Five ways club management software can help your club during a crisis (and beyond)

Club management software can help during a crisis

Unfortunately, there are some situations that we just can’t predict – a global pandemic being one of them. Up and down the country, clubs are concerned about their financial health and future. It’s in times like these that you rely on your systems in place to help ride the storm.

If you don’t have club management software, read on to see how moving to one can help your club in a crisis, and beyond.

Keep the money coming in

Without money, your club can’t survive, so here are a few factors to consider on the financial side of things (all of them may not apply to you).

1. Standing orders

If your members (or their parents) pay their fees by monthly standing order, the amount and day on which they pay is fixed and can only be amended by them. In difficult times, you may decide to reduce your fees or defer payments, but you can’t do this without people creating a new standing order, which isn’t their priority, considering all things else. If you did manage to convince your members to make the change, they’ll need to change this back to the original payment amount, once things are back to normal.

If members cancel their standing orders, or their payment fails, you won’t know until you’re manually reconciling payments next month. The delay of that information is bad news for forward financial planning.

With club management software, like LoveAdmin, you’re in full control. You can change the amount you want to collect – down (or up!), without members having to take action. If a member cancels their recurring payment (which can be made via Direct Debit or PayPal), the system alerts you immediately. In the event you want to defer payments for a few weeks, that can be done within a few clicks.

2. Cash, cheques, and bank transfers for seasonal or termly fees

Taking payments by cash, cheques or bank transfers means that your cash flow stops when your club is not open for business. It’s worth considering recalculating your fees to be collected monthly rather than in lump sums. For example, if you’re charging for 3 terms across the year at a total cost of £300, divide that by 12 and charge £25 per month. Not only is this more affordable for members, but also improves cash flow in quieter weeks, like the summer holidays or Christmas.

The benefit of members paying monthly, via LoveAdmin, is that you can adjust payment amounts when necessary and you don’t have regular spikes in admin each time you request and receive payments. The system does it all for you as well as giving you forecasted income data to help plan your finances.

3. Donations

If you decide to stop charging members but still need to generate income to keep your club alive, then you need to set up a means for people to donate. There are plenty of online platforms that can facilitate this but none of them will be connected to your membership database or spreadsheet file unless of course, you’re using a system like LoveAdmin.

LoveAdmin’s built-in fundraising tool lets you create donation appeals for one-off or regular payments. You can suggest an amount to be donated or simply allow members to donate what they like.

Note: If you’re a registered charity or CASC, you can collect gift aid information too.

4. Communicate quickly and easily

Communication at the best of times is key, let alone when the daily running of your club comes to a halt. If you don’t have an effective system in place, chances are you’re copying and pasting emails into Outlook or Gmail. When you hit send, you have no idea if members have received or opened emails.

With LoveAdmin’s group email tool, you can create personalised emails and send these to selected groups of members from your database. What’s even handier is that you can see what emails were delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, blocked or reported as spam.

5. Deliver exclusive online content

If your club closes (like you’re experiencing now) or your members can’t get to you, what then? How do you keep them engaged and deliver value for the fees they pay? In this scenario, digital content is king but what’s the best way to provide it? Of course, there’s Facebook, YouTube, and a plethora of other social media platforms but you need to make your content exclusive. Not to forget, it’s difficult to manage these platforms when they’re disconnected from the place you use to store member and payment information.

Here’s where LoveAdmin’s digital content tools come into play. You can publish content directly to your members via the LoveAdmin, LoveGymnastics or LoveSport mobile apps. Whether it’s videos, images, text or a bespoke home training programme that your members can follow and record their practice for, we’ve got it covered. And the great thing is that you can restrict who sees the content to only those that continue to pay and support your club.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve covered in detail how gymnastics clubs can use LoveAdmin to deliver online content and classes to their members during the coronavirus crisis.

That brings us to the end of the list of the different ways that club management software can help your club in turbulent times. If you don’t have a system in place, you won’t find a better time than now to start investigating the benefits that club software can bring to your club. For a full list of features and benefits, click here and to find out more, book a free no-obligation consultation today.