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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Using Paypal? Great! Now Use it Better

Posted on June 13, 2018February 20, 2019 by Justin at PoolDues

Fortunately, more neighborhood pools and clubs are starting to use PayPal for their member dues. Only collecting checks these days would be like choosing to only talk on a landline phone.

The problem is that 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.

The main issue here is that PayPal isn’t a good member billing / reporting backend. It processes credit card and echeck payments for your customers just fine, but it doesn’t sort your payments by product. Or list what customers bought what. You can perform searches, but anyone that has tried searching PayPal knows how problematic that is. I’ve been accepting PayPal at CartoonSmart.com for nearly 20 years now, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried searching for a customer by last name and I simply can’t find them (many times their business name nullifies a reasonable search).

Doing a lot of business through PayPal is one of those “good problems,” but the more options / products / services your club chooses to sell, the more trouble it is to sort through payments if your backend doesn’t sort it for you. Keep in mind, I’ve talked to many club Treasurers that will say, “oh it isn’t that hard to just manually log each payment in Quickbooks (or whatever they use).” But every time I hear that, I think, “Even if it isn’t that hard, it doesn’t need to be done at all”. It’s 2018. Technology has got this!

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What many clubs currently do. The membership is probably $530, but this club has added in $16 for Paypal fees

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Where a proper payment portal comes in…

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The Pool Dues backend will organize everything by product for you. You’ll quickly be able to see how much of each product has sold, how much those products have earned, and links so you can see details on each sale (including, of course, which customer purchased the item).

And that’s just the beginning. Imagine being able to set up recurring billing options (automatic payments). Or, if the member does a 1-time payment, wouldn’t it be nice to automatically begin reminding them to pay again? And send another reminder….and another… Pool Dues can do that!

You can export payment info to CSV sorted by date range and then by product or all earnings. You can export customer data as well.

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Paypal Fees Included…

You’ll notice in the image above the odd price of $567.05. That screenshot is from a club whose membership price is $550 but they are adding in a 3% fee at checkout.

Instead of displaying both the membership price and fee added together, the shopping cart displays them separately. You can label this 3% fee anything you want (and change the %). So it could read:

– Tax
– Tax / Fees
– PayPal Fee
– Convenience Fee
– Credit Card Upcharge

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Most people just ignore tax because we are used to seeing it added in. So if your concern is that members will question the PayPal fees being added in, you can keep this labeled as Tax (which is the default cart setting).

Also, if your members are already used to seeing the PayPal fee added into the final price, they’ll understand what the fee is regardless of how it is labeled.

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And how do you get to the shopping cart…

As you can see, here at Pool Dues we place a lot of emphasis on design. So take a look at one of our example buttons to sign up…

Unfold and you’ll find details about that specific membership option. The beauty of this is that you can have many options listed on the same page without cluttering it up with too much detail.

[sf_button colour=”accent” type=”standard” size=”large” link=”https://democlub.pooldues.com/member-dues/” target=”_blank” icon=”” dropshadow=”no” rounded=”yes” extraclass=””]See our demo site for an example Member Dues page…[/sf_button]

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Family Membership – One Time Payment

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Got kids? This is the membership for you!

Make a one-time payment for your Yearly dues. Click below to pay this fee through Paypal (the final cost includes Paypal charges).

First year members, don’t forget to include your initiation dues if you haven’t already paid them.

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PayPal is requiring more security on YOUR end…

As of June 2018, PayPal began requiring SSL certificates from merchants and other upgrades. You can read more about this on PayPal’s site (tap here).

Obviously, your Pool Dues payment portal has an SSL certificate out-of-the-box, and we are hosted on servers that include their other required protocols.

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Recommended iPad Settings to use our Member Check In app in Kiosk Mode

Posted on June 11, 2018February 20, 2019 by Justin at PoolDues

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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 and then make sure members can’t mess around with the iPad.

On this page, we’ll go step-by-step through the settings we recommend for kiosk mode. If you haven’t bought a locking case yet, we recommend searching Amazon for “iPad kiosk case”, and you’ll find plenty of options.

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Resetting a Used iPad

First, let’s get the app downloaded to your iPad. Ideally, you’re starting with a brand new iPad that doesn’t have anything else on it. If a member of your club has donated an older iPad for this, have them first wipe out that iPad by going to Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings.

That iPad should go back to its original factory status at that point (where it greets you with a “Hello” screen).

