Do your Board members feel like the pool is a full-time job? Especially your treasurer and your membership chair? If you’re still using snail mail to send paper invoices to your members, your poor treasurer and membership chair probably do have a second full-time job–at least in the spring when most clubs collect dues. If your club has 250 member families,…

In today’s world, consumers pretty much expect every business or organization to have an app they can download to their phone. Given the choice between viewing a mobile web page and an app, most people will choose the app. Apps are sleeker, more powerful, and designed to be viewed on a phone. Web pages (even ones optimized for mobile viewing)…

Undoubtedly your pool has a policy for guests. Almost every pool requires members to pay for their guests. Usually, it’s a nominal fee – between $3-5. So why do so many people neglect to actually pay when they bring guests? No one is enforcing the policy. If members are still signing in with a paper book, it’s too easy to simply not…

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of hiring a gate attendant for your club for the weekends. Is there a case to be made for spending money on a paid gate attendant position at your club? Pros: An actual person manning the gate. This would mean 100% stop-loss for gate crashers. Train your members to always sign…

Do your lifeguards and board members know what steps to take when there’s poop in the pool? It’s not all that complicated, but someone needs to know what to do. Let’s face it, those of us that are parents know that even the best-laid plans sometimes backfire. Sometimes that perfect diapering fails to contain the mess. You think you’ve put on…

RWI = recreational water illness A fun topic, I know. But there’s a chance you’ll have to deal with this at least once at your pool this summer. RWIs include a variety of infections including gastrointestinal, skin, ear, respiratory, eye, and wound, but the most common RWI for pools is diarrhea. The CDC has some good materials about how chlorine…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sponsors a Healthy and Safe Swimming Week, which is happening May 20-26 this year. Why not use that week to promote healthy and safe swimming practices to your members? Memorial Day falls on May 27th this year, which means most pools will be opening sometime during the week of May 20th –…

Have you ever tried to text your friend to see if they’re at the pool? But you don’t hear back because they’re in the pool? I don’t know about you, but I use the Find My Friends app on my phone only for my family members.I know the name says Find My Friends, but I don’t actually share my location with…

Movie night at the pool is not the easiest event you’ll pull off all summer, but it’s such a great memory for the kids that it’s totally worth the upfront time to get it all put together. This is the kind of event your members will remember all year long and look forward to from year to year. What you’ll…

Do your members sign a waiver before each pool season? It goes without saying that your club should have insurance. It also goes without saying that any third-party lifeguarding company you hire should be a reputable company with insurance of its own. Neighborhood pools are not public pools, so they are not required to follow the same rules as public…

We’ve talked about this on the Pool Dues blog before, but it’s worth talking about again. Your club needs various membership levels, and you need to have a clearly-defined membership policy. We’ve seen some clubs with a dozen different membership options – pool only, pool only for seniors, tennis only, club access for only half the summer, full access for families…

In a previous post, we talked about how to advertise your club on Facebook. Today we’re gonna talk about why spring is the best time to advertise on Facebook. People start thinking about joining a pool when the weather starts to warm up. If you use Facebook to advertise to a targeted (read: local) audience, people will visit your club’s…

Facebook is a great way to advertise your club to a targeted audience, and now is the perfect time to do it! Your club probably already has a Facebook page, so why not put it to use to get new members? Your club’s Facebook page should be the public face of your club – the place where non-members can see…

Want an awesome and shiny new sign for your tennis courts? With every Pool Dues website that includes tennis courts, we’ll send you a free, brand new sign for your tennis courts. Our tennis reservation signs are UV weather resistant, metal, and reflective. They’re a great way to get your members to start using the Pool Dues reservation grid. Place…

The newest update of the Pool Dues app now allows for tennis reservations directly in the app. Members can reserve a court directly from their phone, making it even easier to get court time for your club’s tennis players. Let’s look at the new functionality. Directly from the home screen of the Pool Dues app, members can toggle on for…

If you haven’t read our blog about privacy issues and the Member Directory, head over to this blog article to check it out. It’s important that your members are aware of the privacy issues related to having their information in an online member directory, whether it’s a neighborhood pool or any other organization. With that said, you do want your…

With a Pool Dues website, you get a user-friendly built-in Member Directory. We’ve made it super easy for your members to look up other members by lots of different categories like babysitters, pet sitters, women’s interests, men’s interests, sports, and a whole host of other filters. Want to find a local teen to help you move furniture? Use the Pool…

This summer, keep the bees away from your pool and keep everyone happy! It seems like as the pool season goes on, the bee problem gets worse and worse. Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s the increasingly overflowing trash cans. Maybe it’s the increase in food brought to the pool. Actually, the bee problem is worse at the end of the pool…

