New Features in 2019 – Invoicing Pool Members

Posted on January 18, 2019January 21, 2019 by Justin at PoolDues

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Boards are getting back together and you’re probably reminded yet again that being a Board member is a bit like dining at a nice restaurant in Winter and sitting at the table closest to the door. Everyone else has it a little bit better than you do.

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But we’re here to help, with new Invoicing features!

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Justin here, lead developer and founder of PoolDues.com. So I sat down with my club’s new Treasurer a couple weeks ago, who was just coming off a meeting with our old Treasurer that gave him the rundown on how things were done in the past. Every year the previous treasurer sent out invoices generated from Quickbooks. And as it turned out, he was still manually keeping track of who was an active member. But wait, that’s something PoolDues does automatically for you! Old habits die hard I guess.

Except there was one BIG thing PoolDues wasn’t doing that Quickbooks was. We weren’t emailing invoices. PoolDues has always had the option to automatically remind members that payments were due (or past due) but it was a bit too friendly of an email.

I was overlooking the gravitas of the Official Club Invoice Letter. Numbers in columned boxes with words like “DUE NOW” do scare people.

So I told my new Treasurer, don’t waste a perfectly good football Sunday creating and sending an invoice to every member. The PoolDues database has everything we already need to send people a frightening invoice letter. I just have to format it that way….

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So we’ve got proper Invoicing now!

And it’s smart too.We will never invoice a member that has a Recurring payment plan setup. That’s important because….

It’s completely unnecessary.
We don’t want to bother them with a million invoices because they probably signed up for a Recurring payment plan to be left alone
People forget stuff. Like whether or not they signed up for automatic payments a year ago. So it’s entirely possible you end up with someone paying twice.

Once someone pays for the current year, the invoicing system will leave them alone. So if you start mass invoicing in February, and do it every couple of weeks, eventually less and less people get emailed.

By April or so, then you can start paying attention to the people that haven’t paid. We have a neat heat-map type feature that shows who isn’t current (very useful when it’s close to the start of the season).

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Which brings us to Custom Invoicing

So what happens with those stubborn end-of-spring members that just wait till the last second to pay. You can keep having the Invoice Bot send them mailings, but if you want to really put the screws to them, you can send them a custom invoice with LATE FEES. Yup, you can go there.

But custom invoices can be used for anything really. If you want to invoice a new member with the Membership and Initiation fees, with a nice custom message, you can do so. The payment link will take them directly to the cart, with all those products you invoiced them for.

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So that’s two BIG features in 2019 and it’s only a few weeks in. Want to watch some TV?….

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Using Facebook to Get New Members to Your Neighborhood Swim and Tennis Club

Posted on June 22, 2018February 20, 2019 by Justin at PoolDues

Facebook is your number #1 tool for getting new members to your neighborhood pool. If you are not a fan personally, hear me out. Because Facebook is essentially an automated member recruiter. What Pool Dues does for automating billing and check-in for members, Facebook does for finding new members. Their “discovery” algorithms (what they recommend to users) leans heavily on location and what a user’s friends are into. So, if a potential member has Friends in your Facebook group, they are going to get a recommendation from Facebook. And of course, you can occasionally remind members to add people to the group that aren’t members yet. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s take a step back to discuss how to start your club’s presence on Facebook.

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The Difference between a Page and Group

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Chances are someone at your club has already setup a Facebook Page, but if not, consider this an online business card for your club. Within a few minutes you can add a video or image header, icon (like your personal profile icon), and basic info like location, contact info, description like, “We are a members-only swim and tennis club in [city, state].” You will get stumble-on traffic to this publicly visible page, so you want visitors to quickly know you aren’t a community pool, but you also want to show off the best your club has to offer. So make sure you post up some high-quality photos. Find someone with an iPhone and take some decent photos of the pool in full swing. Kids jumping in. Adults with drinks in their hands in the pool. Point is: look cool. An empty pool, or a picture of the front entrance sign is pretty lame.

Next up make a Group for the pool. Groups are social, Pages are not. Although it is possible to post a comment to a Page, people generally do not as Pages are heavily moderated., and comments get shelved to a tiny corner of the page.

On Facebook people converse in groups. And neighbors in neighborhood groups talk A LOT. You want to encourage people to make the group active. Allow members to post freely. The more active it is, the more people visit the group (or get recommended to it) and get to know your neighborhood pool and the people there.

