Helsby Community Sports Club is the former Sports and Social Club for workers of the village's BICC factory. Established in the mid-20th Century it caters for a variety sports. Currently the club is home to six resident sports, namely Bowls, Football, Fishing, Rugby, Running and Tennis. The club also runs it's own Darts and Snooker Teams and has an active Bridge Club and a thriving Social membership. Existing facilities include the clubhouse, three tennis courts, two bowling greens and football pitch, two rugby pitches and two fishing pools.

Since the early 1990's the club had been independently run by it's own membership on a volunteer basis, following the company's decision to scale down it's operations in the village and cease it's formal association with the club. For several years thereafter, the club then survived on only a short-term lease and as such was unable to secure the necessary external funding that was required to improve it's now somewhat dilapidated clubhouse and facilities.

In 2003 this changed when the Borough Council acquired the site of the club and then drew up a 35-year lease for the club so that it now has the necessary security of tenure it requires to bring in outside funding for the improvement of it's clubhouse and facilities.

Coinciding with this a Development Group was formed that also included representation from Parish and Borough Council and an ambitious Development plan was produced which set out how the club envisaged growing it's membership and improving it's facilities. To assist the club in this development, external funding has been secured from a number of outside agencies such as Primary Care Trust, local Partnership Frodsham Forward, SportsMatch, the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), plus several private businesses. Progress has also been aided by the club working in close partnership with several external bodies, e.g. both the local Parish and Borough Council, plus the relevant National Governing Bodies of each of the resident Sports clubs.

Initially these developments were progressed exclusively by the club's volunteer officials and coaches. The club's Executive Committee recognised, however, that if the club is to be sustainable in the long term, it needed to make a transition from being almost exclusively volunteer run to being more professionally managed. In order to make this transition, the committee decided to appoint a Business Development Manager (BDM) in January 2007. The BDM is responsible for managing the membership records and improving membership and financial reporting for the club's Executive committee. The BDM is also heavily involved in marketing to both increase membership and improve member retention. The purchase of Book-It software was seen as a key tool to be used for all of these roles and it is hoped that through the use of the software, increases in local business sponsorship and continual use of grant schemes available to the area the BDM will become a self financing position.

It will be with core marketing activities that the club's BDM will initially be required to invest most time and effort. Whilst the club's membership grew rapidly in 2004 and 2005, maintaining this growth is the club's next big challenge. The club occupies a prime position for the surrounding rural area and has the potential to not only grow it's existing membership still further, but also to establish new sports and recreation activities that may appeal to entirely new members. This task - the promotion of the club to both it's existing members and the wider community will be the responsibility of the club's BDM. The production of a quarterly newsletter to members (ultimately to be increased in frequency to monthly), the development of an annual advertising campaign, plus electronic marketing to members and non-members via the club's web-site and e-mail through Book-It are to name but a few of the other expected outcomes of the post. A further task will be to develop a "brand image" for the club and in so doing, to re-launch the club under it's new name Helsby Community Sports Club. 

Chris Johnson, the voluntary club development officer was primarily involved in the purchase of Book-It software prior to the appointment of the BDM. When questioned why he chose Book-It software his response was

"Having reviewed a number of software packages that were available on the market and given consideration to developing our own In-house solution, we opted for Book-It software. Having increased membership by approximately 50% within the previous twelve months, the club's management were concerned that a greater level of control and reporting over their membership data would be needed to ensure that the club continued to grow and prosper. Offering easy to use functionality for tasks such as subscription renewals and producing club newsletters, plus optional extras, for example, dealing with the purchase and sale of club merchandise, Book-It was the obvious solution and what's more very reasonably priced. The on-line Tour and evaluation version of the software enabled the club to assess Book-It in advance of purchasing the package and when the opportunity arose for the club to secure external funding to cover the cost of the software, the staff at Instinctive Systems were very helpful in ensuring that the purchase was dealt with quickly and smoothly.

The club's Business Development Manager has now been tasked with transferring records over from our legacy system to Book-It and is equally complementary of Instinctive Systems support staff in making this task as painless as possible! The club now looks forward to a further period of growth and has no doubt that in Book-It it has selected a system that will meet it's demands both now and in the future."

Although still relatively new in the position of Business Development Manager, Michelle Pickstock added the following comments

"Book-it will provide an excellent resource to help me develop my role. As well as having all of our membership data in one place, it can easily be analysed, and will allow me to undertake targeted marketing campaigns and initiatives. It was really useful to be able to utilise the data transfer tool provided by Instinctive Systems, as this allowed me to convert our data from a MS Excel spreadsheet into the Book-it system, without having to enter almost 800 member's details individually"

Paul Herschell, managing director at Instinctive Systems commented

"I am so pleased that Helsby Community Sports Club has chosen our Book-It product to help them manage their membership. It is great too to hear that they are taking the professional approach to managing their organisation by appointing a Business Development Manager. The BDM will not be disappointed in the marketing opportunities that Book-It can provide to help to grow the organisation. Many features are available to allow groups like Helsby Community Sports Club to forge closer links with their existing members through better, clearer and more targeted communication via postal mail, email and now even SMS. Better communication often leads to a clearer understanding of the membership and its needs and opportunities for improvement which in turn leads to better membership retention. Booking club facilities should be made easier through our facility booking features. Our enquiry database provides a great marketing tool for targeting new enquiries and converting them to members and similar tools can easily be used to communicate with ex-members to convince them to rejoin, perhaps as new club facilities become available in the future. Our source of contact tracking system will help to identify which areas of marketing are working to grow membership and which are not. As well as members, our database can be used to store non member details for organisations such as local business sponsors, funding bodies etc all with the same communication and correspondence recording features as members making applying for sponsorship and monitoring grant funding a breeze. All features are provided in a way that routine administration becomes far less time consuming freeing up the BDM's time to concentrate on club development."

The expected outcome of the appointment of the BDM, purchase of Book-It membership and booking software and increased marketing activities by the club, will be an increase in membership and in turn an increase in bar sales. It is the hope of the club's Executive Committee that in making this bold step, the future sustainability of the club can be secured, the position of Business Development Manager can be developed into a full-time managerial role and further development projects such as building a new bigger and better club house, adding floodlighting and other projects can be accomplished.

For more information about Helsby Community Sports Club visit www.helsbysports.com