Last year, The SFP Trust and The Kilpatrick Fraser Charitable Trust (KFCT) set-up a new innovative Club IT and Sustainability fund to support Quality-Mark accredited community clubs who were interested in using technology to aid their growth and development.
Grants of £500 have been awarded to part-fund the start-up costs of web-based club management systems which are designed to enable real financial, resourcing and administrative benefits, addressing many of the challenges club volunteers face on a day-to-day basis.
Gartcairn Football Academy from Airdrie are the latest club to receive an award for ‘My Club Hub’ which is the club management system they have chosen to enhance their ongoing growth, development, sustainability, communication and governance strategies. The club’s Chairman, Robert McCallum commented; “MCH has been an absolute revelation for the academy and we cannot thank The KFCT and The Scottish Football Partnership Trust enough for the introductory funding. When I saw MCH many years ago I thought it wasn’t for the academy – we did gift-aid etc and it worked – so why fix something that wasn’t broken! This funding has allowed the academy to enter a trial period to test out the platform and all I can say is it’s really a game changer! For me personally, I now no longer have to spend a week collating gift-aid records to submit to HMRC every year, the system does all of this automatically for us now and its per month, not per year. We thought we might get some push back from some of the coaches but once they realised all of the administration, registration, gift-aid forms, declaration forms etc were now removed from their duties, they were all on board very quickly. With no real effort, I can easily say the academy is now bringing in well over £2,000 more per month than previously, all because of the MCH system.”