One of the most surprising outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic has been a boost in participation numbers for some Australian sports clubs. With lots of time for reflection and the desperate need to get outside of their four walls, many people have begun a new love affair with fitness and are making the most of sport, when Covid restrictions allow.
This trend is something the team ANU Sport and Recreation has witnessed. The organisation works with the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra to enhance the student experience through a holistic offering of sport, health, and wellbeing.
They oversee the university’s vast facilities, which include four grass ovals, four indoor basketball courts, several tennis courts, squash courts, a fully equipped gym, yoga studios, group fitness rooms and a dojo. They’re also in charge of ANU’s 33 sporting clubs, representing around 3,000 members.
Despite a fall in student numbers on campus this year, ANU Sport and Recreation says many of the university’s clubs have experienced growth. Even teams that were previously struggling have seen significant increases of new members sign up.
But there was a problem. Up until last December, ANU Sport and Recreation had been using Google Sheets to manage all of their club memberships. This was ineffective and unreliable. Their member information was littered with junk data, scattered in various locations, in different formats, and stuck behind long-forgotten passwords.
With their increasing popularity, they knew it was time to streamline. This is where Jonas Leisure came in with their innovative UniOne platform. UniOne is an industry standard student activity management tool, helping universities with membership, ticket sales, surveys, data storage, marketing, and much more.
After lots of shopping around, ANU Sport and Recreation came to the conclusion Unione was the platform for them. They began transferring all their membership data over at the end of last year, and now the majority of ANU’s sport clubs are using the platform.
ANU Sport and Recreation Sport Officer for Club Development, John Hukins, has been part of the switch over and has nothing but praise for UniOne.
“UniOne has been really well received by all that use it,” he said. “Once we’d trained everybody, all that people could talk about is how easy it is to use. You can do so many functions on it and now everything is in one place – it’s the epitome of a ‘one-stop-shop’. The data is also so much more secure, and every time we had a problem, Jonas Leisure was incredibly responsive and helped us through it quickly.
“It’s a particularly brilliant platform for universities because of their naturally high turnover. We can keep on top of things when people graduate and new students come in. And because we have so many different clubs with different needs, we’ve been able to tailor it depending on what these nuances are. For example, it’s worked just as well for our quidditch team, which is fairly new and has around 30 members, as it has for our well-established rugby team with hundreds of members.”
ANU Sport and Recreation plans to expand the use of UniOne across many other programs it manages.. Once fully established, they’re hoping to capitalise on its functions in other ways, such as using it to aid grant applications and help make sport more inclusive and accessible for students and the local community.
Mr Hukins added: “The big picture for us is to build upon our relationship with the university, so we can provide better offerings for students. We’re working hard on our diversity and inclusion policies so we can create more safe spaces in sport, improving access for all people and groups.
“This platform will help us to achieve this by giving us a bigger picture of our membership and helping us to reach out to them effectively. Thank you to Jonas Leisure for making our job so much more effective.”
