Clubmate - Running a fishing club just got easier

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Frome & District Angling Association

Customer Story

KEY BENEFITS

Tripled their membership base, increased revenue by 300% and moved the club into the 21st century.

Frome & District Angling Association - Our Story

Established in 1931, our association used to run matches for hundreds on the River Frome. Today, we offer affordable angling and the opportunity for our members to enjoy the superb local rivers and still waters. Members can go fly fishing for trout, river coarse fishing and fish in our peaceful still waters.

Our fishing club needed to be dragged into the 21st century.

Our club had been lacking in organisation for some years. We had no database of members and no way to communicate with them. As you can imagine, it was an ordeal to keep track of who’s paid for their memberships, collecting the money and keeping our bookings in order without having some sort of database for that information.

We didn’t have one centralised place that a possible member could visit and get all the information they wanted to know about Frome Angling Association. Things like membership prices, location, types of fishing available and so on.

It was clear that we needed to start growing our memberships beyond the traditional methods to drive some revenue. The best way for us to do that was by having a Frome Angling Association website that gave visitors all of the information they needed, followed by a way for them to join online in a way that was fast and simple. 

The main objective was to find a solution that would drag the club into the twenty-first century and help us to get more members. Without making a change, we were at risk of using all of our reserves – at which point the club would cease to exist.

Clubmate has transformed the way we operate.

When we heard about Clubmate, we quickly realised that it would be the perfect solution for us.

What attracted us to Clubmate initially was their websites for fishing clubs. We didn’t need a hugely expensive site with all the bells and whistles – just something that looked clean, digestible and had the functionality of selling memberships online.

Sure enough, Clubmate was able to give us a website that showcased our fantastic association and helped us to sell our memberships online. Perhaps the biggest bonus was that it was incredibly affordable!

After the websites caught our attention, we realised the Clubmate software would take things one step further. We quickly had an end-to-end system that managed our club – from marketing to prospective members through to the operational side of things. Implementing Clubmate to manage the back-office tasks such as managing members and payments meant that within weeks, we had a solution that was easy for our team to learn and use day-to-day.

Our figures have drastically improved.

Since getting started with Clubmate, new memberships have been rolling in: our membership base has more than tripled and we’ve sold a number of extra day tickets. We put our Exchange Tickets online in October 2020, and in the two months that followed, we’ve had 29 tickets booked. It might not sound like a lot but in the last five years, none of our members had used our Exchange Tickets!

We’ve now been able to adopt twelve-month memberships from the date of joining which has kept our membership base growing throughout the year. We’ve also set up “auto-renewal” for our memberships, and we’re excited to see the difference it makes when renewals season arrives.

Having the online solution running alongside our tackle shop sales has made sure that we’re still catering to the different ways that our members like to pay. The fact that Clubmate helps organise the tackle shop sales, as well as online sales, has made our lives so much easier.

Clubmate has also given us the ability to stay in contact with our members through email, so it’s helped us to build a sense of community among our members and keep them engaged.

Perhaps the biggest and most impressive change we’ve experienced is the club going from making a loss last season to generating a significant surplus in revenue – and that’s only since launching with Clubmate about ten months ago. It’s safe to say that getting started with them has been the best decision we’ve made.

Just do it.

There were no obstacles when deciding to introduce Clubmate. Our committee was all for moving the club forward, so it was really a no-brainer.

I’ve already been recommending Clubmate to many other fishing clubs. When systems like this exist, there’s no excuse for clubs to be using administrative systems from the 1950s. If you’re considering getting started with Clubmate, just do it!

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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

Frome & District Angling Association

CLUB MEMBERS

290+ members

CLUB WATERS

7 x Waters

MAIN CONTACTS

Martin Blain

WEBSITE

www.fadaa.uk

KEY CHALLENGES

Declining membership

Anglers didn’t know the club existed

Paper based, laborious admin

No member database

Running at a loss

Interested in becoming a member of FADAA?

Membership is now open.

If you live in or around the Frome area and would like to join our friendly club, click the button below to visit our website and sign up.