, helpful and respond quickly to any queries we may have. It’s great to work with a company that actually understands the angling community and it’s clear the system has been designed with anglers in mind.
Would we recommend Clubmate?
It’s helped us save money, it’s saved us hours of time on our admin and it’ll be so simple to hand over to future volunteers because each person gets their own login – which means no more passing around email addresses and passwords.
I’ve already recommended Clubmate to another angling club that has since signed up. When a system solves so many problems faced by so many angling clubs, it’s hard not to spread the word!
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
CLUB NAME
Horsham & District Angling Association
CLUB MEMBERS
400+ members
CLUB WATERS
4 lakes, 4 ponds and a 2 mile stretch of the River Arun
MAIN CONTACTS
Ian Petch
WEBSITE
KEY CHALLENGES
Club admin was too labour-intensive
Membership information was written out by hand
High printing and postage costs
No ability for anglers to pay online
Interested in becoming a member of HDAA?
Memberships are sold out for the current season. Visit our website to join our waiting list for next season.