A major advantage gained was the Online Registration capability. Previous hours of collating paper registrations become a thing of the past as players are now able to register online without attending registration days or relying on the various club registrars to enter their details correctly. Sharks Registrar/Treasurer, Emma Gould commented at the start of registrations:
“The new system is fantastic, I love it. We had a registration day as it was expected from our members. We set up a couple of computers with internet access and took registrations for 2 - 3 hours. Last year I had to go home with all the registration papers and enter each individual registration into the database. This year by the time I went home it was all done. It has saved me hours of computer time”.
SP Registrations has dramatically improved our time efficiency when taking registrations. With over 3000 members transacting online within this calendar year, it has allowed us to focus our time in other areas of the sport which have previously been neglected. The Online Payments facility has also meant we are not continually chasing our members for funds but rather receiving our money well before our competitions commence.
In July, we had 3096 Kids to Kangaroos Participants and we had 79% pay online!
Brilliant System! Can’t wait to see what more it can do!
On behalf of the Watsonia Warriors Junior Basketball Club, players, families and committee, I would like to sincerely thank Daniel Smith and the team at Sporting Pulse. The Warriors have successfully converted to Online Registration with incredible success.
TRAINING – The session at DVBA was very informative. Support documentation was very easy to follow and matched brilliantly with the live tutorials. The best part was being able to access the system live and generate some test players and teams, so that we could actually watch the system in action. This instilled a greater sense of confidence for when we had to utilise the system for our own needs.
REGISTRATION – Thanks to the excellent training and documentation provided, this was EASY! Having a suggested sample document and being able to build / customise to our needs made the process almost seamless. No more forms to collect, no more handwriting to interpret, no more contact details to update, no more spreadsheets to maintain. It’s all done by the membership and the Registrar’s main duty is to watch it happen! Knowing that our current members just need to access the system and confirm or update their details in upcoming seasons is fantastic. It will make future Registration periods a snap, rather than a time to be dreaded. There are a couple of things we will do differently next time, but that’s just tweaking an already terrific process.
FINANCES – Being able to accept Credit Card Payments has been invaluable. The vast majority of our members have taken up this option, meaning there are fewer manual transactions to be monitored. Funds are credited to our club account quickly, supported by clear and accurate reporting. This has made the Treasurer’s role an absolute BREEZE!
SUPPORT – No doubt, having access to the Support Team via phone or email is a godsend. No request was too small or trivial. If we needed a customised field or report that didn’t exist, it was built for us with no delay. Where we requested further training on reports we could generate for ourselves the staff were patient and thorough, not only demonstrating what could be done but explaining the reasoning behind the process. This enabled our Administrators to build on that understanding to further customise our process and reports.
REPORTS – Love Them!!! Thanks to the initial training and ongoing support, we have been able to build and edit many reports to meet our needs. Tracking transactions and payments, memberships, clearances, even uniforms and merchandise has become incredibly easy. Information can be sorted and/or grouped by almost any criteria you can imagine, dollar value, date, age group, gender, team, product, payment type, etc. This versatility has ensured that our various Coordinators have access to reports that are specific to their roles. The Boys’ and Girls’ Coordinators have easily created Team Sheets for the Team Managers at the start of the season. The Registrar and Treasurer have even used the Sporting Pulse reports to present at Committee Meetings.
COMMUNICATION TOOLS – At this stage we’ve only just begun to utilise the email system provided, but it’s working brilliantly so far. Making “groups” and sending emails is very easy, however I would love to see the option to select multiple members at once, or to have the cursor return to it’s previous position rather than the top of the list. Also, it would be great if we could select multiples of our custom groups (such as Team Managers AND Coaches, or all players in a certain age group) and send them one email, rather than having to create multiple emails or generate specific reports first.
TEAMS – (from our Girls’ Coordinator and Uniform Officer) “Very easy to create and populate team lists. Great for making Team Lists for Team Managers to use, containing the contact details for each player. I would prefer for the system generated Team Lists to contain singlet numbers, rather than having to create a report as a “work around”. Over all, it’s a great system to use.”
WEBSITE – (from our webmaster) “I found the website fairly straight forward after the initial learning curve. It’s definitely better than the old system!”
Again, many thanks for all the work you’ve put into creating, maintaining and improving the Sporting Pulse registration system, and a special thanks to your support staff.
Wagga Touch Association (WTA) is a large regional affiliate, located within the state of New South Wales, in the Southern Suns region. The association hosts numerous competitions for Men’s, Women’s, Mixed and Junior Touch at Jubilee Park, with various formats running in both Season 1 and Season 2 each year. To efficiently manage their competitions and member details, WTA is a significant user of the SportingPulse products (Sportzware Central and Sportzware Membership), provided to them through the benefits of their affiliation with Touch Football Australia (TFA).
Whilst visiting the SportingPulse website, WTA Administrator, David Baggio stumbled upon this new solution to what can be a time-consuming and complicated process. Seeing the benefits of the new system, Baggio immediately rang SportingPulse to discuss the possibility of setting it up for his affiliate. Over time, and with the assistance of SportingPulse, the online system was set up, a business account was created, approval from the WTA Board was granted, registration forms were customised, and the new process was ready to be implemented in Wagga.
WTA decided to implement the SportingPulse Online Registration and Payments system to allow direct payments and registration from individual players, reducing the time spent going through financial records to identify who has not paid, and reducing the time spent having to chase team payments. WTA recognised that the online system required players to be individually responsible for their own registration, thus freeing up administration time and subsequently causing less hassle for committee members and the competition administrators.
“The ability to do Online Registration and Payments has helped our processes at Wagga Touch substantially, especially concerning the financial reporting aspects of our association. Online payments has provided us with an extensive reporting system, which easily makes it much easier to identify who has and has not paid, thus saving time for end of financial year reporting. Also the ability to accept online payments via the Pay Pal system has helped us to minimise risk associated with having large amounts of cash on hand, and trips to the bank. By using PayPal, payments are directly deposited into our association bank account within two working days,” explained David Baggio.
It was a relatively smooth transition from the old process to the online payments, however as expected there was some adjustment time needed for identified participant groups of the affiliate. Overall, the feedback from the younger participants and members has been positive, as they are already familiar with making payments online for other aspects of their lives, such as online shopping, ticket purchases and so on.
WTA highly recommends the Online Registration and Payments system to all, other Touch Football affiliates, as it has drastically improved their financial processes and reporting; specifically in the collection of payments and it has also reduced the stress of processing transactions. However you must be aware of the business account conditions, set up with PayMySport, as the PayPal bank account does have a limit. Once that limit is reached, you must be prepared to provide proof of identity and other documentation to re-enter that account.
“Wagga Touch strongly encourages the Touch Football community to use this system. We are happy that we decided to implement this process.”
