How do you move to an online booking system?

Local community venues are a crucial part of the fabric of civic life.

Community halls, churches, arts facilities and sports clubs enable our communities to create, play, meet and build connections by providing affordable access to spaces and equipment. But the processes that many venues use to manage their bookings make accessing these spaces harder than it needs to be, and the administrative burden on overstretched staff and volunteers can be huge.

If your venue is struggling with paper forms, drawn-out email threads about availability, and chasing unpaid invoices, then it’s definitely time to consider a technology solution that can make this considerably easier for both your team and your hirers. Moving to a new system can be daunting, particularly if you feel out of your comfort zone with technology or you’ve not managed a big change process before.

SpacetoCo has worked with hundreds of spaces like yours to transition them to better online bookings processes. We’ve created this guide to demystify the process of implementing a community venue booking system. Below, we will break the project down into simple stages and lots of examples and resources so that you feel confident to make this important transition and reap the benefits for your community venue.

Reduce cash holding risk/simply finances - Taking cash either in person, at the venue, or taking cash deposits to secure bookings or bonds creates a lot of risk for community venues. The cash deposits are a liability that may need to be returned if a booking gets canceled. Many venues have no easy way to see which cash is a liability and which is earned and can therefore be spent. An online venue booking system that holds funds until they can be paid out holds the liability on your behalf and means you only get the cash that can be spent.

For our full guide on what you should look for in an online venue booking system for community venues and some myth busting - check out our guide here.

What is the return on time investment from implementing an online venue booking system?

Depending on the volume and complexity of what needs to be transitioned, moving to an online venue booking system can be a 3-6 week project - although it usually only requires 4-6 hours of resourcing a week from your team over that period.

However, this time investment is repaid almost instantly when the system is live. You can expect to save time on the following tasks:

Delegate:

Data entry - your customers will enter their own bookings data
Cancellations & changes - your customers can request their own changes and cancellations
Availability checking & questions - your customers can self serve this information

Automate:

Emails - all repetitive emails should be automated e.g. You’re booking is confirmed
Bond process - have the system take and return the funds for you

Eliminate:

Invoicing - never create or chase an invoice again
Credit notes - not required any more!
100’s of reconciliations in your accounting system

There are lots of online venue booking systems out there that range from free widgets that you can add to your website to more comprehensive solutions. When making your assessment, it can be a good idea to to have a list of things that are important to your organisation so that you can score each option objectively as you do your research. Here’s a download of some recommendations for what features and requirements other community venues look for to help you determine what’s important to your specific needs.

In some venues with small teams, getting to a decision about moving to an online venue booking system can be easily agreed and action taken. But many larger venues like community centres, arts facilities, rural halls and churches need to get approval from a lead team, board or committee.

As the champion of the change, you will need to ensure that the stakeholders who need to understand and agree to the change are all well informed and in favour - otherwise this project will never get off the ground!

1. Identify your main stakeholders

Typically in a community venue organisation these fall into the following categories. Some people may fall into multiple categories.

Decision Maker - The person/people who have the final say and authority to make the decision and ultimately sign a contract with whichever platform you decide to use. These people often have control on the budget.
End Users - The person/people who will be most impacted as they will have to change from their old processes to using the new system. The most obvious end user is your current bookings officer, administrator or secretary. However, you may have less obvious end users e.g. Custodians and Volunteers.
Customers - People who have bookings with you or regularly make bookings. The customers most impacted by the change are likely to be your regular hirers as they may be very used to ‘the way it’s always been done’ and have no desire to change.
Influencers - The people who also have a stake in the decision making process e.g. your treasurer, the person who manages your IT or your finances person.
Champion - That’s probably you! This is the person who who pushes for the change and commits to getting the resources, budget and approval to make it happen.

2. Bring them along on the journey

Once you have identified and named your stakeholders, you can then plan for how you will involve them in the process and keep them informed (and hopefully get their support!)

