Chandler’s Ford Parish Council

Chandler’s Ford is a small community in Hampshire with a parish council. The Parish Council manage several community facilities in the area including Hiltingbury Recreation Ground and Fryern Recreation Ground.

The Challenge

Before choosing Sports Booker, Chandlers Ford Parish Council managed bookings manually through Microsoft Outlook Calendars. This booking process limited the scope of what it could offer customers and left the council with high volumes of administrative tasks every month.

Chandlers Ford required a modern booking solution that would centralise the scheduling of multiple locations, including a four-court sports hall, tennis courts and recreation grounds and allow customers to pay online.

They also required a booking system capable of managing sports club subscriptions. With over 600 tennis subscriptions in circulation the task of manually checking expiry dates each month had become a time consuming process.

The Solution

Sports Booker designed an online booking system with several key features:

Online booking & facility scheduling: Provide an easy to use booking function for multiple venues, activities and equipment hire.

Secure client website: A booking website with ‘HTTP secure’ communication.

Online membership management: Manage customer memberships and membership fees.

Unlimited site licenses: Grow the business without site license limits or customer caps.

 Duncan Murray, Parish Clerk explains: “We needed something that was flexible and could grow with our needs preventing the need for another change. A system that could act as a virtual till storing our transactions securely and manage the tennis memberships as well as the allotment fees. In addition, we needed a system that could cope with different venues/resources, a choice of sports activities and hire of equipment for those that might not have futsal balls or badminton racquets. On top of that it had to be secure – i.e. https//”

 

Why did Chandler’s Ford Parish Council choose Sports Booker for their online booking system?

“Some systems might have offered some or most of these requirements, but not all of them combined all with a set licence fee rather than a variable one according to how many bookings were taken in a month. Sports Booker seemed to have the capability to do what we wanted at an acceptable cost. In truth the Parish Council should recoup most of the licence costs by postage savings. What did we really want? To work smarter – we were already working hard enough!!”

The Result

The installation of Sports Booker software has streamlined booking and membership management for Chandlers Ford Parish Council.

Sports Booker integration has allowed customers to book and pay online at a click of a button. They also have the option to add extras such as equipment hire before completing the booking.

Tennis memberships have been automated through the Sports Booker membership management function.  Each month expired members will be automatically detected and sent a reminder email.

Sports Booker also includes unlimited licenses, meaning Chandlers Ford Parish Council look forward to business growth without limitations.

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