You want to set this up as a new iPad, so skip past any prompts to set up the iPad with an existing iCloud account. When you create a new iCloud account, you could use a club email like board@[your pool name].com or treasurer@[your pool name].com . Make sure it is a real email address you can verify (and recover the password for down the road).

If you aren’t currently at your pool or club when you set up the iPad, just remember you’ll need to connect the device to the club’s wifi. Otherwise, the app can’t connect to the net and check in members!

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Enable Kiosk Mode in the app

Download Member Check In (tap here) to an iPad. This is a free app, so you shouldn’t need to add any payment info to the App Store before downloading.
Open the app and search for your pool.
The next screen will ask for your email and PIN, which you’ll get in the next step.
Login into your Pool Dues portal (the footer menu has a link to login). After logging in, the footer menu has links only visible to admins. Tap Kiosk PIN.
Go back to the app and enter the email and PIN.

You’re done!

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Miscellaneous settings for kiosk mode

Before we make sure members can’t leave the Member Check In app, let’s toggle a few more recommended settings for kiosk mode.

Settings > Notifications > Touch ID & Passcode > Turn Passcode Off . If the iPad restarts (because it ran out of power), you’ll want the lifeguards to be able to restart the iPad and get right back into the app.
Settings > Notifications > Show Previews > Never.
Settings > Safari > Auto-Fill > Toggle off for everything.
Settings > Display & Brightness > Auto-Lock > Never. You don’t want the iPad going to sleep.
Settings > Display & Brightness > Brightness > Set to Maximum. As it will be poolside in the sun, you’ll want the brightness up as high as possible.
Settings > iTunes & App Stores > Updates > Toggle On. This should be on by default, but make sure that Updates is on so the Member Check In app is always updated.

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iPad Settings to make sure members don’t leave the app

Here’s the most important step – setting up Guided Access. This prevents members (let’s face it, kids) from monkeying around with the iPad.

Settings > General > Accessibility > Guided Access (at the very bottom). Toggle On.
Set a Passcode.
Exit Settings and open Member Check In.
Now triple-click the iPad’s home button. Guided Access will now be on for this app. Which just means the app can’t be closed without triple-clicking the home button again and then entering the passcode.

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Add a Member Check In Kiosk to your Neighborhood Pool or Club

Posted on June 7, 2018February 20, 2019 by Justin at PoolDues

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New in iOS version 1.3 of the Pool Dues Member Check In App!

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.

About Kiosk Mode

When I first thought about creating a Member Check In app for my pool, the kiosk version was the first thing that came to mind. Replace the tattered old paper guestbook with a fancy iPad to better encourage people to sign in. And of course, tie it all into the billing backend, which our pool sorely needed (i.e., no paper checks).

As I began building the backend, adding features, and tinkering with the app, I started to realize I was more interested in the possibilities of the Member Check In app for individual users. Primarily for the social aspects. I loved the idea of being somewhere other than the pool and seeing who was there. And from that, other ideas started coming to me about the news section, sponsor section, and ways to better lead people to pay guests fees or shop.

But Kiosk-mode was always on the drawing board, and part of the fun of working with our Free-Trial Pools is hearing what they want, and a couple of them really expressed interest in getting this live. Cut to today’s launch!

Spin the wheel of members!

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Kiosk mode is really pretty simple, as it’s main function is to check members in as quick as possible. Obviously, you don’t want people lingering at the front desk any longer than needed.

So, unlike the personal version, where pool members can check in with a quick status update, in Kiosk mode they simply enter their PIN. I even thought about removing the PIN option, but then some bored kid could come up to the device and just check in every member for fun and prompt emails to them to pay for guests.

Speaking of which, members can still note that they are bringing guests, and they can still toggle on a privacy option. This hides their status at the pool from other users of the Member Check In app (at my pool we joke it’s the Hide-From-Your-Spouse toggle). If a member toggles on that they’ve brought a guest, that is noted within the picker directory of the app. There are three notable icons…

– Member is checked in today

– Member brought guests

(paid) – Member brought guests and paid via PayPal

– Member was checked in, but has checked out (or gone private)

Guest Fees

If a member toggles on that they’ve brought a guest, obviously you don’t want the kiosk itself to send them to a payment page. Again, you don’t want people lingering at the front gate. Plus, as a shared device, you don’t want people accidentally saving payment info on it.