As an example:

Name and role	Stakeholder	How to involve
Kerry - Bookings Administrator	End User	Get a wish list of what they would like from the new system Get feedback on a shortlist of software options and include them in any demos
Riya - Chairperson	Decision Maker	Present a case for change at a committee meeting and get approval to search for potential solutions Agree a timeline and budget upfront Get feedback on what outcomes are required to make the project a success for the organisation Create a business case showing return on investment and the rationale for the software you selected. Arrange a meeting with a centre that has moved to the system you’re recommending to get a referral and lessons learned
David - Regular Hirer	Customer	Interview for feedback on current process and how it could be improved Communicate the venue’s desire to transition to an online venue booking system early Share any video content of the chosen solution that helps show the benefit of more self service options. Give plenty of notice and communication when action is required SpacetoCo has this resource to help communicate to regular hirers who’s bookings are moving to SpacetoCo
Karen - Accountant	Influencer	Arrange a demo with shortlisted software providers to get feedback on how the change will impact financial processes.

3. Create a business case document

To help your lead team or committee make a decision, we recommend that the change you want to make is summed up in a business case document. This should clearly state:

the need for change
The investment required (i.e. how much it costs upfront and ongoing)
The return on investment for the centre (e.g. cost savings or revenue growth)
A rough plan and timelines

As part of our consultation process, SpacetoCo helps centers by creating a business case to take to their committee. Here is an example document for a fictional centre! We designed our business model to make it easy for centers to get an agreement for the change so that:

There is almost no upfront cost or budget required to move to our platform
The fees are only paid on revenue that comes through the platform - therefore the costs are easy to calculate from your existing annual revenue
We aim to be a net-zero cost to your organization. We only need to increase your revenue by 15% for SpacetoCo to be effectively free. Most venues see increases of between 10-30% - but we have seen as high as 300%!

4. Get the change agreed and documented

Ensure the proposed change project is on the agenda for exec/committee meeting with plenty of time for discussion and feedback. It may take two meetings to get the change agreed if there are lots of questions to answer.

If you get the change approved, make sure you are clear on:

Who needs to review and sign any formal documentation e.g. licences or a contract.
Who is responsible for procuring the software and delivering the project e.g. who is the Project Manager?
What the timeline and budget is for the project

Before the project kicks off it can be helpful to get clear on the goals and milestones that you are working towards. This makes it much easier to communicate status and progress back to the stakeholders you identified earlier. It can also be a way to rally team members towards being motivated to change.

Goal Setting

We recommend choosing no more than 3 goals for your project. Below is a list of typical goals that community venues choose from:

The time to manage a booking has reduced

The success rate of invoice payment has increased

The cash holding liability has reduced

The number of brand new users booking our center has increased

The amount of time to process and return a bond has decreased

The number of people visiting the center has increased

The hours of utilization have increased

The revenue from bookings has increased

The time to process a cancellation and refund has decreased

The amount of enquiries that don’t convert to a booking has decreased

Baselining and setting targets

When you have chosen goals that are relevant to the mission and purpose of your organisation, it’s important to baseline a key data point for the goal and set a rough target for what it will look like to successfully achieve the goal. Although the information may be hard to come by, it will make it very easy to track whether you’re making a difference with the implementation of the software.

For goals that relate to utilisation and revenue, it’s good to use an annual sum or an average as the baseline comparison. This is because there can be significant fluctuation month to month in community venues due to school holidays.

For goals that relate to a process improvement, this can be measured by logging the time it takes to do the process currently and coming up with a rough average.

Communicating Goals

Committing to reporting on goals quarterly to the decision makers is a good way to keep yourself accountable for tracking the goals. It can also be fun to make the goals very visible e.g. in the office so that everyone can see progress.

We’ve outlined the typical stages that are required to transition a community venue to an online venue booking system and the approximate timelines that you can expect. These stages begin after you have got an agreement to start the project and you have selected the system that you will be using.

