Clubs will now be well underway using the new club and class management system, Friendly Manager and over the coming months start to become familiar with the functions and portals of the National Database. It is a good time to consider the impact and opportunities that this new IT platform will provide.
The database project has been several years in planning and development and became a priority for several reasons. Gymnastics is one of the few sports in NZ that has experienced significant growth each year over the past decade. However, this has gradually placed increased demands on club administration and national body services resulting in a need for improved systems and processes for a better club and member experience. In addition, with IT platforms becoming common tools of everyday life it is becoming essential for organisations to keep up with the digital age.
Ultimately, once up and running, IT platforms such as Friendly Manager not only save administration time, and therefore money, they provide a better customer experience and members have more control over their membership registration and payments.
The National Database
Receiving the Gymnastics NZ club membership information via Friendly Manager creates a powerful database that will provide significant value to clubs and members. This is one of the first platforms of its type to be rolled out by a sport in NZ. We partnered with Sport NZ on the project which is now gaining interest in the wider sports sector.
Along-side a range of member services, the database becomes a powerful tool that can generate targeted information from the membership data. The value of this type of data insight (often referred to as ‘big data’) is transforming the nature of how businesses operate across the world. The ability for an organisation to develop insights from data enables better understandings of customer needs and retention, to then make better decisions to map their future direction more effectively.
The database will also be able to efficiently generate data to support project proposals and reporting for external stakeholders such as Sport NZ and funders. This information will be used at a national level but is able to be tailored specifically for clubs decision making and funding applications.
The rapid rise of this data generation has highlighted concerns around privacy. The development of the National database has taken privacy into consideration and any data analysis is purely demographic i.e. age, gender etc.
Gymnastics NZ is excited about the launch of the database and what it will be able to offer to the gymnastics community.