March 2022 will mark one year since we launched a partnership with Penwortham Priory Academy, a coeducational secondary school located in Penwortham, Lancashire. As with several other partners, launching during the pandemic brought its own set of challenges, but when a window of opportunity presented itself with the easing of lockdown, the school went live on pitchbooking.com, receiving over 1000 bookings and generating over £200,000 in revenue over the course of the year.
The School hosts 19 facilities on Pitchbooking, 4 of which are instantly bookable online by members of the public. These include a full-size 3G pitch, Netball Courts and the Sports Hall, which doubles as Badminton or Table Tennis Courts. By choosing to make these facilities available for online booking, Penwortham is able to provide essential leisure services to the surrounding community. The 3G pitch in particular is used to run local leagues, provide weekly training sessions for local clubs and offer casual bookings to local residents on an ad hoc basis.
The remaining 15 facilities include internal school halls, classrooms & offices that are managed internally by staff. These facilities are only available for internal bookings. The ability to control what facilities are live to the public and what ones remain under internal management was a key driver in Penwortham’s decision to start using Pitchbooking. It’s just one of many ways Schools can use Pitchbooking to protect their facilities and provide safeguarding measures for those who attend.
We spoke to Keith Bolton, Strategic Estates Development Manager at the school, to get some feedback on his experience using Pitchbooking so far.
“At the school, I manage the Estates Team to make sure our facilities are the best they can be for all users of our site. This is for our school pupils and also the wider community that utilise our facilities outside of school hours. We hire out our football pitches & netball courts, as well as other large spaces (Assembly Hall, Drama Room etc. ) for choirs, fitness classes or religious groups.”
So why Pitchbooking?
“Pitchbooking offered us greater flexibility for our users and offered an instant payment system using debit/credit cards, helping us remove the need for cash payments to be taken.”
Processing cash payments is a heavy burden on both administrative and finance teams. It’s probably the biggest problem we help our Partners solve and it’s why many of our features are designed to simplify this process.
- Instant payments via secure online checkout
- Automated payment plans for block bookings
- Online payment links for invoices
- All payment information gathered in one dashboard
The Payment Link feature was actually developed based on feedback from Penwortham and how they were adapting the system to further streamline their processes. As a company, Pitchbooking is product-focused and customer-led, and this is just one of many examples where a customer has had a direct impact on the development of a new feature.
Penwortham did not use any software before Pitchbooking so there was a period of transition for Keith and the team.
“During this period, we started fresh with hiring out our 3G. This was the first year we had offered this facility for online booking, so we had to learn how our bookers use the facilities and what they expect while also offering an easy booking system. As with all new products, we went through a learning curve to understand how the software could work best for us and our school environment.”
Ensuring that the software works best for each of our Partners is essential to our onboarding process. We partner with all types of facility owners, from schools to local authorities to commercial centres, and we know that every facility owner operates differently.
We worked with Keith to ensure his facilities were set up to maximise online revenue while also highlighting the protections available to restrict access and retain control over the online availability of slots. Penwortham stressed the importance of retaining control over booking access due to the facilities being located on school property and also that the required safeguarding measures be met at all times.
“There are some areas that only our staff can book for hirers (classrooms etc.) and there are other areas that the public can book for themselves such as the 3G football pitches. At our school, we have created a time period blocked out to the school which then restricts anyone from booking these slots during the school day.”
What has been the most useful feature for you and the team?
“There are a few features that are very useful for our team: the daily calendar, online payment & subscriptions, analytics and the ease of invoicing.”
All of the features listed by Keith come as standard with the Pitchbooking dashboard. These features are some of the most popular among all of our customers and the booking teams who use them see a huge reduction in admin time along with happier bookers across the board.
How has Pitchbooking changed the booking process for the regular hirers of Penwortham facilities?
“Most of our regular hirers we manually book ourselves, but we have now been able to offer them additional payment facilities such as using debit cards for these regular users. One big area this has worked well for us is for our football league that we run. Teams are now able to pay automatically on a weekly basis which has greatly reduced any debtors we have who would have previously paid with cash. All these teams are on a subscription period with automatic payment attached to their account.”
Pitchbooking enables facility owners to provide a seamless experience for both their bookers and staff.
To learn more about how Pitchbooking can help you, visit our solution page or contact us at info@pitchbooking.com