This post talks about repurposing SailEvent to keep track of all visitors to a club and not just those who are actually sailing.
To support NHS Test & Trace sailing clubs must maintain a record of all those visiting their premises including club members, their families and friends. (See references below.) That sounds like a daunting administrative task yet by using SailEvent and applying a bit of thought and ingenuity, you can easily implement contactless, digital, self-service attendance recording.
No two clubs are the same so there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution but here are some ideas to get you started.
The principle
The concept of a competition is central to SailEvent. A competition has some facts describing it and a list of competitors. Typically competitors take part in a series, an open meeting, a regatta but they can equally sign up for leisure sailing or simply to visit the club.
So the trick is to set up a competition called, say, Visitors and compile a list of potential visitors.
Compiling the list
This depends very much on the nature of your club. A small club with mainly local members may want to simply put all its members on the list. Alternatively you can publish an entry form and ask members to sign up only if they plan to visit at some unspecified time in the future.
Attendance recording
The final setting up step is say when people can visit the club. Some clubs may want to be open at all times; others may limit visiting to just certain days and times.
Either way the answer is SailEvent sessions which have dates and start and end times. (btw sessions can now be as long as you like.) Thanks to the clone function it is really easy to create, say, a month or more of like sessions.
To prompt or not to prompt
Prompts are brief emails or texts to remind people to record their attendance. If for instance your club is open only at weekends and is always well-attended then asking everyone if they will be on-site seems reasonable. But if your club is open every day yet often used by only a few then multiple prompts may be seen as intrusive.
You can configure the number, including zero, of prompts SailEvent sends so why not start with a best guess and fine tune from there.
Good to go
At this point it’s a good idea to let your members know what is expected of them and to enlist their cooperation. In our experience people take to SailEvent really well especially if they understand that they are supporting NHS Test & Trace.
SailEvent takes over
Either by prompting or self-motivation your members will be asked a question on their phones that looks like this
Their answer is date and time stamped and securely recorded in the SailEvent database ready to be passed to NHS Test & Trace if asked.
Do I need sailing competitions too?
Maybe not if you don’t need to know who is sailing as opposed to who is just visiting. But yes if you want contactless signing sheets and the race team app.
Is it one hundred percent?
Unlikely unless you have an exceptionally well-disciplined membership! We are dealing with humans here and it seems they are not always capable of following simple written instructions. But it should be pretty good – we have reports of 95% compliance – and NHS Test & Trace is not an exact science anyway. What we want is for everyone to do the best they can.
We have talked in this post about how SailEvent can be used for free to implement easy-to-use, contactless, digital self-service attendance recording. That's one quick way that clubs and their members can help NHS Test & Trace and combat the pandemic.
References
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