Someone Who Gets It
I'm Jason Shannon, a former community rugby league club president who lived the grind firsthand.
The same few volunteers doing everything, week in, week out. The constant search for new sponsors to keep the budget balanced. The struggle to find enough people to run game day — let alone take on committee roles.
As president, I leaned hard on technology to make things easier for everyone. Autonomous cameras to record games. Proper POS systems to track stock and sales. Anything that could reduce the load on volunteers while keeping the club running smoothly.
Football Doubles was always a reliable earner for us — we were lucky to have someone who ran it consistently. But I kept asking: could we do this online? Could we reach people who weren't physically at the game?
So we built a digital version. And it worked — sort of. We weren't limited to selling at the ground anymore. But we still had to post on Facebook every week, run ads, send text messages, chase people to buy. It was the same grind, just in a different format.
That's when I realised: the problem wasn't the channel. The problem was the model.
So I asked two questions:
What if we could keep everything people love about traditional fundraising, but remove the weekly grind?
And what if we could capture what the best clubs know — and share it with everyone?
Those questions became BuyDoubles and ClubHub. And together, they became Club Funding International — a company dedicated to helping the clubs that hold our communities together not just survive, but thrive for generations.
