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, that’s 250 invoices you need to print out. 250 envelopes that need to be stuffed. 250 envelopes that need to be addressed. 250 stamps that need to be licked. Then, there are 250 individual checks that trickle into the post office box. That’s multiple trips to the post office and maybe 20 trips to the bank, assuming the treasurer holds on to multiple checks until it’s worth his or her while to make a trip to the bank. (Don’t even get me started on holding on to checks. When I write a check, I want it deposited immediately. I don’t want it held on to for weeks, making it come as a surprise when the money leaves my bank account. Honestly. It borders on rude to hold on to someone’s check for an extended period of time. But I digress…)

How about this instead: Your treasurer clicks a few buttons on the admin page of your Pool Dues website. That’s it.

Sure, there are all sorts of cool things your treasurer and membership director can do behind the scenes (check the links below), but the best thing about a Pool Dues site is that dues paying is taken care of with a few clicks! No paper invoices. No envelopes. No stamps. No trips to the mailbox. No checks. No trips to the bank. Not convinced? Check out some of the behind-the-scenes stuff for your treasuer and membership director.

Billing

Treasurer – Documentation

https://pooldues.com/membership-documentation/

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 sign your guests in. If your pool uses wrist bands, chances are the season starts out with everyone wearing them and gradually compliance tapers off as the season progresses. If you’re not enforcing the wristband policy, then there’s no way to distinguish guests from members, and it’s easy for people to bring guests without signing them in or paying for them.

Fees don’t have to be paid before entry. If you have a paper sign in book and require members to sign in their visitors, the assumption is that members will pay for their visitors at some later date. Which brings us to the next point:

There is no clearly defined method for payment. Are they simply billed at the end of the season for all the guests they brought? Are they supposed to keep the tally themselves and simply add the price on to their next year’s membership? Are they supposed to put cash in some box on the day of their visit? Are they supposed to pay online each visit? If you don’t make it easy for members to pay, they simply won’t pay.

Pool Dues is working on solutions to this problem.

Our check in app makes it easy for people to sign in guests. By using the Pool Dues Check In App in kiosk mode, members can check in themselves and add an icon saying they brought guests. The system will prompt members to pay for their guests via a PayPal link, and the “who’s here” tab on the app will show whether a member has paid for their guests or not.

Prepaid Guest Passes are coming! Probably the easiest way to get members to pay for their guests is to offer prepaid guest passes. There are a number of different options here, but the two most popular options are paying for a number of guest passes in advance and paying for the right to bring an unlimited number of guests for the season. In the first option, members can purchase a package deal (like 10 guest passes) in advance and use the passes over the course of the season. In the second option, members can purchase an unlimited guest plan. For a given price (like $50), members would be allowed to bring up to 3 guests (or however many your club chooses) each time they come to the pool during the season. Look for this new feature on PoolDues.com soon.

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 in and wear their wristbands. Members would still be required to sign in via the kiosk, and wristbands would still be required as well, but there would now be an actual person verifying that members check in and are wearing their wristbands. While this might seem like overkill, let’s remember that we’re only talking about the weekend. So this will train your members to actually sign in and wear their wristbands on the weekends, which will (presumably) translate to the weekdays.
• Increase revenue for guests. Whether it’s through pre-paid guest passes or cash taken at the gate, having an attendant at the front gate will ensure that guests are properly paid for.
• Oversight of snack shack. If your club has a snack shack where members can grab chips or cookies or a soda and pay for it in a cookie jar (as opposed to a manned snack stand with cooked food), a gate attendant can provide oversight. You could also implement snack shack credits, where kids can grab a snack and the gate guard can add it to a running tab for snacks.
• Extra hands to keep the facility tidy. A paid gate attendant can help the lifeguards and members keep the place clean and tidy. We’re not necessarily talking about having the gate attendant clean the toilets, just ensure that the garbage cans aren’t overflowing, there aren’t soda cans lying on the pool deck, and abandoned towels are put in the lost and found at the end of the day.

Cons: You’ll have to pay someone. But we think there’s a case to be made that this isn’t really a con at all. Let’s look at the numbers: You could pay a neighborhood teen minimum wage to sit at the front gate on weekends only. At a rate of $8.25 an hour, you’d be paying roughly $135 each weekend (8 hours on Saturday and Sunday). For a 12 week summer, that’s about $1,600 total. For the entire summer. Your club could probably swing this cost by simply enforcing payment for guests.

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?

