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Exeter & District Angling Association

KEY BENEFITS

Provided with an effective way to manage members, generated extra revenue, increased membership numbers & day ticket sales.

Exeter & District Angling Association - Our Story

The EDAA now controls over 26 miles of fishing in and around the Exeter area, covering canals, ponds and rivers. The Association aims to provide low-cost, varied fishing for local anglers. 

For the specimen pike and carp angler, there is the Exeter Ship Canal, with pike in excess of 30lb and carp to 40lb plus, whilst not an easy water, the rewards can be great for the dedicated specialist angler. As a point of historical Interest, the 6-mile long canal was constructed in 1563 and the first ship canal to be built in Britain.

The match fishing side of the Association is a buoyant one, with regular open matches held year-round. In addition, the Association has an active inter-association section with matches being held on our, and neighbouring clubs waters in Devon and Somerset.

Before Clubmate, our adult membership numbers were declining.

I was co-opted onto EDAA’s committee to assist with bailiffing issues and as a link to the Angling Trust. Soon after joining the committee, I noticed that the junior memberships were growing steadily thanks to the Learn to Fish Open Days (made possible by the Angling Trust, the club president and other trained coaches), whilst the adult membership base was steadily declining. The club was actively looking for ways to save money rather than thinking about ways to grow the adult membership base.

Like many other clubs, we had an ageing committee that suffered from a change in people’s lifestyles in which they were moving on from angling or retiring from serving on the committee. This meant that it became difficult to run the club efficiently; membership details were kept in different places and we didn’t have a means of contacting members directly to follow up on things like missed payments or permit information.

Not only did the club operations need improving, but we also needed to give our members easy access to buy a membership or a day permit whenever they wanted as opposed to being limited to the opening hours of the local tackle shops.

Why we chose clubmate.

Through the Angling Trust, I heard about another club that used Clubmate. I soon found out that they offered a discount to angling clubs affiliated with the Angling Trust, which prompted me to reach out to them.

To begin with, the main goal for us was to make sure that we knew who our members were. Once we had streamlined our operations, we could begin to focus on making fishing easy and accessible for our members. This involved making sure the member data we had was up to date, slowly switching to online payments and getting used to digitally communicating with our members regularly. 

Thankfully, Clubmate is an end-to-end solution that allowed us to address all of our pain points and even helped us to create a brand new club website that new members could use to join online.

Clubmate has transformed the way EDAA operates.

Our members can pay for their memberships and day permits online through the Clubmate App, meaning we no longer have to handle cash at the club. Plus, members can join and renew at the touch of the button from anywhere at any time – no more waiting for tackle shops to open! 

When members pay online, our admin work is reduced by 90% as Clubmate does it all for us. It’s also easier for the next generation of club members to join, which is highlighted by the considerable increase in members joining this way.

Our new website meant that new members could find us easier and we finally had a place to share the great work we’ve been doing with the Angling Trust. Members can now get involved with the website directly by uploading their own photos to our gallery, which is a fantastic feature.

A lot of the older members that like to pay via tackle shops are still able to do so because we can reconcile it in the Clubmate system so that all of the information stays in one place. Even though we want to encourage more people to pay online, we’re not alienating the small portion of members that would prefer not to.

The support we’ve received from Clubmate has been fantastic, their web chat within the application has helped us answer our own questions on a number of occasions and their team is always available over the phone too. We’re still getting to grips with the system as there are so many great features, but we can already tell that the software is going to continue to be a massive help for us.

Would we recommend Clubmate?

We would recommend Clubmate to any fishing club that needs a reliable way to manage its members, but I’d recommend it even more so for clubs that are struggling to collect payments or struggling to attract new members. It might seem like a big change for those that aren’t tech-savvy but when you look at all the benefits, it’s a no-brainer. 

Every membership secretary and treasurer needs Clubmate!

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If you’d like to learn more about Clubmate and how it could benefit your fishing club, please get in touch (we don’t bite!):

hello@clubmate.co.uk

0333 987 4677

CLUB NAME

Exeter & District Angling Association

CLUB MEMBERS

800+ members

CLUB WATERS

26 miles of fishing in and around the Exeter area, covering canals, ponds and rivers.

MAIN CONTACTS

Phil Hoult

WEBSITE

Click here

KEY CHALLENGES

Declining membership numbers

Inefficient communication tools

Needed to offer a modernised joining process to attract younger members

Over-reliant on tackle shop sales

No centralised member database

Interested in becoming a member of EDAA?

Exeter & District Angling Association is pleased to offer a variety of membership categories. Click the button below to visit our website and sign up.