Lanhydrock Angling Association

KEY BENEFITS

Securing the club’s future, ability to accept membership payments online, allowed the club to go paperless, offered a risk-free option of supplying and selling branded club clothing.

Lanhydrock Angling Association - Our Story

Lanhydrock Angling Association has nearly 2 miles of double bank fishing for Salmon, Sea Trout and Brown Trout on the River Fowey, in the beautiful grounds of the National Trust Estate of Lanhydrock.

We have annual membership and offer self-service day and week tickets.

We were keen to become paperless.

At the end of 2020 the future of Lanhydrock Angling Association was in the balance; the National Trust were no longer in a position to process members cheques and there were insufficient staff to manage catch returns, AGMs and minutes of meetings.  There were two choices; lease the fishing to another club, or the preferable option to start a new club from within the existing membership and committee.

Club officers were appointed and the committee rose to the challenge – with just one caveat – that the club be easier to manage.  But how?

Because we didn’t have a dedicated person responsible for these tasks, there was an awful lot of work for me to take care of. There were mountains of paperwork and because there was no other way of collecting payments, we relied on posted cheques and stamped address envelopes. I mean, who even has a chequebook anymore?!

I told myself I would only take an Officer role at the club if there were online payments and paperless, so those were the two biggest pain points. If we wanted the club to grow, we needed a more efficient way of collecting payments and organising memberships so that we weren’t spending all of our time snowed under with paperwork.

Why we chose Clubmate.

I found Clubmate after a bit of research and I gave them a call right away. The Clubmate Team were incredibly helpful from the initial enquiry and confirmed that Clubmate offered the solution we needed for more efficient club management and online payments. 

We were keen to offer club clothing for our members and initially, we didn’t think Clubmate could facilitate something like that – we assumed that would be separate from our club management. But after mentioning we wanted to sell merchandise, they gave us a solution for that too. The only thing that made me hesitate was whether we could provide a Parking Permit with the Memberships sold, but Clubmate soon showed us how it was possible.

The solution we were looking for.

The software is very intuitive and the support staff are always readily available if we need assistance. I’ve been particularly impressed by the knowledge base – there’s a helpful article for every possible question and a walkthrough for each part of the system, so I can often find answers to my questions without needing to contact the support team.

Clubmate also helped us start selling our own Lanhydrock Angling Association merchandise. All we had to do was provide them with our logo and choose the types of clothing we wanted to sell. They took care of the embroidery and we don’t have to worry about storing stock onsite – Clubmate takes care of it all for us, and members are able to place orders for club clothing online using our dedicated club branded store.

Our members had no problem getting to grips with the site. Many of them are also members of other fishing clubs in the region and have contacted me to ask if I know whether other clubs will be transferring to Clubmate in the future. They love the ease of use compared to the old fashioned method of posting cheques and hand-written membership cards. They feel empowered to manage their memberships online in their own time – and the bonus is that it’s less work for us!

Would we recommend Clubmate?

I would definitely recommend Clubmate. It takes away all the painful parts of being a Membership Secretary and gives us the power to be a modern, up-to-date fishing club: selling memberships online, being paperless and offering secure online payments.

Don’t hesitate to contact the Clubmate Team with an enquiry. Even if you think the way you run your club or the members you have won’t work with an online system, the team will demonstrate how it can support your club and how it can fit your memberships and club structure. Speak to them today, you won’t regret 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

Lanhydrock Angling Association

CLUB MEMBERS

>100 members

CLUB WATERS

Double-bank fishing on the River Fowey

MAIN CONTACTS

Richard Grieve

KEY CHALLENGES

Taking over admin from The National Trust

Unable to offer online payments

Wanted to go paperless

No way of selling club merchandise

Interested in becoming a member of Lanhydrock AA?

Our annual membership is currently full for the year, but we are still offering Day & Week tickets.