The committee have been looking at better ways for the club to send internal messages out. Currently we rely on the notice board, emails and Facebook. All of which are not ideal for different reasons.
A solution is for the club to use something called 'SPOND CLUB'. Within the next couple of days, parents/guardians and volunteers will receive an invite via text message/email to join SPOND. If you could please accept this invite ASAP, as only then will you be able to receive information that we send out through SPOND.
Once you have accepted the SPOND invite, it then suggests that you download the app. We would strongly recommend doing this. Because, if you only accept the invite but don't download the app, you will just receive messages by email (which could be easily missed or go into trash). Whereas if you download the app, you will get a notification on your phone whenever a message is sent to you. Also, if you have the app, should you have any queries re a message that you've received, it is easier for you to get in touch with the club/auth admin persons with any questions that you may have. All swimmers will have at least 1 guardian invited to join SPOND. If you would like another guardian added that hasn't received a SPOND invite (within the next couple of days) please get in touch with Florence (gerberflorence@yahoo.fr) and she will add a 2nd guardian.
IMPORTANT - if you have more than 1 child in the club, you may receive several invites. Please accept all the invites. For example, Child 1 might train in Lane A and Child 2 in Lane D. By accepting both invites you will get messages that are intended for both Lane A & Lane D. But you only need to download the app once and within the app, you will get message for both lanes. If you are a volunteer in the Club, you will receive an invite to join our volunteers group.
Everyone's contact details are stored on SPOND securely and they are kept private. The only people who can view the contact details are auth club admin. If you have any concerns about being on SPOND please contact committee members Caroline H or Florence G. If you have any technical queries - struggling to navigate the app etc you can get in touch with Gemma Shaw for help.
Finally, although we've had opportunity to play around with SPOND, we might find that certain settings need to be changed once it's rolled out. If people could just bear with for the first few weeks of using SPOND whilst everyone can get to grips with it. The committee also ask that SPOND is used as intended, which is a tool for the club to get important information out to our members and not for it to be used as a chat app.
Many Thanks