Worthing Bridge Club has over 270 members. We adopted Pianola in 2015.

Before introducing Pianola, we used spreadsheets to manage our membership list, and BridgeWebs to handle the publication of results.

Worthing is an old club, with a fairly elderly membership. Our committee just about managed to use the spreadsheets. Very few people are computer literate here: we were using entirely paper records until 2010!

Pianola has made the process quicker, simpler and more reliable.

Managing the club membership was a complete nightmare before Pianola: there were three different spreadsheets, none of them was accurate and everyone had a different version. It was also very easy to delete or move something inadvertently… it was easy to mess up the whole thing!

When I came across Pianola, I thought it sounded like a very good idea. Pianola enables us to keep the records in a single place, everyone accesses the same record and committee members do not have to come down to the club to use the club computer: they can do it from home. It is also impossible to corrupt Pianola’s database.

Another important aspect of managing the club is chasing membership renewals. With the old spreadsheet system, the membership secretary used to have to print the members’ list for the directors who collected the fees. Pianola has made the process quicker, simpler and more reliable.

It looks good, it’s user friendly and it’s well worth the money

Before Pianola, we never sent emails to our players. We would usually send letters or put up notices on the club board, which people often missed. Pianola now makes it easier to communicate with our club members. Initially, many players were not keen to share their email address with the club. But gradually, people started hearing that Pianola was good and they realised that they liked receiving the results quickly in their inbox. Instead of hanging around the club at the end of the session, waiting for the results, they now go home, knowing that by the time they get there, the results will be waiting for them! So the majority of club members have now shared their email with us.

Recently, we have also started using Pianola’s website builder. It is much easier to use Pianola’s website, compared to BridgeWebs, because the results are uploaded automatically. We also used to have to upload data to the EBU and now we do not have to do that anymore - it’s done automatically!

"Pianola is easy to use and simple to update. It looks good, it’s user friendly and it’s well worth the money!" Alexa Baxter, Honorary Treasurer, Worthing Bridge Club