Time was of the essence for Melissa Green, who had spent several years running the marketing and club communication at FCTwenty11 football club on top of her full-time paid employment.
Melissa was growing increasingly frustrated with the amount of time that laborious administration tasks were stealing from her goals of communicating well with the club’s current members and supporters, and marketing the club to grow its membership base.
“I was spending more time supporting people with online registrations and chasing payments and fees than I wanted, and I didn’t have any way to get meaningful up-to-date data that would help me make good decisions for growing the club and improving communication with our members and supporters.”
Sending emails was also a complicated affair, which involved sorting target groups in Microsoft Excel before uploading them to an email provider.
“In reality, email communication didn’t happen as often as I wanted it to because I just didn’t have time to go through the whole convoluted process,” she says. “Other coaches and managers were using their personal emails to communicate with club members and supporters, so there was also no consistency or opportunity for club branding there.”
And then in November 2020, Melissa saw a demo of the club management software Friendly Manager and knew it was the tool she needed.
“When I saw how Friendly Manager could massively impact our admin tasks and communication, I was so excited,” she says. “This was what I had been looking for in a whole range of other software products, but had never found in one place.”
She was thrilled by the concept of working with live lists when communicating with her members and realised it would save her huge amounts of time when compared to her old method using Excel.
With Friendly Manager, she could simply click one button to email an entire group of people and she could also create on-brand reusable email templates for the entire administration team to use, saving time and giving consistency to the club’s branding and messages.
Another benefit for Melissa, as the manager of all club marketing and communication, was that Friendly Manager could give her oversight of all communications throughout the club, which she didn’t have when staff members were using their personal emails. This would allow her to finally execute the consistent look and feel for all club communications she had long been pushing for.
Melissa brought her team in for a second demo of Friendly Manager and they were just as excited as she was.
“The fact that Friendly Manager allowed us to create a single software platform with Comet and Xero both connected was a game changer for everyone. It supercharged our ability to have accurate data available in all the software products the club relies on, but we only had to input it once.”
FCTwenty11 decided to implement Friendly Manager just one month later, in December 2020.
Now Melissa is able to effectively target branded emails to segments of the club’s membership, ensuring that the right members get the right information at the right time.
