The Wandle Piscators

Streamlined the joining process, able to track online and offline payments from one place, modernised the club, made member communications more efficient.

The Wandle Piscators are committed to helping the historic River Wandle come back to life after centuries of pollution and abuse. Membership to fish on our waters is open to anyone with an interest in fishing and restoring the River Wandle to full health and biodiversity.

Members benefit from opportunities to meet and fish with lots of other like-minded anglers, both in South London and further afield, along with members-only fishing trips, fly-tying classes, river walks and so much more.

Running the club before Clubmate was a bit of a nightmare. We’d given the club a reboot and we needed to modernise the management side of things so that we could grow the club. We started off using an Excel spreadsheet for membership records, but we had to create membership cards Blue-Peter style: by hand. Communication was an issue too, as we had no way of staying in touch with our members. If we needed to share details for an event or club updates, we pretty much relied on word of mouth to get the message around.

We needed an automated system to manage memberships and issue cards to members, communication tools and online payments; but we still wanted to have the option of using cash or cheques because not everyone is used to the internet. Being inclusive is very important to us.

To be honest, we didn’t look at any other solutions because Clubmate has the backing of the Angling Trust which was good enough for us. We also really liked the fact that their software is designed specifically for angling clubs and is run by fellow anglers, so we were confident Clubmate would know what we needed. 

The only thing that I was slightly worried about was our lack of computer skills, but if we wanted to modernise the club, it’s a learning curve we’d need to embark on.