We’ve used an example community venue to illustrate the plan timelines as a point of reference for your venue:

Kate Sheppard Community Centre

8 bookable spaces within the venue	2 spaces are moderately complex e.g. they split into two child spaces	20 regular hirers
3000 bookings a year roughly	3 people that manage the bookings part time	4-6 hours a week, they have a resource who can focus on the project

The below factors have a direct correlation with timelines to transition to online bookings

the number of regular hirers
the number of spaces
the complexity of spaces
the complexity of charges
the volume of bookings to transfer over
the number of legacy pricing, refunds, credit notes, and discounts
the degree to which your team or customers feel nervous about learning new software
the amount of time a dedicated resource can spend on the tasks that need to be done
the amount of help, coaching, and support you get from the software vendor

The timelines given are an indication of the elapsed time of the project. It should only require 4-6 hours a week of actual time spent by your team. The typical times to transition to different community venues are as follows:

The 5 stages to transitioning to an online venue booking system

Here is an example of a Gantt chart to show you a typical timeline for transitioning to online bookings:

Activity	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5	Week 6	Week 7
Prepare for the change (1 week) Hold a kick-off meeting to align the key people who will be involved on timelines and what’s expected of them. Gather all the information you will need to start setting up your spaces in the new system Get clear on your rate card and any exceptions Undertake any training to use the system
Build your online spaces (2 weeks) Do the basic account setup. Enter all the photos and descriptions for your spaces Set up the policies, rules, and configurations Preview and test them
Invite Customers (2 weeks) Create a list of impacted hirers Create communications to inform them of what’s changing, the benefits, and what they need to do to register Send the comms to customers, start tracking and chasing Approve registrations and bookings
Sync Availability (1 week) Enter availability blackouts e.g. holiday closures Enter internal bookings Enter regular hirer bookings Enter known casual bookings Check availability against the old system Share new calendars with stakeholders e.g. custodians
Go Live! (1 day) Publish any updates to your existing website e.g. redirect or turn on new booking software Redirect phone/email enquiries to new online bookings Celebrate the change!

Who needs to be involved?

Project Manager - this is the person that is responsible for delivering the change to the online venue booking system. In a community venue, it is typically the GM or a nominated bookings administrator. In smaller venues like sports clubs or rural halls, it may be a committee member.

The PM is responsible for:

Creating and communicating the plan
Allocating out the tasks
Getting trained on the system
Managing relationship with the vendor
Finalizing rate cards
Building the spaces and configuring them
Getting IT and Accounts support when required

End-User - The person/people who will be managing the bookings. They may also be project managing the project as well if it’s a small team or venue!

The end-user is responsible for:

Getting trained on the system
Contacting and chasing customers
Gathering customer bookings and pricing data
Entering bookings

Customer - The casual and regular hirers who have bookings with the venue

The customer is responsible for:

Registering to use the system
Checking bookings have correctly moved over

Software vendor - The role the vendor plays in your project will depend on the software product you have selected. At a minimum, they should provide online support and guidance to implement the tool.

This stage typically takes a week and helps you prep and set up for a successful transition.

1. Hold a kick off meeting to align the key people who will be involved on timelines and what’s expected of them

This meeting should involve the PM, the end-users, and if appropriate the software vendor.

A typical agenda for this meeting is:

Recap the goals of the project
Share the plan and timelines
Agree on key dates and who will need to deliver key tasks
Raise any risks
Go through any questions and concerns
Share any key resources e.g. links to training.

2. Gather all the information you will need to start setting up your spaces in the new system

Create a centralized document e.g. a spreadsheet that has all the information you will need to set up your venue and bookable spaces in the new system. This would involve collating key information like:

names & descriptions for spaces
inclusions & exclusions
rules
terms and conditions
photos and videos
policies e.g. cancellation

You cannot easily calculate a basic hourly rate for your spaces
You have too many different pricing variations
You have many legacy rates for regular hirers
You offer bespoke pricing
You don’t have a rate card

We have developed a toolkit to help you simplify and clarify your rate card. This short video course helps you learn how to create a rate card. It's an excerpt from our onboarding but will be useful to any space wanting to set up a robust rate card for casual and regular hires. You can download the toolkit mentioned in the course here.

4. Undertake any training to use the system

Although simple systems are usually pretty intuitive, it’s a good idea to commit a few hours to explore and learn from any available online training. It will help you get the most out of the system you are paying for, will be a helpful reference point if you get stuck and a key resource for training new staff.

SpacetoCo offers both free online training and facilitated options, depending on what’s best for your organization. We recommend getting a demo of our system first, but if you’re super keen you can explore our product by taking our online training. It takes about 1-2 hours to complete.