1. 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. If a sponsor knows 200 people will see their ad every weekend at the pool, they’ll be more inclined to pay for a sponsorship than if you say to them, “ummmm… it seems like there are a lot of the people at the pool on Saturdays….”
   • For example, a gold level sponsorship is $500. If you’re pitching a real state agent, that price is merely a portion of selling one single house. With their gold-level sponsorship, 300 people will see their ad each weekend. Over the course of a year, all they have to do is capture 1 sale to make it worth their while.
2. Come prepared with more numbers – Do a little recon about the sponsor. How much is a pizza pie? How many would they need to sell to pay for the sponsorship? How much is a tooth cleaning? How many new clients would they need to acquire to pay for the sponsorship?
   • For example, a silver level sponsorship is $250. That’s 21 pizzas. With a link to their pizza shop on the pool’s check-in app and the pool’s website, 21 pizzas (especially if they deliver to the pool) is nothing. Easily worth the sponsorship price.
3. Know who the decision makers are – If you’re planning an email campaign to get new sponsors, make sure you’re contacting the right people. If you’re going to call or visit local businesses, make sure you’re talking to the decision maker.
   • For example, if you’re trying to get a dentist to sponsor your pool, contact the dentist, not the front desk staff. If you’re trying to get a pizza shop to sponsor the pool, contact
     the owner, not the delivery boy. If you’re trying to get a landscaping company to sponsor the pool, contactthe owner, not the guy who cuts your lawn.
4. Know your audience – You know your members better than we do. Are mosquitos a problem in your area? Get a mosquito spraying company to sponsor your pool. Do your members tend to cut their own grass or hire a landscaper? Maybe a landscaping company isn’t a great sponsor if none of your members are inclined to hire that type of company. Does your pool hosts lots of adult parties? Maybe target a local brewer who supplies kegs for your parties. Does your pool mostly sponsor kid-friendly parties? Maybe you skip the local brewer.
5. Let them know that their sponsorship is more than a banner at the pool – The days of a plastic banner hanging on the fence are gone. Sure, you may still choose to use the banner, but sponsorship on a Pool Dues site is so much more. Sponsors are shown on the Member Check-in app, and members can click on their logo to call them or visit their website.
6. Make sure your potential sponsors (and your current sponsors) know they can sign up online – You Pool Dues site allows sponsors to directly sign up on your website making it super easy for everyone involved.

As your club thinks about approaching potential sponsors, be ready with a sales pitch. We can’t tell you which type of businesses are best for your club, but here are some of the most common types of sponsors for neighborhood swim and tennis clubs:

• dentists
• orthodontists
• pizza places
• coffee shops
• real estate agents
• restaurants (especially ones that will deliver to the pool)
• local brewers or bars (especially ones that supply beer for your adult parties)
• mosquito sprayers
• landscapers
• vets
• tutoring companies

Stop Wasting Time Trying to Manage Your Club Income

Here’s what we see in clubs all the time:

1. Treasurer emails every single member in January telling them to pay their annual membership dues.

2. Treasurer trudges to the post office box every few days looking for checks that have been mailed in.

3. Treasurer waits weeks while a few checks trickle in here and there.

4. Treasurer waits until they have a dozen checks and then goes to the bank to deposit them.

5. Treasurer signs in to Quickbooks to log the different payments.

6. Treasurer repeats steps 2-5 over the course of the winter and early spring months.

7. Treasurer gets lazy and skips step 5.

8. Membership dues aren’t logged consistently, people have questions about how much money they owe, people sneak into the pool and play tennis even though they haven’t paid their membership dues. In short, membership dues are a mess by the time the pool opens in early summer!

Here’s a better way: Let Pool Dues do all the work.

Let’s look at those 8 points again with our system in place…

1. Treasurer emails every single member in January telling them to pay their annual membership dues.  Pool Dues sends out a mass invoice email ONLY to members that need to pay.

2. Treasurer trudges to the post office box every few days looking for checks that have been mailed in. People will pay with PayPal, thus no checks in the post office box.

3. Treasurer waits weeks while a few checks trickle in here and there. Members might still take their sweet time paying their dues, but at least the money trickles into PayPal rather than into the post office box. Though if those members want to keep reserving tennis courts or the clubhouse, they will pay on time.

4. Treasurer waits until they have a dozen checks and then goes to the bank to deposit them. No need to deposit anything!

5. Treasurer signs in to Quickbooks to log the different payments. Payments are logged in PayPal and they’re logged in the Pool Dues backend. Our proprietary system built specifically for neighborhood clubs will do all the work of organizing payments.

6. Treasurer repeats steps 2-5 over the course of the winter and early spring months. No need to repeat the steps, simply send another mass invoice and sit back.

7. Treasurer gets lazy and skips step 5. Treasurer can be lazy – Pool Dues has got your back.

8. Membership dues aren’t logged consistently, people have questions about how much money they owe, people sneak into the pool even though they haven’t paid their membership dues. In short, membership dues are a mess by the time the pool opens in early summer! Your check-in kiosk will only display the names of current members. Your tennis reservation system will only allow current members to make a court reservation. The Pool Dues backend has everything organized and ready for you by opening day to hand out wristbands or keyfobs.

