Newcastle District Hunting Club - Customer Story

Who Is Newcastle District Hunting Club?

The Newcastle District Hunting Club was established in 1997 in response to changes in Australia's gun laws. It offers a variety of services to its members. The club is police approved for hunting, target shooting, pistol shooting and collecting, allowing club members to meet the requirements for holding a firearms license.

It is also an approved hunting organisation, enabling its members to obtain a NSW Restricted Game license. Additionally, the club provides firearms safety training, hunting license testing, and target shooting events for rifles and pistols at a local range.

To better understand the Newcastle District Hunting Club's history and use of Member Jungle, John Howden, the Club's Secretary, came into the Member Jungle office so I could interview him about the club.

Watch the video here.

What Changed After The NDHC Joined Member Jungle?

Since joining Member Jungle, the NDHC has seen amazing membership growth and has saved a lot of time and money using our system. 

Since joining Member Jungle five years ago, the NDHC has seen a massive membership growth of 231%, including a 16% increase in membership in the 2023/24 financial year alone. 

Here’s John explaining that in his own words.

“That’s all been driven through the website, people just came to us in droves,” 

“We’re accessible, we have a good name out in the hunting and shooting community, but we’re visible; people can find us online through SEO. We keep our webpage fresh.”  

In that direct quote, John mentions that the NDHC is growing by about ten members a month. Well, we looked at the numbers for the past couple of years, and they are actually growing by an average of 18 members a month. 

As far as time and money savings are concerned, the NDHC has saved a lot by not having to print out and post plastic membership cards and paper membership renewals. 

Now, each year, when the NDHC’s members renew their memberships, the expiry date on their digital membership cards automatically updates so their members can use them as proof of compliance with the licencing requirements, they can simply generate new cards with new expiry dates at no extra cost, saving them literally thousands of dollars. 

John had this to say when asked how he, the other club administrators, and their members have found using the Member Jungle system. 

“From the club's point of view, from the Secretary's point of view and from our Treasurer's point of view, we’ve found it fantastic. It’s really easy to manage, easy to change content, easy to put stuff up on the site, and if anyone goes to our site they can see there’s tons of stuff on there. Members have found it good as well; we’ve made it fairly user-friendly, and they’ve come to terms with this is how we do business in the 21st century, and they’ve just adopted it and ran with it,” 

“The renewal system’s great. I’ve got it set up that 30 days out, they start getting their renewal reminders, and then I've got it staggered out so as we come closer to the end of the year, the renewal reminders are more frequent. It saves me a heap of time, I don't chase people. 650 members in the club, I don’t chase people for renewal reminders; they either renew or they don’t, but by far, the majority of our members will renew on time.”  

John had this to say when asked how he has found running club events through the Member Jungle Event Module. 

“It’s the only way to run events. I found it was so easy that they could not only book but they could actually pay for the event, which meant that I wasn’t handling cash. I’ve just implemented that as a standard practice across the club now. Any interactions we do with other clubs or other organisations where we’re paying them to use their facilities, it’s now just a simple bank transfer rather than a cash transaction,” 

“The other good thing is that I know beforehand how many members I’ve got turning up, so I don’t get any surprises with a million people turning, and I’ve got to work out who’s paid and who hasn't.”

Attendance Reporting 

One of the major time sinks for licensed gun clubs is the attendance and compliance reporting aspect, where members need to prove that they are meeting the minimum attendance requirements in order to keep their gun licences. 

The NDHC is now using the Member Jungle system so that its members can check their attendance rather than contact the club to get a copy of their attendance records, saving the club a lot of time. 

“Our attendance reporting tool that I put together was okay, but our members didn't have access to their input. So we put together an attendance report that links back to the membership database, so now they can see their own attendance. They don’t have to ring me up and say, ‘How many attendances do I have?’

“They can track their inputs, but more importantly for me, at the end of the year, when I’m doing my reporting, I can just do a data dump and bring down the CSV file, and I’ve got all the information in there,” John explained.