1. Do the basic account set up.

This will involve deciding key things like where booking notifications go, adding in your organization's details, and setting up your users' accounts.

2. Enter all the names, photos and descriptions for your spaces

This step is obviously dependent on how many spaces you have and how complex they are. Photos are a really important part of an online venue hire page as they help a customer visualize your space and can often prevent a lot of avoidable questions.

3. Set up the policies, rules and configurations

The software system should allow you to configure settings for how a space should accept bookings and what rules to apply. These configurations will include settings like:

Your cancellation policy e.g. how many days up to a booking can a customer cancel
Your refund policy - what % refund is returned on cancellation
Your minimum booking time e.g. 1 hour or 4 hours
Whether you have a bump in/out applied to a booking
What additional extras are charged with the space

Now your venue and spaces are set up, you will need to start getting your customers ready to have their bookings entered. The most important thing to remember for this step is that you’re asking your customers to go through a change process. Some people are resistant to change or are nervous about using new technology. Therefore we recommend that you spend time making sure you have good communication prepared to give simple, clear information and instructions. Your communications should also focus on the benefit to the customer when the system is implemented e.g. they will no longer have to ring up the centre to check availability or cancel.

When you prepared your charges in an earlier step, you may have needed to make changes to the rates for your hirers. This may have been to simplify them, standardize them or just increase them if they have remained static for many years. If your regular users have been impacted by this change, you may also need to communicate these pricing changes as well when you inform them of the system changes.

Lastly, some community venues also use the transition to an online venue booking system to ‘correct’ undesirable behaviors that may have cropped up over time. Examples of this can include:

Block booking space and not inform center when it’s not been used until the invoice is raised
Waiting too late to query an invoice
Late payment of invoices
Booking multiple spaces then canceling what is not used

A refresh in the system can lead to a silver bullet to fix poor behavior - as ‘computer says no’ is an easier conversation to have. You can use the communication process for the shift to the new system to refresh your policies and what will and will not be allowed going forwards.

Regular hirers are people who have frequent (e.g. weekly) bookings and usually pay monthly by an invoice for their bookings. Their booking schedule will usually be fixed a year in advance and they often have reduced rates and the same space in your venue.

Examples: A yoga class teacher or an AA group.

Recommendations for transitioning regular hirers

For many centres, regular hirers make up the majority of the bookings and as their schedules are fixed in advance, we recommend that you invite these customers first.
These customers are your VIPs and will face the most change when you transition as they will likely have to manage bookings in an online account, rather than face to face or using paper invoices. These people will require the most effort to help them transition through the change.
Given that regular hirers have a high volume of bookings, we recommend that your team initially sets up and enters their bulk booking template to retain control.
You will need to decide on a cut-off date between your current invoicing process and moving to your new system. The end of a month is usually the neatest and easiest way to do this.

Casual hirers are people who book infrequently e.g. 1-2 times a year. They usually pay upfront and may need a security bond.

Examples: Kids' birthday parties or AGM

Recommendations for transitioning casual hirers

For casual hirers, the way that their bookings are transitioned will depend on how you currently manage these payments. We recommend that, because these bookings are usually simpler and lower volume, you ask your customers to enter and pay for these bookings in the new system.

Part paid casual bookings - request to re-confirm booking and complete payment in the new system and issue a discount code for the deposit paid.
Unpaid casual bookings - issue a request to confirm by booking and paying in the new system.
Fully paid up casual bookings - your team add in as a manual booking in the new system

For casual bookings where you are requesting that they confirm and book in the new system, make sure you give them a clear deadline by which you can hold the slot they booked.

How to invite your customers to get on board with the change

1. Create a list of impacted hirers

It’s really useful to have a list of your known regular hirers and impacted future casual booking customers so that you can easily keep track of where they are in the process of transitioning their bookings. It will also make it easy to quickly access their contact details when you send out the communications.

This spreadsheet template can be used to enter and keep track of your customers.

2. Create communications to inform them of what’s changing, the benefits and what they need to do to register

This step depends on several different factors as to how you should communicate the change.

If you don’t have many existing customers or you know that they will be flexible and welcoming of the change, then creating a simple email template should suffice.

