Bristol Bridge Club is one of the pioneers of Pianola services, which we adopted over five years ago.

Our club is quite large: we have over 600 members. Before Pianola, we were using spreadsheets: it was difficult to manage such a number of members without specialist tools. Spreadsheets took us a long time and offered no personal service.

The new website makes our life much easier

This is what prompted us to look at Pianola, which has a much better way to manage our large membership. Pianola creates personalised messages, addressed to each individual, reflecting their specific circumstances.

For instance, our club has recently become a charity. This process entailed collecting information, forms and payments from our members. Pianola made it easy to keep track of who had done what, and we could send tailored reminders, without sending generic emails to everybody.

Some of our members do not use emails, but this is not a problem, because Pianola also prints out personalised letters; all we have to do is put them in an envelope and post them.

The membership management is one of the key benefits we get from Pianola: all data are kept in one secure place. We do not have to worry about synchronising spreadsheets or about complying with the Data Protection Act: Pianola does it all for us.

It is intuitive and straightforward to use!

We also use Pianola to keep our members up to date with events coming up at the club; we find that players are more likely to turn up at the club than before, thanks to the reminders.

The vast majority of our members are not IT literate and they are not keen on using technology products. However, we received good feedback from them: most have shared their information on the database and have signed up to receive the emails. In particular, our members really enjoy getting their results quickly after the session, and many make the most of Pianola’s analytical features. Some players go through the hands with their partners on the phone, looking at Pianola’s screens, and like comparing what everybody else did.

In 2015, we were one of the first clubs to start using Pianola’s website builder. We used to have our own website, but we decided to switch to Pianola’s version because uploading results and pay-to-play files was complicated and time consuming on our previous system. The new website makes our life much easier, as all these data are now uploaded automatically. We found the website easy to build and use, even for those who had no previous experience of working with websites!

"Pianola offers capabilities that did not exist in bridge before. It is intuitive and straightforward to use!" Sue O’Hara (Committee Member) and Mike Forrest (Membership Secretary), Bristol Bridge Club