Lanhydrock Angling Association

Securing the club’s future, ability to accept membership payments online, allowed the club to go paperless, offered a risk-free option of supplying and selling branded club clothing.

Lanhydrock Angling Association has nearly 2 miles of double bank fishing for Salmon, Sea Trout and Brown Trout on the River Fowey, in the beautiful grounds of the National Trust Estate of Lanhydrock.

We have annual membership and offer self-service day and week tickets.

At the end of 2020 the future of Lanhydrock Angling Association was in the balance; the National Trust were no longer in a position to process members cheques and there were insufficient staff to manage catch returns, AGMs and minutes of meetings.  There were two choices; lease the fishing to another club, or the preferable option to start a new club from within the existing membership and committee.

Club officers were appointed and the committee rose to the challenge – with just one caveat – that the club be easier to manage.  But how?

Because we didn’t have a dedicated person responsible for these tasks, there was an awful lot of work for me to take care of. There were mountains of paperwork and because there was no other way of collecting payments, we relied on posted cheques and stamped address envelopes. I mean, who even has a chequebook anymore?!

I told myself I would only take an Officer role at the club if there were online payments and paperless, so those were the two biggest pain points. If we wanted the club to grow, we needed a more efficient way of collecting payments and organising memberships so that we weren’t spending all of our time snowed under with paperwork.

We were keen to offer club clothing for our members and initially, we didn’t think Clubmate could facilitate something like that – we assumed that would be separate from our club management. But after mentioning we wanted to sell merchandise, they gave us a solution for that too. The only thing that made me hesitate was whether we could provide a Parking Permit with the Memberships sold, but Clubmate soon showed us how it was possible.

I would definitely recommend Clubmate. It takes away all the painful parts of being a Membership Secretary and gives us the power to be a modern, up-to-date fishing club: selling memberships online, being paperless and offering secure online payments.

Don’t hesitate to contact the Clubmate Team with an enquiry. Even if you think the way you run your club or the members you have won’t work with an online system, the team will demonstrate how it can support your club and how it can fit your memberships and club structure. Speak to them today, you won’t regret it.