Since the Kiosk already has member emails on file, we simply prompt the member to send themselves an email reminder which contains a link to pay via PayPal from your portal. This way they can go sit down, unpack, and pay when ready.

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Keeping members honest

The picker directory of members gives everyone a kind of “bird’s eye view” of who’s currently at the club or was at the club. Including who brought guests. So, when a member checks in with guests, their name in the picker changes to ” + “. But if the member pays guest fees through your Pool Dues billing portal, their name changes to include ” + (paid)”.

Plus, the bottom of the Kiosk screen will show more details. Here are two examples….

“Member checked in at 3:47 and brought guests”

“Member checked in at 3:47. Paid $6 via PayPal for guests”

A little effort goes a long way…

Most pools already rely on members self-policing themselves when it comes to guest fees. If someone wants to be dishonest and bring 5 guests without paying, there’s usually very little to stop them. And sometimes people want to be honest, but they don’t have paper money for the “honor system” cash box. Lifeguards aren’t there to enforce guest fees or even check guest bracelets (they are paid to save lives and check chemical levels, not police member honesty). And other members aren’t going to confront each other about paying for their guests.

The Member Check In app in kiosk mode (or in individual user mode) simply adds a little transparency to the honor system. What will drive members to pay for their guests is two-fold…

1. Since the app shows members have paid via PayPal (and how much), this allows people to show off that they’ve actually paid. “See those 5 extra crazy boys in the pool, I did actually pay for them.”

2. Your pool looks high-tech as ! Members don’t know that everything is still essentially run on the honor system. So if it appears your pool is trying to get money for guest fees, people are going to pay those guest fees. Especially if it’s easy (and cashless).

One final thought: The opposite applies to point 2. If you don’t make ANY effort to collect guest fees, no one is ever going to pay them.

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Summer Games for Your Neighborhood Pool

Posted on June 5, 2018February 20, 2019 by Justin at PoolDues

Spend a little of your social budget this year on ramping up the game collection at your neighborhood pool!

Let’s go over this far-from-exhaustive list of games that can entertain kids (and adults) at the pool this season. Remember that 10-15 minutes out of every hour is adult swim and that’s 10-15 minutes kids can spend annoying their parents to go home or 10-15 minutes when they socialize with other kids playing games.

Lawn Games

Is your neighborhood pool lucky enough to have some truly useable lawn space? Mine is. We don’t have a high dive, we don’t have a slide, but we got lawn! And when it’s adult swim, that’s where the kids go. They’ll play ball-wall against the guard shack, freeze tag, frisbee, you name it. And of course, whatever their Social Director can afford to spend money on for them to play with. Fortunately, lawn games are relatively cheap. Here’s a few…

Bottle Bash (aka Beerspee)

This is a favorite among adults and kids. Opposing teams of two try to knock down a plastic bottle on top of a pole using a frisbee. If the receiving team can’t catch the frisbee, the throwing team gets 1 point. If the receiving team’s bottle drops, the throwing team gets 2 points. If both the frisbee and bottle drop, the throwing team gets 3 points. We play until 21, and you must win by 2 (so a bottle drop must win the game). In the adult version, we require one hand to be holding a beer.

This game gets my highest recommendation as Social Director!

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SpikeBall

This game is described as volleyball meets four square. I’ve just ordered this for my neighborhood pool, but I’m going to predict now it’ll be a big hit. This is a 1 vs 1 or 2 vs 2 game where the same rules of volleyball apply (only two ball touches allowed), but you spike the ball into the net, and the other team has to return the spike or lose a point.

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Target Frisbee

Does your pool have some extra floatie tubes in the lost and found? I’m guessing yes. Well, check out this DIY video on how to turn those tubes into goals for target frisbee.

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Hearthsong Wonder Wave

Okay, this isn’t really a game, but I’m sure the neighborhood kids will make it into one somehow. And it seems perfect for kids in wet bathing suits.

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Honorable Mentions…

Cornhole – A few years ago Cornhole probably would have been higher up on my list, but let’s be real: it’s lost a little of its luster. But hey, if your pool has a set sitting in some closet, dust it off and break it out.
Bocce Ball – I love bocce ball, and I’ll suggest to the Board until the day I die that we need to build a real court. But until that happens, it’s hard to justify kids throwing around the world’s hardest balls willy nilly on the lawn. In theory, you could play bocce ball without an official court.

