Warminster & District Angling Club

Spending less time on admin, increased membership growth, a new website to help promote the club.

Warminster & District Angling Club was formed nearly sixty years ago in 1961. We currently have over a thousand members and operate as a not-for-profit amateur sports club – our mission is to encourage youngsters and people of all abilities to enjoy fishing. Members can also enjoy their fishing at many of our neighbouring clubs with our exchange ticket program.

The club has eight waters: Crockerton Lake, Eden Vale, two lakes at Witham Friary, Berkley lake, two lakes at White Post, Cara’s Lake, the Limpley Stoke fishery on the Bristol Avon and a beautiful stretch of the River Frome at Rode. We offer fantastic fishing for all anglers whether you’re a carp angler after the silverfish and tench, or those that might want to go for some of the predatory species.

Before Clubmate, staying on top of our admin was incredibly time-consuming. The only way for members to join was through cash payments via the Club Shop, which was losing business for the shop proprietor due to spending too much time on the joining process; filling out and organising application forms etc. Joining in the traditional way was proving to be a lot of hassle for our members.

I acted as the club secretary, so it was up to me to collect the paperwork and transfer the member information onto spreadsheets. This was a monotonous task and took up a lot of my time, which was especially frustrating since I already had enough to do! Our members would have to travel to the shop if they wanted to go night fishing or collect a ticket for the club’s Ticket Exchange. Given the current circumstances with the COVID-19 pandemic, we wanted to give our members other options to join and renew that didn’t involve making unnecessary journeys.

I recognised that we needed to use technology and the internet to make things easier and join the 21st century. The amount of time I was spending on admin was getting out of control and I knew there must’ve been a way to make things simpler and more efficient for our members. In doing so, I’d be able to spend my time concentrating on fishing along with other projects, not admin.

Clubmate even offered websites for fishing clubs, which also captured our interest. Our existing website (in my opinion) was useless, which tends to be typical of so many clubs in the angling community. We wanted our website to be the go-to place for members or prospects looking to join should they have any questions about Warminster & District Angling Club. 

Perhaps the biggest reason we decided to get started with Clubmate was the fact that they’ve kept it simple. It’s important to remember that the majority of people running a fishing club are of an age group where computers and software systems are a little alien to them which can knock their confidence, and so they end up sticking to the manual system they’re familiar with. We were one of them, but after speaking to Owen and seeing him demonstrate how easy the system is to follow it became a necessity to sign up.