Youth football club implements ONLYOFFICE to coordinate distributed volunteer management team

Today we are going to tell you the story of Twickenham Tigers Football Club playing in the Surrey Youth League. Managed by a distributed team communicating via emails, the organization has no clubhouse and no own IT infrastructure but still has to meet the GDPR and Child Safeguarding legislation requirements.

With a view to stop the flurry of emails and keep personal data safe, the Twickenham Tigers managers decided to implement ONLYOFFICE. In this post, the chairman and club secretary Ralph Bye shares his team experience.

Twickenham Tigers Football Club is a community youth football club for mixed ages of children from under 7’s to under 18’s age groups.

“We have 120+ children with, of course, approximately 240 parents.” says the club secretary. “The age groups are in teams that are registered with local leagues to compete with other similar ability teams throughout a committed season of regular, structured matches.”

This community is administrated by 25 individuals who need to be informed of Child Safeguarding Rules, GDPR rules, and, each team match players, rosters, and schedules.

The two main reasons for making the choice were GDPR requirements and familiar interface.

“I explored Office 365, Google GSuite, Confluence, and TeamDrive. However, only ONLYOFFICE did appear to offer what the demographics of our 10% of management would recognize and feel comfortable with. The demographics of these users are 45-55 years of age who have been brought up with Microsoft Office applications in a folder structured file system,” explained Bye.

What the Twickenham Tigers management team values the most is cloud-based access to documents. Another important thing is role-based access permission. The club documents are split into two groups. First one is “Club Level” where documents and information that everyone in the club needs to be aware of is stored, maintained and retrieved.

The second is “Team Level”. “And this is where it gets interesting,” says Ralph. “Each team age group has its own folder (under a Season year) and a group permission against it. A manager is assigned to their relevant group. This segregates and secures, who is able to see details of children involved at their own age group level. I’ve put together a process to roll up the groups when the year moves on maintaining the group members.”

ONLYOFFICE seems to be ideal for such a structure, and the Documents and Common Folders are the main areas of usage for the management team.
The Twickenham Tigers might as well move onto using the ONLYOFFICE Mail Server with their own domain to clearly define their identity. “The Blogging area would be useful for making persistent announcements that new age group managers can look up each subsequent year,” adds the chairman.

The club secretary is going to promote the desktop and mobile apps as those will provide seamless access to our document repository. “I can see our managers being very impressed with using the mobile app to quickly look up a team roster or a club policy that needs referencing from the pitch side. Having desktop tools availability across all major platforms is an enviable advantage as well,” he says.

The main goal is to reduce the annual administration of document emails, but the team feels that even more could be achieved with ONLYOFFICE.
“This solution appears to offer a very sustainable model that will endure years of continued usage that will be respected by those involved in its service,” concludes Bye.

The football club has a non-profit status, which means that they are using ONLYOFFICE cloud solution free of charge. If you want to learn more about the non-profit program, visit this page.