Pavement Games

4 Square – Hugely popular among the kids, this game requires nothing more than a four square grid painted on the pavement and a bouncy ball.

Ping pong – If your pool can find the space (and budget) for a good OUTDOOR ping pong table, this makes for an amazing addition to the club. Adults and kids will love it. You probably won’t love replacing balls and paddles, but that’s what Amazon is for. A decent outdoor table is about $600.

Hopscotch – If you’re painting the pavement for 4 Square, save a little paint and make a cool hopscotch board too. A classic game that’s still entertaining to kids.

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Clubhouse Games

Tiki Toss / Ring Toss – This just involves swinging a ring, which is attached to a string, in an arc so it attaches onto a metal hook. I’ve made about 5 of these in my backyard (about one per kid), as they are an incredibly easy DIY project and the materials cost next to nothing at your local hardware store. I’m filing this under “Clubhouse Games” since you’ll probably want an overhang of some sort to attach the string to.

Board Games – Got some closet space in your pool clubhouse for board games? Build up a collection of classic games by sending out a newsletter to your membership about donating any old sets they have lying around. You’ll quickly get enough board games to occupy the kids during short (or long) swimming breaks.

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Bright Idea: Your Pool Dues payment portal is the perfect way to fundraise any of these “bigger ticket” items for your neighborhood or community pool. That Wonder Wave above is about $200. If 20 families donated $10 each, you’ve got it paid for.

Pool Dues is all about making it EASY for members to pay their dues and ANYTHING else! You can create an unlimited number of products / services that your pool wants to sell or raise money for.

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Partnering with Other Neighborhood Pools to Make $7500 or More in Extra Guest Fees

Posted on June 4, 2018February 20, 2019 by Justin at PoolDues

Recently, my pool’s main pump broke so we were out of commission for a few days. Using my “secret network of fellow Social Directors,” I quickly got in touch with two other nearby pools to ask that our members be allowed to swim there in our time of need. One put it to a quick Board vote via email and the other just cleared it with their President who said, “sure, why not”. So, within a few hours, we had two equally great back-up pools.

This showed some awesome neighborhood camaraderie, and as the downtime crept into the weekend, everyone had a blast inter-mingling on Saturday and Sunday. Keep in mind, these are neighborhood pools, so parents all knew each other from school connections, church, synagogue, little league, the local watering holes, you name it. So it wasn’t like strangers were forced to swim with each other for a few days. My city, Dunwoody, considers itself one big neighborhood (their unofficial motto), and that’s exactly what this felt like: one big neighborhood get-together. Which got me thinking that our pools need to intermingle more often.

So, how do we best co-mingle pools? The first thing to consider is how to make sure only members are visiting other member-only pools….

Get member’s wearing wristbands (if they don’t already)

I think every neighborhood pool needs to issue wristbands for their members. 300 wristbands is only about $100. And yes, it’s a pain to distribute these to members, but that’s why you ask for a volunteer to do this once-a-year thing. If your club sends out newsletters announcing 3 or 4 “wristband handouts,” which could even be at a member’s house from say, 5pm-7pm, you should be able to get them into most members’ hands. With our club, we always have some stragglers that don’t pick theirs up, but when that list gets down to only 15 or so families, we just start dropping them in mailboxes.

As much as your Pool Dues-powered Member Check In app can do, it can’t stop gate-crashers as well as a wristband can (nor can a paper sign-in book for that matter). You need something that’s easily identifiable on EVERY member above a certain age that screams “I belong here”.

Now if you do an occasional inter-pool event (or if your pool’s pump breaks), the pool receiving strangers will know for sure those are banded-members from your pool.

When to organize inter-pool get-togethers?

Obviously, that’s going to be something you and your like-minded neighboring pool(s) will need to discuss. Here are some thoughts…

Particular events. For example, a pool volleyball tournament, your Adult Night Parties, Teen Night parties, a Mommy’s Morning Out, etc.
A particular day of the week. For example, Wednesdays. You don’t want to pack too many neighboring-members in on a busy weekend, but let’s face it, even the busiest of pools usually aren’t that busy during the work week.
Or how about this…

Create a Sister-Club Network with Revenue Share

Find 3 or 4 neighboring pools that have wrist-banded members and similar yearly dues. Propose to them that Monday-Thursday members can use any pool within the “sister club” network.

