UKC

Hope this is the best forum to use, I thought club members are more likely here.

I'm seeking comments from club members about how they pay their club subs.  

My mountaineering association, with about 600 members, has its members paying annual subs by bank transfer or standing order and I am heavily involved in the processing of this. We usually get quite a few payment issues such as being made for the wrong amount or not being able to identify who the payment is for, especially when one member pays for several others. So instead we are looking at using direct debit via a third party company, but some members are reluctant.

Do any of you pay club subs by direct debit, apart from to the BMC? If so what is your experience in terms of the communication you get? 

If there are any club treasurers reading this whose club uses DD, how do you set up your DD in a secure way that reassures your members that the mandates and payment requests are genuine?

Just asking for ideas about how others have done it and any issues they faced. 

Have you thought about paypal?  I pay some subscriptions (including Edale mountain rescue) through a regular monthly paypal payment.  Not sure how easy it is to set up from your side or what it would cost you but might be worth looking into.  And, of course some people will not have paypal.

My club uses GoCardless DD. Email reminder every year that people can stop payments if they want.

Also used for hut meetpayments....attendees email that they accept money can be taken for a meet.

The CC uses a manual direct debit system and the NMC use Go Cardless (or at least used to).

Rather than trying to find a system which will work for everyone to replace cheques/ bank transfers my recommendation would be to find a straightforward system to deal with the majority and make things easy to get right for them and to use cheques in parallel to this (younger people who have never seen/ owned a cheque book will be less likely to have concerns about a direct debit is my perception).

That's the same system we are looking at. When we tested it with me as a 'customer' I was not too impressed with the emails I got from GoCardless asking me to set up a mandate. Any text mentioning our association name was rather swamped by stuff from GoCardless (which I would have thought should be keeping a low profile).

The very last confirmation page had text to the effect that the mandate was set up in very small text but with a big button saying 'Get Started'. When I pretended to be naive and clicked it, Gocardless to ok me to a page expecting me to open a new account as a merchant! As such, with my sceptic's hat on I probably would have simply deleted the email assuming it was a scam.

But if others have found it reliable...

Yes, that's a good point

I've been using GoCardless to collect subs and other payments for a 1500-member classic car owners club for a couple of years now.  We have around 60% of the membership on DD's.

Found it pretty effective and much cheaper than any of the alternatives Paypal in particular costs around £1.50 to collect our £39.50 sub, GoCardless is £0.60 net of VAT.  It's online only which can be a problem for some members.

I ran a trial with the Committee members first collecting £1.00 off them all.

Happy to discuss my experience further if that was useful.

Thank you David, I might get back to you later.