revenue – PoolDues.com

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

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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.

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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)

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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.

[sf_fullscreenvideo type=”text-button” btntext=”Watch a Short Video on Social Updates with Donation Progress” imageurl=”” videourl=”https://vimeo.com/268071127″ extraclass=””]

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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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Have something of value to return in exchange…

Most neighborhood pools get some income from Swim Team sponsorships, which is either a monetary donation or product donation (which the pool sells, like pizza at a swim meet). But once those Swim Team t-shirts are printed and poolside banners hung, it’s usually game over for fund-raising.

But that doesn’t need to be the case. Your pool probably averages 100-150 families, so including spouses, that’s around 250-300 people in the community. Local companies are looking for exactly those people to advertise to, and many of those same companies offer services your pool could tap into for events. So why not work out a trade?

You first need to figure out a Social Media package for potential advertisers. Think about what you already have…

1. The Pool Mailing List. You have quality email subscribers that aren’t going to run to the unsubscribe button if you help a local business advertise. You could offer a one-time mailing specifically about a particular company or include their logo in the footer of every email for a certain amount of time (probably 1 year).

2. Facebook. Your pool should already have a thriving Facebook Group, (not a Page, a Group) where your pool posts frequently and so do members. You can offer to advertise for companies there, in a kind of “shout out” format. For example, see the image to the right. We trade bug spraying services with a local company and in return give them what we would for a Swim Team Sponsor.

Creating a group Event on Facebook is also another great promotional tool. So if a local company has an event coming up, for example, a car dealership might have some special weekend promotion, you could create an event in your group for them. Events are especially useful promos because members will usually get some kind of notification on their phone that the event is coming up (usually the day before).

You can suggest to members that they like a local business’s Facebook Page or join a Group that the business runs.

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3. In-App Advertising. If you are a Pool Dues-powered pool, you can put local businesses into your Member Check In app. So, the more you encourage members to check in via the app, the more opportunities those members have to visit your local sponsors.

Plus just showing potential sponsors that you have an app looks pretty darn slick. We successfully reached out to an inflatable company for a free bounce house recently, with this email (and attached the image below)…

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Subject: Advertising at Pool in Exchange for Wet Slide Rental this Friday

Body:

Hi!

I’m Social Director at [fill in your pool / website]. We’re looking for a large wet slide this Friday night, and we’d love to do an in-kind trade here. We could add a large banner poolside for your company and add you to our Social Media Advertising package, which includes a top advertising spot in our Member Check In app. We require members to check in from their phones now, and when they do so, they end up on a page of Pool Sponsors (example image attached).

This has been a big hit with local advertisers, so we think there’s quite a lot of value in it. And obviously a [fill in city name] pool full of parents is exactly who you want to advertise to.

As we’re looking to do this Friday night, we would need to know soon if you are interested. We’re coming to you first because we’ve seen you support community groups like ours.

We would consider your company a Gold Sponsor (normally a $550 value) in exchange for the free wet slide. Here’s more info about what you’ll receive…

[link to details on your site / Pool Dues Portal]

Thanks, [your name]

Attach this Image:

That’s an easy email to fire off, and if the company is interested it’s win-win for everyone. Or worst case, they just ignore it, and you move onto the next business.

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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.