Whether you operate a municipal pool, private swim club, large aquatics center, or splash park, your days are filled with selling memberships and passes, checking people into your facility, and facilitating engaging programs.
That’s why many leaders like you turn to pool membership and swim club management software. With the right solution, you can easily register members, monitor facility entry, process payments, market your memberships, events, and programs, and report on it all with ease.
However, it can be hard to determine which tools are best for your community pool. How can you know what features are absolutely essential, and which ones may not be necessary for your organization?
Just keep reading! We’re going to break down the most important pool membership and swim club management tools through the following topics:
Feel free to click to the section that interests you most. Or, if you’re ready to get started, let’s jump straight in!
Without loyal members, your pool staff wouldn’t have kids to coach, adults to fill your aquatics classes, or people coming to swim for fun. Pool membership software only makes managing members easier, giving you and your staff more time to come up with fun programs to engage your community.
But which software features should you be looking out for? What kind of solution do you want to invest in? While the tools you need will likely depend on your facility’s unique needs, below are the essential features every aquatic facility should have.
Pool membership software has to help your members register and pay for memberships with ease. Instead of paying in cash at the pool, your software should allow people to register and purchase passes online. This way, all of your contact information is centralized in one system, you can manage sales with capacity limits, and physical cash handling can be avoided.
For this to happen, you have to think about how your software can support your members. That said, make sure you have the capabilities to offer various membership tiers and options like:
With options like these, your current and potential members will appreciate the variety of choices they have and you’ll be able to increase your membership population. Ensure to clearly display all membership options within your online platform which will make registration a convenient and easy process!
To make the member registration process even more streamlined and accessible, it’s important to invest in a 100% cloud-based solution. This way, individuals can sign up online for any membership (or even register for a swim team you host!) whenever and wherever they are.
Your software solution shouldn’t just aim to support your members and make their lives easier— it should be doing the same for you and your staff members as well! Make sure your own pool and aquatic facility management tools incorporate the following features:
Your municipal pool membership software should be 100% cloud-based. This means that no matter where you are, your team and members can access your system and reference up-to-date data.
With cloud-based software, your pool membership solution can provide you with access to key insights on membership trends and facility usage at any given time and place.
Make sure your pool software has the capabilities to manage restricted facilities and ensure they stay within capacity limits. Consider the following:
Perhaps your municipality has multiple pools, each with their own community of members and programs. It can be challenging to determine the best way to manage just one pool or aquatic center.
Does your software track memberships, sales, and attendance for all your pools in one integrated platform? Does it allow you to report on your pools individually and collectively?
To keep all of your data and processes centralized, yet individual for each location, your software should set up specific front desk point of sale interfaces or gate check solutions for each particular location.
On that note, reporting should be able to be run per location, too. For instance, imagine you see a dip in membership retention at one of the locations. Focus on the data coming from that particular pool to better determine the cause and tweak your engagement strategies.
One of the most hectic parts of managing a municipal pool or swim club is facilitating check-ins and check-outs. This is a crucial step, especially if you want to verify your patrons’ memberships and passes and ensure you account for everyone in attendance.
A fast and smooth contactless check-in process can bring your pool experience to a whole new level. Say goodbye to long lines with the right pool management and swim club software. Not only can you better keep track of who enters your facilities with one system, but the right solution can provide tools to make checking in even easier and safer for both members and staff.
Your pool software should be able to do the following:
Your pool and swim club management software can even help you plan and market exciting programs and events. This is critical, as these experiences and opportunities are key reasons why members join your facility. Unique and engaging programming is also a great way to secure annual renewals.
Many municipal pools and swim clubs offer a variety of classes for swim lessons, lifeguard training, and other aquatics activities.
With all of the programs and events you offer, your software solution should make it easy for the members of your community to sign up. Don’t make potential registrants wait in line to register for a class. Ensure that they can:
If your facility hosts a swim and/or dive team, you might want to consider online tools that cater to those specific needs. Swim teams will frequent your pool for practices and competitions.
Use your software solution to set up a program dedicated to swim team registrants. This could be the place where they register and pay for dues, uniforms, and transportation using your secure payment processing tool.
If your swim team program involves managing a roster and integrating scheduling capability from a third party, you should also look into league management software. This type of solution can help facilitate the creation of multiple teams, and even automate coaching and member assignments.
If this is something you’re interested in and want to learn more about, take a look at our comprehensive article dedicated to league management software.
In order to effectively communicate with members and other frequent visitors, make sure that your swim club management software offers integrated marketing and communication tools. If you can’t easily email or text your community, you should consider different software.
Your communication options should allow you to filter your aquatic community in various ways. For example, you should be able to email one family, one swim team, or your whole membership base at once depending on your needs.
This is a great way to market specific events, programs, or important dates to the most relevant audience! You can email your entire community when a new registration season has opened or text previous swim team members about the next date for swim team tryouts.
To expand on your marketing efforts, make sure you can also personalize your communications, both email and text, with the data in your membership database. In fact, emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.
In addition to marketing events, these communication capabilities are important for relaying critical and time-sensitive information. This is true for any recreation facility but is especially important for outdoor community pools and aquatic centers. Here are some examples of how email and text messaging is an invaluable tool for your swim club:
Your members will appreciate the outreach, and you won’t have to worry about turning members away because they didn’t know the pool was closed!
This has been mentioned briefly in the previous sections, but the last essential tool we’ll be discussing is the ability to process payments through the software itself.
This option offers you the convenience to do all your payment processing through the software provider. This avoids the hassle of dealing with the customer support teams of both the software provider and the payment processor. You also won’t have to worry about a third-party processor’s own standards and procedures. Integrated payment processing is a key feature of top pool membership software.
At a minimum, your payment processing solution should:
An integrated payment processor that powers your online registration site makes online membership purchases and registration fees a snap for your community. No more waiting for checks to be mailed or having lines outside of your office on registration day!
However, membership and registration fees aren’t the only instances of payment processing that you need to consider. Does your community pool operate a concession stand or sell equipment like goggles and swim team uniforms? Do you sell day and guess passes on site?
If so, you’ll need software with point of sale capabilities, so that you can efficiently process transactions on site. This should integrate with your community pool’s cash drawers and printers.
Having an integrated POS solution will also help your municipal pool’s financial reporting capabilities. Software that includes POS capabilities and integrates with your financial reporting allows you to track trends in purchases and preferences without worrying that something has been forgotten.
In addition to all of these processing features, your community pool staff should look for software that enables them to track daily deposits and transfers, reconcile credit card and bank statements, and generate invoices and payment reminders. All of these tools are crucial for ensuring the financial health of your community pool.
Instead of picking and choosing individual tools, consider a comprehensive online pool and recreation management solution like CommunityPass. Since 2003, CommunityPass has supported communities with software that helps them to better manage recreation departments, park districts, before and afterschool programs, and, yes, municipal pools, swim clubs and aquatic centers.
The above screenshot is a view for administrative users of CommunityPass when they set up their pool/aquatic center program catalog in the system. This provides a comprehensive view of the programs offered, as well as the individual sessions. With the clear navigation menu up top, leaders like you can easily explore the software.
CommunityPass uses the above features, as well as the following capabilities, to make pool and aquatic center management even easier.
With CommunityPass pool membership software, you’ll improve the way you manage sales, facility entry, marketing and communications, reporting, and more! When operations run smoothly, your pool can generate more revenue and you can focus on creating more programming that your community will love.