Busbridge Duplicate Bridge Club is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2017. The club currently has about 80 members and meets twice a week with around 8 tables.

Two main factors initially prompted us to look at Pianola:

• The management of our membership database.
• The publication of results.

Since we have started using Pianola, more people have been able to contribute to the running of the club

Before we adopted Pianola, the management of the membership database was problematic. We effectively had four different databases: the membership contact list in Excel; a printed Word list of members; a renewals list used by the membership secretary; and the ScoreBridge player database. There was no way to share these, nor to keep them synchronised, and nobody could be sure which one was the most up to date. In effect, we did not know for certain who our members were.

To address these challenges, we adopted Pianola in 2014. We started by using Pianola’s features for the management of our membership and for uploading our results.

We now have a reliable platform for membership administration, with one definitive database available 24/7 to the various people who need to access it. This has provided numerous benefits, including:

• Efficient management of renewals, for example to track the payments and send targeted reminders.
• Easy communication with members by email.
• Addressing any data protection concerns, since Pianola’s database is centralised and secure.

Any bridge club today should consider using Pianola

With the adoption of Pianola, we now have a much simpler and more reliable way to publish club results, and we benefit from the improved presentation and analysis provided by Pianola. Prior to this, we used to publish results to our own web site, but the procedure was technically complicated and error-prone. In addition, it took a considerable amount of time to set up each year’s results calendar.

Since we introduced Pianola, we have also started seeing a growing number of our players using Pianola’s partner finder feature.

Most recently, we have adopted Pianola’s web site builder. The previous site was leading-edge when built back in 2006, but it used technology that had become obsolete and was becoming ever more difficult to maintain. So having integrated Pianola’s results publication into our old web site, in 2016 we took the decision to fully migrate the club’s web site to Pianola.

Two of our members, who had no particular technical knowledge, were able to build the new website, which went live in April 2017. The key benefit is that we are now able to allow various people to keep the site informative and up-to-date, for example with news and events. In addition, the website fully integrates with Pianola’s results calendar and analysis.

Since we have started using Pianola, more people have been able to contribute to the running of the club (through publishing results, communicating with members, updating the website). We are less dependent on a small number of people and the work is distributed more widely across our members.

"Any bridge club today should consider using Pianola to make their club more attractive and easier to run." John Spiers, Busbridge Duplicate Bridge Club