February Newsletter for members – important consultation on changes to target booking system
Hi everyone, we are going to send a more fun email newsletter soon with details of our inaugural handicap competition / shoot during March – we haven’t forgotten.
We want to ask YOU as a club member to try and help us work out the current problems with the target booking system.
We are getting a huge amount of no-shows. The record for no-shows on a Wednesday evening is 7 (out of a usual 16 spaces available) so almost half the pre-booked people didn’t turn up one week. Last Saturday we had a fully booked target list for both sessions but 10 people didn’t turn up. This is a quarter of all the spaces available! This has 2x negative impacts.
1) the club is affected financially – the less viable each session is the less able we are to offer extra sessions.. if we fill the sessions that we offer we have more cash to spend on rent for opening extra sessions.
2) we’ve got loads of people hoping to shoot who are not coming because they think the session is full.
Basically what we think is happening is that people are pre-booking all the sessions they think they may want to come to in order to hold a space for themselves. If they can’t make it on the day they just don’t turn up. We need to address the problem and we think there are 3x ways forward.
Possible Solutions
1) Make the booking system pre-pay so in order to get your name into a square you’ll need to go through some sort of pay-wall. Hopefully we could set this up so that you shouldn’t have to repeat all the details every time.. but I’ll need to look into technical aspects of this. This system is the best one for us being able to open up an ‘overspill’ shoot which is definitely usually possible on a Sunday and quite often possible on a Saturday. Overspill shoots will be on the roof pitch.. once the existing sessions are fully paid for we can open an overspill list – if we get 12 people signed up we’ll book an overspill shoot.
2) ask everyone that wants to shoot to sign up to Direct Debit. We don’t really want to do this as we know that some members can only come sporadically and it will effectively make us quite a ‘closed club’. Lots of similar London activities do work on this basis – some yoga clubs, martial arts clubs etc. It’s a possibility but isn’t one that I favour personally.
3) Ask no-shows to pay the missed session fee unless they have a really good reason.. if they don’t / won’t pay the missed session fee then we’ll remove them from the pre-book system so they’ll only be able to attend if they pre-pay or turn up on the day with cash without pre-booking.
We really do need to sort this out soon given the reduced number of sessions. We want to see full sessions (in reality down at the club not a virtual ‘booked out’ target list), once we get this we can book more sessions for the club to shoot.
We really value everyone’s input – please do let us know if you feel strongly about one option over another. My feeling is that a pre-payment system would work best for us in the office… but might be unpopular and unduly punitive for the majority of conscientious club members that very rarely ‘no-show’.. but if we go down the route of paying for a missed-session this might not actually change people’s attitude towards booking and not coming which won’t open many more spots…
Either of these options should work so it will pretty much come down to a vote.
Please please let us know – cast your vote on how you want the club to develop!!
Best wishes,
Heidi
