Stanley & District Angling Club

Simplified membership process for volunteers and members, allowed members to pay conveniently online, supplied and shipped professional Photo ID cards directly to the member, saved heaps of time on admin, enabled checking of tickets and membership on the bank.

Stanley & District Angling Club is a small, friendly mixed-coarse fishing club based in County Durham. Our water is Greencroft Pond and has 22 well-built platforms to fish from, with parking close by. Species include carp (common, mirror, crucian, brown goldfish) roach, rudd, skimmer, bream, tench, chubb and gudgeon. We offer an inclusive angling experience, with easy access to the front pegs and a triple-size dedicated peg for those with disabilities.

Joining new members, printing ID cards and even general club management were all done manually with no help of a software system – not even a spreadsheet.

Photo ID cards were a necessity for us because we wanted to stop people from sharing their membership with non-members. We couldn’t find a supplier to take care of this for us, so we took on the work ourselves. However, we quickly realised that it was going to be a bigger job than we had anticipated, and soon we were spending lots of our personal time getting the cards printed and distributed. 

We had to ask new joiners to provide a passport-style photograph with their membership form, which we soon learned isn’t something that people tend to have on hand anymore. Combine that headache with the added paperwork of sending out/receiving membership forms, managing the club efficiently felt like an impossible task.

To add to this, the only payment options we offered were cash and cheque – with most members opting for cash. Given the COVID-19 restrictions at the time, collecting cash wasn’t going to be sustainable for us and it’s not very secure either. We wanted to give our members other ways to pay that were safe and didn’t involve handling cash regularly.

The main thing that stood out to us was how simple the system was. It’s straightforward and easy to pick up on, even for those who aren’t tech-savvy. Clubmate allowed us to take our whole joining process online, meaning no more trawling through paperwork or handling cash and receiving cheques in the post.

After speaking to the Clubmate team, we learned that they could also help us with our Photo ID cards. Keeping everything in one place under one system was a bonus and a large part of the reason we decided to get started.

Another huge benefit is that the system is online and cloud-based, so we can log into Clubmate on the bankside and check members’ details or day ticket bookings on the spot – which was the icing on the cake!