Somerset Leisure Trust

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Somerset Leisure Trust - case study

For us, one of the benefits of becoming a not for profit Trust was the opportunity to establish our own ICT system, allowing us to take full advantage of Gladstone’s add-on products.

We had been using Gladstone for around 10 years, and although we had the latest Plus2 software, we were unable to use a number of the additional products offered by Gladstone within our existing ICT infrastructure.

When Somerset Leisure Trust was formed in August 2009 we made the choice to set up our own ICT system and selected an IT partner to manage our IT infrastructure, this included our membership software system. Gladstone undertook a major cleanse and archiving project on all of our old data before building a bespoke system for our 13 leisure facilities.

Operating as a Trust has given us the autonomy and flexibility to develop our own systems, including our own website, social media tools, finance packages and even an intranet for staff communications. We can now act more commercially and rapidly develop the business in the areas that need attention in order to meet the needs of our customers.

Part of this strategy was implementing Gladstone’s reporting tool, Tableau. Gladstone has enabled bespoke reports based on our KPIs and other areas we need to monitor across our sites. These include DNA profiles of our users, such as ethnicity, age, disability. We can even join reports together to show areas such as attendance, block bookings and online booking, based against sales figures. This gives us the ability to efficiently gauge what’s popular and even drill down to see exactly who it’s popular with so that we can then target our marketing more effectively.

Modern marketing methods are something we need to offer our customers, and we’re really getting involved with social media, sites such as Facebook, as well as text message marketing campaigns. We can download the data from Gladstone to do this, ensuring the right messages get to the right people. For instance, we can target parents that have used our summer clubs with holiday activity information.

The reports are also helping us to make our systems more effective, by pointing out which customers have missing information, such as a phone number or date of birth.

Despite undergoing a rebrand, we have carried out a soft launch of Connect, allowing online booking and payments for our racquet sports and all fitness classes. So far we see around 500 bookings a month. We’re now in project phase for allowing online membership purchases, as well as investigating entry kiosks for a new multi million pound leisure centre being built in Bridgwater, of which we are the preferred Leisure Operator.

Heather Lang, Head of Business Services, Somerset Leisure Trust

Categories: General | Plus2 | Connect | Case Studies

Published in: Gladstone Newsletter - September 2011

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