Essentially you’re making it so guest fees are waived for members of your sister clubs. But as we all know, most clubs rarely enforce their own guest fees and barely make any money off cash boxes anyway (though that’s something your Pool Dues portal can solve).

Here’s the key part. This isn’t free. **This is an add-on fee only available to members of those 3 or 4 clubs (again, a perfect fit for your Pool Dues portal).**

Our yearly membership is $550. As a father of 4 kids (almost 5 now), I would pay as much as $100 more to visit 3 or 4 other pools in the summer. I know my kids would love to vary which pool we visit. Different pools mean different playgrounds, high dives, maybe even water slides. And as a parent, I’d love the social aspect of meeting other parents in the community.

So let’s suppose 4 pools did this. They have 1000 families between them. Now let’s assume 300 families paid $100 more for the Sister Pool Network option. Are you ready for some math…

That’s $30,000. Split 4 ways that’s $7,500 per pool.

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Win-Win for Pools and Members….

1. Can you say your pool made $7500 in guest fees last year? Or $5000 or even $2500…. Probably not. And your club definitely did not make that much money from people that already had a home club nearby. Most of your guest fees probably come from out of town guests, birthday parties, adult friends, etc. They do not come from people swimming 1 mile away.

2. It costs nothing to try. It’s just an extra Cart option you can add to your payment portal.

3. If you limited the days to Monday-Thursday that members could hop pools, that still leaves your peak days (Friday-Sunday) exclusive to members. Which also ensures that prospective members are still going to favor their closest pool.

4. This add-on feature also becomes a huge perk to your membership in general.

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Can Your Pool Put up Permanent Street Signs Around the Neighborhood?

Posted on June 3, 2018February 20, 2019 by Justin at PoolDues

Not all swim and tennis clubs are located 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 farthest 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 to the club by putting up street signs? Well no, but as the saying goes, it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Getting your city to permit affixing pool signs to existing road signs could be a lot more work than just doing it.

If you do decide to take the initiative yourself, here’s what I recommend…

Don’t go cheap. Get reflective, metal signs.
Stick to 1 color (not including black or white).
Use a plain font for the sign.
Don’t add a phone number or website. That’s way too much advertising.
Add directional arrows to the club. That should be the real point of the sign, just get people there.
Don’t include any promotional text like “Join the [club name]”. Just “Pool and Tennis Club” is really all you need.
Keep the signs within your neighborhood (no main roads).

What’s it cost? Expect to pay about $40 per sign. Which really isn’t bad at all. 7 or 8 street signs are less than the cost of one family joining. And as long as the city doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, those signs will last many years.

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Why a Kegerator is the Perfect Crowd-Funded Purchase for a Pool or Tennis Club

Posted on June 1, 2018February 20, 2019 by Justin at PoolDues

First off, should your club get a kegerator? Heck yes!….

It’s a HUGE member perk. We’ve even had prospective members ask before joining if we had one.
If you are already hauling in half-barrel or even pony-size kegs to the club, you know it’s a race against the clock to finish it before closing time.
Again, if you are already providing occasional kegs, you know buying ice isn’t cheap (and it’s a huge waste). 20-pound bags are about $5 and you need at least 3 or 4 of them to reliably keep a keg cold in the summer.
Getting someone to volunteer to be Kegerator Director is easy. I guarantee there’s someone in your club that already has a home kegerator.

Board Approval

This is the tough part. You’ve got two hurdles to overcome here.

Who pays for it?
The “Think of the children” pushback.

The first part is easy – make it a crowd-funded purchase. The second part is what will cost you votes “for” if you aren’t prepared.

There’s probably going to be at least one Board Member worried about the optics of having a kegerator at the club. Innocent child eyes will see members imbibing. Well, the fact is, they are already are seeing it – adults bring their own drinks to the pool all the time. At my club, our recycling bins were full to the brim with beer cans. Members don’t hold back, keg or no keg.

So what’s worse for young eyes? Seeing members pull out can after can of Bud Light or occasionally visit a nondescript black refrigerator and pour something into a red cup?

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The other half of that pushback is better phrased, “Think of the teens”, and that’s a far more reasonable pushback. You will need a locking tap, which is about $20 on Amazon. Door locks are also available to prevent access to the keg itself. Kegerators also have wheels so you can easily roll them in and out of a locked part of your club.

