Wessex Volleyball Club: Branded Drawstring Bags and Keyrings for a 50th Anniversary

Hotline Promotional Products sponsored 50 branded drawstring bags for the junior taster sessions at Wessex Volleyball Club's 50th anniversary weekend in July 2026, and the club bought custom Silicone Ad Loop keyrings to use as commemorative admission passes. More than 250 people took part across the weekend, and a charity raffle raised over £350 for the Mark Pitman Fund.

Who Wessex Volleyball Club are

Wessex Volleyball Club was founded in 1976 as Poole Thumpers and now runs across Poole and Bournemouth. Fifty years on it holds senior and junior national titles, and it has produced more than a hundred international athletes, including three who went to the Olympics and two to the Commonwealth Games.

The anniversary weekend brought current players, former members, coaches, volunteers and families together across junior taster sessions, tournament matches, a reunion, an evening celebration and a charity raffle. Club founder Geoff Allen and his wife Lynn were recognised for building it.

The club's junior programme runs from Year 7 to Year 13, delivered entirely by volunteer coaches, and there are currently around 80 young people on the waiting list.

Why drawstring bags for the junior sessions

The bags went to juniors at the "Try Volleyball" taster sessions, which is a specific audience with a specific problem. A child at a taster session has arrived with kit in a carrier bag and no idea yet whether they belong there.

A drawstring bag is a cheap solution to both halves of that. It carries the kit, and it makes somebody who turned up for one session look like a member of the club on the way out.

"Our junior players take pride in wearing the Wessex brand."

Practically, it also keeps working. A drawstring bag goes to training, to PE and to tournaments, which means it is seen weekly rather than once. For a club recruiting juniors, that is the point: the bag is doing its job at a school on a Tuesday, not at the event where it was handed over.

Why a keyring instead of a paper ticket

This is the idea worth stealing. The club needed admission passes for the anniversary celebrations. Rather than print paper tickets that would go in a bin at the end of the night, they ordered custom silicone keyrings and used those as the admission pass instead.

The cost is comparable to decent printed tickets. The difference is what happens afterwards. A paper ticket has a working life of one evening. A keyring goes on somebody's house keys and stays there, which turns the cost of admission control into the cost of a keepsake that keeps the club's name in a pocket for years.

If you are running a ticketed event with a fixed guest list, it is worth pricing a branded item against printed tickets before you order either. The answer is often closer than people expect, and only one of the two survives the evening.

What a 50-unit order looks like

Fifty bags is a small order by the standards of this industry, and small orders are where community organisations usually get told no. We printed fifty. That is worth saying plainly, because volunteer-run clubs routinely assume branded merchandise starts in the hundreds and stop looking. Minimums are set per product rather than by blanket policy, and they vary widely across the range, so the number on the product page is the one that applies to that product. If the minimum on something you want is higher than your club needs, ask us, because there is often a similar product with a lower one.

Getting a volunteer committee to sign off the design

Running a club on volunteer time means nobody has a spare afternoon to project-manage a merchandise order, and decisions usually need more than one person to agree. "The Visual Proof™ service made it easy to share designs with our Board before ordering." That is the part of the process most likely to stall an order, and it is worth planning for. A free Visual Proof shows your logo on the actual product, comes back within 20 minutes during working hours, and carries no obligation to order. Because it is an image rather than a description, it is something you can put in front of a committee who are not designers and get a straight answer from. The club's other comment was about the end of the process rather than the start: "The shipping was much quicker than I expected and the design functions and service was really good. We'd definitely recommend Hotline." If your club works to a committee, the practical advice is to agree who approves the proof before you request it. The proof itself takes twenty minutes. Waiting for four people to reply to an email is what takes the fortnight. You can read more about how a Visual Proof works, and about sharing a basket with a colleague if more than one person needs to see the selection before it is ordered.

If you are buying for a club or a community event

Our guide to promotional products for charity events and fundraisers covers budgeting on volunteer-run funds, and how to choose promotional products for an event covers matching a product to the people receiving it. Every product page shows its own price at the quantity you enter, its minimum order and its guaranteed delivery date, before you speak to anyone. To see what is available, browse our bags range or our charity and community merchandise.