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Group Settings

If you created the pool’s Facebook Group, you are the Admin by default. If you are just taking over as Social Director or Membership Director, get the current Admin to give you Admin powers. Then, make the pool’s Page the admin of the Group. Find Edit Group Settings, then look for this option…

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After you make this connection, you’ll have the option to post in the Group as either yourself or the Page. Facebook makes it easy to toggle back and forth (for reference, see the image below). So you can even respond to your own posts by toggling back and forth.

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Group Settings for a Neighborhood Pool

The big decision in your Facebook Group’s settings will be the Privacy. You definitely don’t want Secret, so it comes down to Public or Closed. For marketing purposes Closed might seem counter-intuitive, but if your Group’s description reads open and inviting, you should get plenty of new neighbors / potential members to the group. Your group’s title will also help encourage new neighbors to join. For example if you title it “Hillside Pool – Members Only Group”, that’s obviously not going to attract non-members. If you title it, “Hillside Neighbors and Pool”, you’ll get plenty of people asking to join.

You can still be choosy about who you allow in the Group. One of the main things I look for in approving new members is mutual friends and location. If the user is new to Facebook and knows no one that I know, and doesn’t live nearby, I won’t approve (which is rare).

For extra scrutiny, you can even ask questions to Facebook users that request to join. For example, “Do you live in the Hillside neighborhood?” or “Do you want to be contacted by our membership director?”. These questions will probably deter anyone that’s just looking to advertise their local business.

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Let’s rundown a few other useful settings…

Automatic Membership Approval – Great setting. If you run another group, for example, the neighborhood Men’s or Women’s group, this will auto-approve anyone in your other groups.

Posting Permissions – Do not toggle this on. Doing so would make every post subject to admin approval. Which sucks. The whole point of groups is open discussion. If a member is a trouble-maker down the road, deal with that on a case-by-case basis.

Custom Address – Give your group a nicer URL with this option.

Location – Obviously you want to enter the club’s home address.

Group Type – Club or Neighbors. I’m not sure if there’s a benefit to one over the other.

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It’s called Social Media for a reason. It’s time to be social (and show non-club members what they are missing)

Once you add people to your group (and you definitely need to add them in yourself), it will begin to fulfill its purpose of reminding prospective members about the club. In the off-season, people will discuss whatever – local news, restaurants, power outages, etc. You don’t have to do much posting then.

During the summer month’s you’ll have no shortage of things to post: ice cream socials for kids, beers by the pool, shark nights, swim meets, birthdays, poker nights, outings with other club members, tennis round robins, clubhouse parties, adult nights, tween nights, etc. Plus any news worth emailing to club members is worth posting on your Facebook group as well.

What you’ll find is that members are going to do plenty of this social media work for you. You can nudge them to help out too. If you see someone taking a photo or video at the pool, ask them to post it to the group.

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Example post: Crowd-pleasing time-lapse video (no one is visible long enough to be scrutinized in their suit)

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Not only are you reminding current club members that all this fun stuff is going on, but you’re also advertising ALL the cool stuff going on to people in the Group that aren’t paid club members. And that’s what this boils down to.

The lookie-loos that gravitated to your online group ARE your target market! You can hang door flyers, you can send stuff in the mail about the pool, you can put up road signs to advertise, but none of that converts the anti-social people. Those people are a hard sell.

The pool will be an easy sell to neighbors that are naturally social. But a road sign doesn’t show them what they are missing. As the old adage goes, “show don’t tell”. That’s what Facebook does. It shows people – Hey, look. This is EXACTLY what’s going on down here. Why aren’t you here?

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Georgetown Rec is Boosting Check-Ins with a Kiosk

Posted on June 16, 2018February 20, 2019 by Justin at PoolDues

The Member Check In kiosk at Georgetown Rec is a hit!

We had our first Friday test run (a notoriously packed night) and about 75 members were checked in. Some of that included sub-family account check-ins, meaning spouses and kids, but that’s the whole fun of this! Kids can have their own sub-accounts, or they can use the kiosk to check-in their parents. Since all that’s required to check in (or out) is a 4 digit pin, this is a great way to get kids to learn a useful number sequence, for example, a street number.

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Here’s my kid checking in. Complete with “acting directions”.

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Tag: pool app