Crowd-Funding for a Kegerator (or anything at your pool)

So let’s go back to who pays for the kegerator. If the club is on a tight budget, simply make the members that want a kegerator pay for it. Heck, even if your club isn’t on a tight budget, make the members that want a kegerator pay for it.

This will set a nice precedent that IF members want something that not every member will use, they have the freedom to fundraise for it. A kegerator is the perfect example. The club as a whole isn’t going to drink from it, so the club as a whole shouldn’t be responsible for paying for it.

Taking Donations

Obviously, you can go old-school and try to pass a hat around to pay for a kegerator, but cash in a hat doesn’t really work well with a social media announcement or club newsletter mailing.

Here’s where your Pool Dues portal fits in perfectly. And by the way, we can set up a kegerator donation product right off the bat for you (or any donation style product).

Here’s what worked really well for my club…

Create a product with a suggested price of $20.
Include a Name-Your-Price option with a minimum amount above the suggested price (see the pic for reference).
Send out a newsletter mailing announcing that the club can get a kegerator IF it is crowd-funded.
Wait a week or so then use your club’s social media channels (Facebook Group, Twitter, whatever you got).
Repeat steps 3 or 4 if need be.

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Showing Donation Progress

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Our kegerator was $468, and after the first newsletter mailing we got about half way to our goal. In fact, after our first 3 donations, we got to $120 because one person donated $80 using the Name-Your-Price option.

Our club has a Men’s Only Facebook Group, so about a week after the club newsletter, we posted in the Group and quickly exceeded our goal (which paid for the locking-tap and the first couple kegs).

And obviously, our Treasurer could easily keep tabs on who donated and how much. The picture to the right shows some of the reporting from the Pool Dues backend.

At this point, the club hadn’t yet been using our Member Check In app, but if they had been, they could have seen real-time progress of how much had been raised.

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How to Keep a Kegerator Funded?

Again, here’s where your Member Check In app and Pool Dues payment portal is going to come in handy. We’ve added a laminated sign on the wall by our kegerator reminding people that they should occasionally chip in. Of course, the beer drinkers know who they are, and if they want to keep the beer flowing, they also know they’ll need to chip in. All your club needs to do is make it easy to pay.

For resupplies, you probably don’t need to ask for $20 at a time though (which was the initially suggested donation for the kegerator). Instead, your Pool Dues portal includes a “Day of” donation option, with prices in $5 increments.

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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.

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….

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 Member Check In kiosk at Georgetown Rec is a hit!

Fortunately, more neighborhood pools and clubs are starting to use PayPal for their member dues. Only collecting checks these days would be like choosing to only talk on a landline phone.

The problem is that 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.

What many clubs currently do. The membership is probably $530, but this club has added in $16 for Paypal fees

The Pool Dues backend will organize everything by product for you. You’ll quickly be able to see how much of each product has sold, how much those products have earned, and links so you can see details on each sale (including, of course, which customer purchased the item).

And that’s just the beginning. Imagine being able to set up recurring billing options (automatic payments). Or, if the member does a 1-time payment, wouldn’t it be nice to automatically begin reminding them to pay again? And send another reminder….and another… Pool Dues can do that!

You can export payment info to CSV sorted by date range and then by product or all earnings. You can export customer data as well.

You’ll notice in the image above the odd price of $567.05. That screenshot is from a club whose membership price is $550 but they are adding in a 3% fee at checkout.

Instead of displaying both the membership price and fee added together, the shopping cart displays them separately. You can label this 3% fee anything you want (and change the %). So it could read:

– Tax – Tax / Fees – PayPal Fee – Convenience Fee – Credit Card Upcharge

Most people just ignore tax because we are used to seeing it added in. So if your concern is that members will question the PayPal fees being added in, you can keep this labeled as Tax (which is the default cart setting).

Also, if your members are already used to seeing the PayPal fee added into the final price, they’ll understand what the fee is regardless of how it is labeled.

As you can see, here at Pool Dues we place a lot of emphasis on design. So take a look at one of our example buttons to sign up…

Unfold and you’ll find details about that specific membership option. The beauty of this is that you can have many options listed on the same page without cluttering it up with too much detail.

As of June 2018, PayPal began requiring SSL certificates from merchants and other upgrades. You can read more about this on PayPal’s site (tap here).

Obviously, your Pool Dues payment portal has an SSL certificate out-of-the-box, and we are hosted on servers that include their other required protocols.

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 and then make sure members can’t mess around with the iPad.