Does your club need new playground equipment? Or updated tennis scoreboards? What about a kegerator? These are types of things that some of your members want but not all members want. So why not use crowdfunding to pay for items that only a portion of your members will use? If the whole club isn’t going to use an item, the whole club shouldn’t…

Is your club looking to increase membership? One great but overlooked way to reach out to prospective members is a traditional mail campaign. But forget the days driving to every house and stuffing a handmade flyer into each mailbox. And forget about paying to print out thousands of flyers and send them to every single house in a 5-mile radius.…

Sponsorships are a great way to increase revenue for your club. But how do you go about getting new sponsors? Or convincing your current sponsors to stay on for another year? Come prepared with numbers – Make sure you know how many members your club has and how many eyes will be on the sponsor’s logo or ad each week.…

Do you still have some piece of paper from 15 years ago hanging on your cork board with the names and phone numbers of your neighbors? I know I do. Literally, I have a piece of paper hanging in my laundry room with the names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of everyone living on my street 15 years ago. Half…

Stop Wasting Time Trying to Manage Your Club Income Here’s what we see in clubs all the time: Treasurer emails every single member in January telling them to pay their annual membership dues. Treasurer trudges to the post office box every few days looking for checks that have been mailed in. Treasurer waits weeks while a few checks trickle in…

Recurring Billing is a great way to get your current members to pay early and completely automate your club’s bookkeeping. Imagine if 95% of your club simply signed up for an automatic payment plan. This could save your volunteer Treasurer days worth of work!  Get Your Members to Pay Early What’s better than having your members pay online? Having them…

It’s January, boards are getting back together and that means it’s almost invoicing time. Don’t give up an afternoon trying to email everyone the old fashioned way. Let the Pool Dues invoicing bot save you from giving up a weekend!

Does your club still paper invoice people and wait for checks to be mailed to your P.O. box? Is your dues payment date set sometime in spring? Many pools set their payment due date some time in late winter or early spring – early enough to be well before the pool season begins but not early enough to do much…

Redesign and Update Your Club’s Website for the New Year In the span of just two short weeks, your old and outdated club website could be completely remade for 2019! Seriously, imagine going from this: to this:   When you come onboard with Pool Dues, the typical time frame from staging your club’s website to going live is two weeks.…

One of our newest pools, Neshannock Pool in New Castle, Pennsylvania, has seen an exciting uptick in earnings since switching to a Pool Dues website from their old and outdated website. Within 31 days of launching their Pool Dues website, the pool had over  $14,000 in online sales thanks to a winter promo email and the ability for members to…

Use Facebook effectively by creating both a Page and Group for your club. Then link the two!

Watch some video of our iPad kiosk in action running the Pool Dues Member Check In app.

Fortunately, more neighborhood pools and clubs are starting to take Paypal for their member dues. The problem now: your club is probably just jumping straight from a Buy Now link on your website to Paypal’s site. And as of June 2018, that problem gets worse….

Once your pool or club has decided to invest in an iPad and a secure locking kiosk case, you’ll just need to enable Kiosk Mode in the Member Check In app, then make sure members can’t mess around with the iPad.

You can now enter a special login (provided by us), to enable “Kiosk Mode”. This allows your neighborhood pool / tennis club to place an iPad at your front gate or desk, to allow members to quickly browse their name and check-in using their personal PIN code.

Let’s talk Summer Games! Spend a little social budget this year on ramping up the game collection.

Read how a pool pump breaking led to a fun week of inter-club mingling, and inspired the idea of a Sister Club Network that can amount to some serious revenue sharing among similarly prices neighborhood pools.

Not all swim and tennis clubs are at the front gate of a neighborhood. My neighborhood is HUGE, and technically it’s comprised of 5 subdivisions. If a family moves into the subdivision furthest from the club, they might not realize their interconnected neighborhood even has a pool. So can you take it upon yourself to help people find their way…

Read how a Pool Dues club raised money in a little over a week for their club’s kegerator, why the Board approved it, and how it will be funded in the future.

We got them signed up just in the nick of time for opening weekend!

The first of what will probably be many articles on what (I think) makes for a great pool social director.

Family membership, couples, singles, seniors? We’ll discuss which your pool / tennis club should offer

Short answer is you can’t, but keep reading, we’ve got a solution that will make any budget-saavvy Pool Board happy. And your members might not even notice the fees have been passed onto them.

What defines a “family” can be tricky these days. And at least once a year, someone will try to negotiate a discount for special circumstances. Save your Treasurer from haggling into a downward spiral with neighbors, and post the Board’s official policy TODAY!

Drop your out-dated application process, and treat your pool’s website like an actual shop. One where members can actually buy a membership online. Your pool is a business. Run it like one.