Digital membership cards, and why the water keeper likes them

Every club has a membership card, and every club has the same problem with it. The card says the person is a member. It does not say whether they are a member this year.

Ours were laminated. They looked the part, they cost the club real money to print and post every spring, and by June a fair number had been left in a coat, a tackle box or a car that had since been sold. The ones that survived could be from any year, because the year was printed small and nobody was going to squint at it on a riverbank at seven in the morning.

The problem is not the card

The person who actually uses a membership card is not the member. It is the water keeper who meets a stranger on the bank and has to decide, politely, whether they should be there.

What the keeper needs to know is one thing: is this person paid up? A laminated card cannot answer that. A photo of a laminated card on a phone cannot answer that. A name the keeper is fairly sure was on the list in March cannot answer that either, because the list in March was the list before eleven people quietly lapsed.

So keepers do what keepers have always done. They take the card at face value, and the club carries the insurance risk of someone fishing on a membership that ended two seasons ago.

What we changed

Our cards now live in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. When a member joins or renews they get a link, they tap it once, and the club's card goes into their phone with their photo and membership type on it. No app to install, no login, no password to forget.

Three things about that turned out to matter more than we expected.

It works with no signal. The card is on the phone, not on a website. On the stretches of the Boyne where there is no coverage at all, it opens the same way a boarding pass does at an airport. The keeper looks at it and moves on.

It renews itself. When the member pays for the new year, the card updates on its own. Nobody prints anything, nobody posts anything, and the colour changes so the keeper can tell this year's card from last year's at a glance. We use a different colour each season for exactly that reason.

It stops working when the membership does. A lapsed member's card shows as expired. The keeper does not need a list, and the club does not need the conversation about a card that looks fine and is not.

What the keeper actually says

We asked ours. The answer was not about the technology. It was that he no longer has to guess. He can see the photo, the year colour and the type of membership in a second, in bright light, with wet hands, and if he wants to look someone up there is a simple screen built for exactly that, with big buttons that work in gloves.

The other thing he said was that members had stopped arguing. It is hard to dispute an expired card when it says expired on it.

What we kept

Not every member has a smartphone, and a club that assumes they do will lose people who have been fishing its waters for forty years. So the club can still print a card for anyone who wants one, from the same record. The wallet card is the default because it keeps itself right. The printed one is there because nobody should be pushed out.

We also kept the photo. A card with no photo belongs to whoever is holding it, and the whole point was to know that it belongs to the person in front of you.

Was it worth it

We stopped paying for plastic and postage, which for 260 members was not nothing. But the real change was that the keeper's question got an answer. For the first time the club could say, on any day of the season, exactly who was entitled to be on the water, and the person standing on the bank could see it too.

We built Tadpole for our own club and other clubs asked for it. Five Irish clubs run on it today for renewals, membership records and day permits, with four more onboarding.

See how the cards work →