On this page, we’ll go step-by-step through the settings we recommend for kiosk mode. If you haven’t bought a locking case yet, we recommend searching Amazon for “iPad kiosk case”, and you’ll find plenty of options.

That iPad should go back to its original factory status at that point (where it greets you with a “Hello” screen).

If you aren’t currently at your pool or club when you set up the iPad, just remember you’ll need to connect the device to the club’s wifi. Otherwise, the app can’t connect to the net and check in members!

Download Member Check In (tap here) to an iPad. This is a free app, so you shouldn’t need to add any payment info to the App Store before downloading.

Open the app and search for your pool.

The next screen will ask for your email and PIN, which you’ll get in the next step.

Login into your Pool Dues portal (the footer menu has a link to login). After logging in, the footer menu has links only visible to admins. Tap Kiosk PIN.

Go back to the app and enter the email and PIN.

You’re done!

Before we make sure members can’t leave the Member Check In app, let’s toggle a few more recommended settings for kiosk mode.

Settings > Notifications > Touch ID & Passcode > Turn Passcode Off . If the iPad restarts (because it ran out of power), you’ll want the lifeguards to be able to restart the iPad and get right back into the app.

Settings > Notifications > Show Previews > Never.

Settings > Safari > Auto-Fill > Toggle off for everything.

Settings > Display & Brightness > Auto-Lock > Never. You don’t want the iPad going to sleep.

Settings > Display & Brightness > Brightness > Set to Maximum. As it will be poolside in the sun, you’ll want the brightness up as high as possible.

Settings > iTunes & App Stores > Updates > Toggle On. This should be on by default, but make sure that Updates is on so the Member Check In app is always updated.

Here’s the most important step – setting up Guided Access. This prevents members (let’s face it, kids) from monkeying around with the iPad.

Settings > General > Accessibility > Guided Access (at the very bottom). Toggle On.

Set a Passcode.

Exit Settings and open Member Check In.

Now triple-click the iPad’s home button. Guided Access will now be on for this app. Which just means the app can’t be closed without triple-clicking the home button again and then entering the passcode.

New in iOS version 1.3 of the Pool Dues Member Check In App!

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.

But Kiosk-mode was always on the drawing board, and part of the fun of working with our Free-Trial Pools is hearing what they want, and a couple of them really expressed interest in getting this live. Cut to today’s launch!

Kiosk mode is really pretty simple, as it’s main function is to check members in as quick as possible. Obviously, you don’t want people lingering at the front desk any longer than needed.

– Member is checked in today

– Member brought guests

(paid) – Member brought guests and paid via PayPal

– Member was checked in, but has checked out (or gone private)

If a member toggles on that they’ve brought a guest, obviously you don’t want the kiosk itself to send them to a payment page. Again, you don’t want people lingering at the front gate. Plus, as a shared device, you don’t want people accidentally saving payment info on it.

Since the Kiosk already has member emails on file, we simply prompt the member to send themselves an email reminder which contains a link to pay via PayPal from your portal. This way they can go sit down, unpack, and pay when ready.

Plus, the bottom of the Kiosk screen will show more details. Here are two examples….

“Member checked in at 3:47 and brought guests”

“Member checked in at 3:47. Paid $6 via PayPal for guests”

The Member Check In app in kiosk mode (or in individual user mode) simply adds a little transparency to the honor system. What will drive members to pay for their guests is two-fold…

1. Since the app shows members have paid via PayPal (and how much), this allows people to show off that they’ve actually paid. “See those 5 extra crazy boys in the pool, I did actually pay for them.”

2. Your pool looks high-tech as ****! Members don’t know that everything is still essentially run on the honor system. So if it appears your pool is trying to get money for guest fees, people are going to pay those guest fees. Especially if it’s easy (and cashless).

One final thought: The opposite applies to point 2. If you don’t make ANY effort to collect guest fees, no one is ever going to pay them.

This game gets my highest recommendation as Social Director!

– Tax
– Tax / Fees
– PayPal Fee
– Convenience Fee
– Credit Card Upcharge

2. Your pool looks high-tech as ! Members don’t know that everything is still essentially run on the honor system. So if it appears your pool is trying to get money for guest fees, people are going to pay those guest fees. Especially if it’s easy (and cashless).

Here’s the key part. This isn’t free. **This is an add-on fee only available to members of those 3 or 4 clubs (again, a perfect fit for your Pool Dues portal).**