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Rolling out a booking system in your club without half the members still asking in the group chat
Dispoly Team
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The decision is made, the login works, and the secretary has spent an evening entering every room and vehicle. Two weeks later, someone is back in the group chat asking whether the hall is free on Saturday.
The rollout is often where it goes wrong. Switch everything over at once, send a single email to everyone, and you end up with a system that looks good and stays empty.
If you haven't chosen a system yet, the criteria in Choosing a booking system for your club will help.
Pick the resource that causes the most arguments or questions. Usually that is the main room in the clubhouse, the minibus or the hall.
Move that one over and everyone sees straight away that something has changed. Start with the projector that four people borrow a year and nobody will notice.
The rest follow once this one is running. Even if everything is already set up, only this one goes on the booking page and into the announcement for now. What that looks like day to day for a clubhouse is covered in the post on clubhouse bookings.
For the first few weeks, leave out anything that makes booking fiddlier or setup slower:
You can add both later, although new custom fields need the Team plan once the trial is over. Starting with everything and trimming later is harder: if the first booking means wading through a long form, people go back to phoning.
Every club has one or two people who keep the whole schedule in their heads: who uses what, and when. In a fire department it is often the equipment officer.
Talk to them before you announce anything, and ask two things: which parts would take work off your plate, and what could go wrong?
That is how you hear about the special cases no spreadsheet mentions, such as the men's choir always needing the hall from 6 pm because setting up takes a while. And the person everyone used to ask keeps that role without having to answer every question personally.
If all they hear is that their list is now redundant, they'll be telling everyone at the club bar that the old way was better.
By default, every booking needs approval: "Require admin approval for reservations" is ticked on every new category, including categories the import creates. That is the right setting for the start. The board still decides, just not in the chat any more.
So make the person who keeps the calendar the point of contact in Dispoly too. In "Settings", add them with "Add Contact" and enter their email address, then select them in the "Contact Person" field on the resource. New requests then land in their inbox. For them to confirm requests as well, they need an account with the "Admin" role.
If the contact has no email address, no email goes out, not even to the "Default Contact Person". That is easy to miss with contacts created by the resource import, because they only get a name until you add the address.
Agree with that person how quickly requests get answered and who steps in during holidays, because they are the only one who gets the email. A pending request blocks the slot for everyone else and doesn't expire on its own. Dispoly doesn't send a reminder about it either, so someone left waiting three days will be back asking in the chat.
Whatever the spreadsheet holds for this resource belongs in the system, at least the current year and the next. From the day of the import, retire the old list. Otherwise people keep writing things in both places and nobody knows which one counts.
In Dispoly you do this by importing a CSV or Excel file (.xlsx): resources first, then reservations. If the resource is already in Dispoly, you only need the second step, as long as the name in the spreadsheet matches exactly. Before you import, the free booking check shows whether the old spreadsheet contains overlapping bookings.
Anything that isn't one person's booking goes in as a blocked period: training sessions, closures, drill night in the training room. If they repeat, see recurring blocked periods.
Create the blocked periods before you import the reservations, because if you add them later, Dispoly won't warn you about bookings that fall inside them. If they are in place first, the import skips those bookings and lists them with the reason "Falls within a blocked period". "Download skipped rows" gives you a file of those rows to sort out.
Keep an eye on the "Status" column in your spreadsheet. If it is empty, future dates come in as pending requests, because approval is on by default. Enter "confirmed" for everything that has already been promised. Otherwise you will be confirming each date one by one afterwards, and every time an email goes out to the imported address.
An import can't be undone. Afterwards you can only cancel or reject imported reservations one at a time, and each of those sends an email too. So take your time over the preview before you click "Import … rows". The full walkthrough is in From Excel to a booking calendar.
There is no link until an admin creates a page under "Booking Pages" and selects the resource. That is where you get the link, the embed code and the PDF with the QR codes. Members book through it without an account.
Before you share the link, have whoever has been keeping the calendar make a test booking through the page. That way you see what members see, and whether the request email reaches them. Afterwards, reject the test request with the reason "Test".
Google doesn't list the page, so only people with the link can get there. Put it wherever people have been asking:
If someone still asks in the chat whether Saturday is free, reply with the link instead of "yes". This matters most for the person everyone used to ask. As long as people get their answers in the chat, they have no reason to check for themselves.
The announcement should say what changes for people: where they check whether something is free, and how they request it. A draft you can adapt:
From now on you can see online when the clubhouse is free and request it directly: [link]
No account, no app. Enter your name and email, confirm the request with the code or link from the email, and that's it. The board still gives the go-ahead as before, but now it comes by email.
Prefer to phone? Keep phoning, and we'll book it for you.
Don't cut the line about phoning. It takes the pressure off, and after a few weeks hardly anyone calls anyway.
When someone phones, enter the booking in Dispoly with "Reserve" on the resource and put the caller's name in the note. The booking is made under your account, so the confirmation and the reminder go to you. As long as the resource requires approval, you will also have to confirm your own entry first.
Beyond that, you don't need to think about reminders. 24 hours before every confirmed booking starts, the person who booked gets an email. Only people who book less than 24 hours ahead don't get one.
Don't leave choosing a plan until then. The trial runs for 30 days from the day you created your organization, not from the day you announce it. If it ends without a plan, the booking page stops taking bookings, and nobody can book or confirm requests in Dispoly itself either.
Once people are booking through the link, take the next steps:
Watch for two things: whether the question "Is Saturday free?" disappears from the group chat, and whether people who were never on the board are booking. Under "Reservations" you can see who booked.
If the same two people are still entering everything after four weeks, either the link is too hard to find or requests sit around too long. You can fix both in one evening: move the link somewhere more visible, and settle once more who answers requests, and how fast.
Start with one resource, talk first to the people who have been looking after it, and make them the point of contact in Dispoly. Bring over the current bookings and retire the old list. Put the link where people used to ask, and keep the line about phoning in the announcement. More resources and looser approvals come after four weeks.
What else Dispoly does for clubs is on the solutions page for clubs.
Trying it costs nothing: no contract, no setup fee, 30 days free.