Godalming Angling Society
Customer Story
KEY BENEFITS
Automated the member sign-up and renewal process, streamlined ID Card printing, saved around 40 hours of time usually spent on admin per week.
Godalming Angling Society - Our Story
Godalming Angling Society was originally founded in 1881 with around 25 members – fishing Broadwater and the river Wey and Godalming Navigation. Since then, we have grown steadily over the years and now have a membership of over 1800, and expanded to include many more waters for our members to fish.
Our membership secretary retired.
Before signing up to Clubmate, we had an excellent membership secretary with a strong IT background who set up a bespoke membership system for us. It worked well and we loved the level of control it gave us, as well as the ability to be reactive to new enquiries. It served us well until the membership secretary retired.
The system he built for us was fully functional but it relied on a lot of data entry and a fair bit of mail-merging for postal membership applications. For 2,000 members, that’s a lot of work. Our now-retired membership secretary estimated he spent around 40 hours per week at peak renewal time on membership processing.
As you can imagine, there was no appetite for this level of commitment among the remaining committee. That meant we needed an automated solution to manage the data entry.
Why we chose Clubmate.
We had looked into Clubmate a few years ago as it was recommended by the Angling Trust, but we needed more functionality than the software offered at that time. Things like being able to issue night permits, for example. Once we revisited Clubmate more recently, they’d added so many new features and so we felt more confident that it’d meet our requirements.
Members are now in control of their own data entry.
As an administrator, I like how the membership plans can be set up easily and how we’re able to manage complimentary permits in particular. The Bailiff App is great and has made membership verification much easier on the waters with a mobile phone signal. We have one water in particular where there is no signal, but we’re still able to export a list of members from the system and check them off ourselves.
The biggest improvement by far is the fact that members can sign up and renew using Clubmate; they essentially do their own data entry so that the club doesn’t have to. As a bonus, it makes our members feel more in control of their angling experience with us. Happiness is when members don’t need to contact me because it has all worked as it should!
Clubmate even handles card printing and the automation means that the system effectively runs itself. It takes a lot of the data entry load off the committee which allows them to focus on more important tasks. Overall, the automation Clubmate offers has saved us so many hours of time on our admin and we’re looking forward to seeing how the software progresses in the future.
Would we recommend Clubmate?
Yes, I think Clubmate is a great way forward especially for bigger angling societies. We were pleasantly surprised at how many members got to grips with using the system to manage their angling memberships. It hasn’t excluded people as you might fear.
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!):
0333 987 4677
or click Book a Demo, leave your details and we’ll call you!
CLUB NAME
Godalming Angling Society
CLUB WATERS
Bramley, Broadwater Wood Lake, Busbridge, Johnsons, Marsh Farm, River Wey, Winkworth
MAIN CONTACTS
David Ewing
WEBSITE
KEY CHALLENGES
Dependent on one individual to input data into a custom management system
Manual methods of membership processing
Needed an efficient way to manage more than 1,800 memberships
Interested in becoming a member of Godalming Angling Society?
Register online by clicking the button below.