Royal Forest of Dean Angling Club

Prevention of members sharing memberships, improved communications between committee & members, Bailiffs can verify anglers more efficiently on the bank, significantly reduced costs.

The Royal Forest of Dean Angling Club (RFODAC) has been in existence for over 60 years and aims to provide anglers with quality angling within the Forest of Dean. Our waters are all lakes and pools within the Forest of Dean, ranging in size from Steam Mills of some five acres to Plump Hill, a small water ideal for a few hours of Silver Fishing.

RFODAC aims to cater for anglers of all skill levels and preferences, from the match angler to specimen hunter, “bivvy boy” to the pleasure angler and families.

Everything – from memberships and payments to overall organisation – was paper and cash-based. Basically, an administrative nightmare. We were having issues with the fraudulent sharing of memberships and day tickets, so we were losing out on revenue that could’ve been used to invest in the club. 

Most of our members didn’t realise how many hours the committee devoted to membership processing. It’s unbelievably time-consuming; deciphering often unintelligible handwriting, collating information, printing and laminating cards, writing envelopes, postage, etc. It takes time that we’d rather be spending with our families (or fishing!)

ID Cards were a challenge too. They would get lost, copied, shared and loaned amongst members. It was frustrating and downright unfair to the honest members who respect the club’s rules on sharing memberships. 

Then there are payments. We would collect and count the cash, travel to the bank to deposit it and manually stay on top of balance changes. Plus, most high street bank branches have closed which only added to our frustrations.

It was all very stone-aged and it was time for us to move on to a more modern solution.

We heard about Clubmate through recommendations from local clubs, so we didn’t look at any other online club management solutions. The demo was great and we were impressed by how one software could solve so many of the challenges we’ve been facing. 

One reservation we had was the belief that older members of the club would find it too hard to buy memberships online. This fear caused huge concern to the committee. However, I felt so strongly that Clubmate was the way to go that I pushed hard for us to sign up. Lo and behold, the “mass walk-out” of long-standing older members we were worried about never happened!