If you have a high volume of customers, and some are likely to be unwelcoming of the change, then it’s a good idea to spread the communications out across a series of emails. It’s a good idea to plan the dates you will send these comms and prepare all these emails in advance.

Whatever you decide to do, you should include the following:

Explain the change
Explain the benefits to the center and the customer
If possible, show an example of a similar center or customer who is already benefiting
Explain clearly what they need to do (e.g. register)
Explain what will happen next
Give a clear deadline and consequence for not taking action
Say a big thank you for their ongoing usage and support of their venue
Make it clear how they can ask questions or get support

Email is usually the fastest way to communicate the change and action required -especially if you have many customers. However, you can also consider the following ideas as well.

Have printed info sheets at receptions
Posters up around the venue
Post on Facebook
Call customers directly

3. Send the comms to customers, start tracking and chasing

Using the list of customer contacts and the prepared emails, sending these comms out should be a breeze!

As you see customers take action e.g. registering or sending in casual booking requests, you should keep your spreadsheet up to date. This means it will be really easy to see your progress and filter on people who have yet to take action and need a chase up.

In our experience, about 10-30% of customers need a phone call or a chase to take action.

SpacetoCo gives you the ability to track your regular hirer applications and status in the tool. You can even see what fields they are yet to fill out, which makes it so much easier to support them through the process. See a video of this in action!

It’s the final step before you can switch on your shiny new online venue booking system and start reaping the benefits of automation and improved processes. One of the biggest efficiency gains from an online venue booking system is that customers can check the availability of your spaces themselves. This is a game-changer as it removes the need for the back and forth emails on when space might be available.

To make this possible, you need to have your availability up to date and accurate in the new system so that you’ll feel confident to accept bookings as they come in. For the first few weeks, you may want to keep your old calendar close by to double-check, but in not too long, you will build trust with the new system and feel confident to burn that wall chart/bookings book or turn off the old calendar.

Here’s how we recommend you get your availability synced up in the new online venue booking system:

Enter availability blackouts e.g. holiday closures
Enter internal bookings
Enter regular hirer bookings
Enter known casual bookings (that are already paid)

This sounds like a lot of effort - but a good online booking system should have features that make it very easy to add in large volumes of bookings.

Here’s an example of how regular hirer bookings get entered into the SpacetoCo system.

SpacetoCo also enables integration with Office 365 to pull over all your internal bookings. Read more about how that works here.

If your existing regular or casual hire customers have not completed their actions and you cannot get live bookings in the system, you can enter a manual blockout and set a calendar reminder to remove this if they fail to get back to you by a deadline.

When you’ve entered everything in the above list start checking it to make sure you’ve captured everything.

1. Check availability against old system

If your old system was paper-based e.g. a diary, then unfortunately this will just mean rolling up your sleeves and checking your online calendar week by week with your paper-based calendar.

If you used a calendar like Google Cal or Outlook, your new online venue booking system may enable a side-by-side comparison that makes this much quicker.

2. Share new calendars with stakeholders e.g. custodians

You may have stakeholders (e.g. custodians or volunteers) who don’t need access to your main online venue booking system but do need to know what’s going on. Some online venue booking systems will allow you to publish your calendars so that others can view them on their own device. You will need to share these calendars with your team so that they also benefit from the new online venue booking system.

Here’s how that process works on SpacetoCo

1. Publish any updates to your existing website e.g. redirect or turn on new booking software

Depending on how your booking software connects to your existing website you will likely need to do one of the following.

If it’s a platform like SpacetoCo, you just need to add URL links from your website to your new venue and spaces on SpacetoCo and press the big Go Live button. You may also need to turn off existing booking form requests.

If it’s a platform that integrates into your website, it’s likely you’ll be working with a developer to do this.

2. Redirect phone/email enquiries to new online bookings

Now you have an online venue booking system - it’s time to use it. We recommend doing the following to make sure all new enquiries get funned through to the new system.

Set up an out of office email that instructs all new enquiries to check availability and book online
Put a big ‘Book Online’ link in your email signature
Create an email template that you can re-use to redirect email enquires to the new system
Change your voicemail so that people know they can book online
Add a book now button to Facebook and connect it to your new booking system.
Get business cards and a poster printed with a QR code to direct people to your new bookings pages.