With dwindling member numbers in most clubs a website is becoming more important to publicize your bowling club. Your website is your public face to your community, having an interactive, dynamic and updated informative website will show your club as a forward thinking modern bowling club.
Levin Bowling Club has been developing for the past year a “Word Press” plugin in partnership with www.Kiwibiz.net. The plugin is specially designed for administering Bowling Clubs, especially match committee and secretary duties.
Word Press is a CMS (Content Management System) ie it is a website with a database where your clubs information is dynamically displayed on the website pages. What this means is that as soon as we enter a result in one of our events it is automatically on the webpage. I’d imagine we are the first club in NZ to have live results and possibly the first in the world. To be able to enter information on members and events into our website database we need an interface, this interface is our plugin we are developing.
A plugin is software that is installed into the website and our plugin allows for all the following functionality to be achieved very easily and is simplistic to use.
We can import or export all our members and events using a spreadsheet. The process takes only a few seconds. All events can be added, including club championships, galas, selected club team event such as interclub, pennants etc, tournaments and rollups. The plugin has the ability to canter for all types of result formats, such as qualifying/post section, two life system, galas results, club team events, round robin and best off events.
Once events are in the database we can add the players and do the draws and results for each event. Adding player is currently manual but we have nearly finished registering online for events. The online registration for events has other advantages too other than administration, your members can see if they have entered an event without having to go back down to the club. Handy for us older guys with poor memories, which includes me! Members don’t have to go down to the club to enter, they can do it in the comfort of their home.
Our club is buzzing and we have seen an increase in interest in club champions which I feel can be largely contributed to our live results on the internet. As soon as the draw is done on Thursday it is available online and as the results are entered, members who are away can follow the progress during the day of our events. This last season we had our biggest entries into our club championships, one event had more players for our 16 rings.
Our newsletter is online along with the executive minutes which are password protected. Cancellations / postponements are online as well as the “Inside Bowls” magazine.
Selections for club rep team can be done online. Sending confirmation emails to team members selected for teams are done right from the website, this feature is still in development.
Club official’s positions are created, then club members allocated to these positions.
The next functionality will be an interactive club nomination form. Some of the code is already written.
Future development will include allowing other clubs to register their events online. A calendar will be design to show all events in our area, lower North Island. Sending our membership capitation lists to our Centre and BowlsNZ. A dynamic Honours Board, this means besides showing all the history of club championship winners, you can also search a particular player to find all of their results. I have a great vision for a member profile page but costs will determine if I ever get this done. Admin area, where committees can share files, etc. Different report created with just a few clicks of a button; these could include emailing out team selections, event reminders, newsletters, club house telephone list, club nominations. Or any other features you can think of, it’s all possible.
Shoota Ballinger
Webmaster
shoota@kiwibiz.net