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 pay online early! Why not set up a prize drawing to incentivize people to pay early. How about, “Sign up for Recurring Billing by Feb 5 and get put into our prize drawing for five free movie tickets!” Or, “Sign up for Recurring Billing by Jan 10 and we will waive Paypal’s processing fees!”

Keep up with Inflation

Let’s face it – at some point in the near future you will probably need to increase membership prices. Maybe your facilities are aging. Maybe your tennis courts need resurfacing. Maybe you need to hire extra lifeguards. Or maybe you just need to keep up with inflation.

People don’t like price increases. But they’re a necessary part of running a swim and tennis club, so your club needs to have a plan. Set a 10-year plan in place where dues are increased a small amount (say $10 a year) every year. Most people would rather pay $10 more each year than have their bill increase by $100 at some point. With a $10 annual increase, your club’s dues would only be $100 more in the span of 10 years.

When members sign up for Automatic Recurring Billing their dues won’t increase. The rate they sign up for is locked in. So then how does that help keep up with inflation?  

What you’re doing is establishing a pattern that every year anyone NOT on Recurring Billing will see their dues increase. So this incentivizes signing up for an automatic plan.

Your club can cancel a member’s Automatic Billing at any time.  After a few year’s you might decide a member’s locked in rate is too far out of line with the current year’s rate. That member has obviously saved money for a few years, so they will most likely want to sign back up for an automatic plan.

Automate Your Bookkeeping

With Recurring Billing you take all the bookkeeping burden off your club’s volunteer Treasurer. With a Pool Dues site your Board admins can keep track of payments. In fact, Board admins can easily see which members have signed up for recurring payments, which members haven’t paid, which memberships are expired, and a number of other data points about payments and membership tiers.

Below is a “heat map” style breakdown of memberships. In your Pool Dues dashboard this is found under Membership > Current Standings by Date. You can even change the date of this query to show standings in the future…

We highlight rows by membership type and flag potential issues in the future. For example, a pink row indicates someone that signed up during the previous Summer.  Now most likely, this member will have paid again before that date (because the mass-invoicing system will notice they need to pay). But this gives you a bird’s eye view of all your standings in relation to when member’s paid the year before.

And as you can see, a light green row indicates a member is on a recurring plan. Your Treasurer can pretty much ignore these members. The only time where they would get flagged is if we detected their membership did not rebill. In which case, their row would turn red. Before that, your Treasurer would also have gotten an email notification that their recurring billing did not occur.

Listen, it’s the 21st century. We’ll say this until we’re blue in the face – people want to pay for things online. They want the ease of automatic payments not a paper invoice in their mailbox. Get set up with Recurring Billing with Pool Dues and make your life easier!

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 with that income before the pool opens. There’s a better system – Recurring Billing included with your Pool Dues site.

Reasons Your Club Should Use Recurring Billing

You Can Set the Due Date Earlier in the Year 

Ideally, all pools should have their dues paid early in the year. If you wait too long in the year, it gets too close to the pool season and you might not be able to get the pool fixed before the season starts. Pools require maintenance. They require upkeep, repairs, and staff. All that stuff costs money, and if you don’t have money until May, you may not be ready in time for the pool to open. Set your due date in January or February – with PayPal Recurring Billing that puts money directly into your account – and you’ll have the necessary funds to maintain the pool, the tennis courts, the clubhouse, and the bathrooms before the pool season begins.

You Eliminate the Need to Invoice the Same People Year After Year

If you’re still sending paper invoices, your club is losing money and wasting time. You spend resources printing out invoices, stuffing envelopes, paying for postage, and making trips to the post office. On the other side of those invoices is more time and resources – someone has to regularly check the mailbox for payments, bring them to the bank, wait days for the payment to show up in your account, and manually do the bookkeeping to track payments. With Recurring Billing, members are emailed, they make their payments online, and money is immediately in your PayPal account.

You Attract Members Late in the Pool Season 

With Recurring Billing, you can get people to join the club any time during the season without fear of overpaying for only a portion of the season. A lot of prospective members balk at joining in the middle of the summer because they don’t want to pay for a full season if they only get to use the pool for a handful of weeks. With Recurring Billing people can be billed annually on any start date – if someone joins the pool August 1, they’re Recurring Billing occurs August 1 each year. That way, they get a full year of membership and you have money coming in throughout the year!

You Attract Tennis-Only Members

With automatic Recurring Billing your club can attract tennis-only members. People who don’t want to use the pool facilities might balk at paying the full membership price. While some clubs have tennis-only memberships, a lot of clubs shy away from this because of the bookkeeping burden of multiple types of memberships. Recurring Billing makes it easy to set up different levels of membership, and it makes it easy for people to pay for tennis only.

Each Pool Dues website comes ready with Recurring Billing options for all membership tiers. Our system is compliant with PayPal’s encryption requirement for recurring billing, and – like every part of a Pool Dues website – it’s incredibly easy to use!