Member signups streamlined by 50% with address autocomplete

Gathering at Mitchell Park, the Palo Alto Pickleball Club is run by hundreds of dedicated “player-volunteers.” That’s right. The club has exactly 0 salaried employees and is instead run by pickleball enthusiasts who volunteer their time under a board of directors.

PAPC is primarily a steward of their public courts but also offers “Getting Started” sessions, clinics, round robins, and a friendly environment for players of all ages and abilities, supporting local pickleball by serving as a community-building model for nearby clubs.

Palo Alto Pickleball Club (PAPC) began in 2016 as a small, local group with a paper-based membership process. Throughout the next nine years, pickleball fever hit hard. Membership ballooned to over 1,400. What once worked—a drop box at the courts, Google Forms, spreadsheets, and manual address tracking—quickly broke down.

Address typos, invalid locations, and mismatched membership fees were constant headaches, costing volunteers hours of manual work.
To make things harder, the city requires that 50% of PAPC members live in Palo Alto. But without a reliable way to verify addresses, the club had no easy way to know if they were meeting that requirement—it was all on the honor system. “We were spending so much time cleaning up errors. Members were entering false or partial addresses and paying for the wrong membership types,” said the club’s Membership Director, Ayla Bell.

The team sought a fast, modern, and affordable fix. While exploring integrations in Jotform, they discovered Smarty’s US Address Autocomplete, which would automatically and instantly validate addresses within Jotform.

“Smarty was the only one that looked professional and easy to use,” the Membership Director said. “And it worked with Jotform, which we were already using.”

By adding Smarty’s US Address Autocomplete, PAPC Membership made the entire sign-up process faster, easier, and more accurate.

As members begin typing their address, autocomplete instantly suggests verified options in a dropdown menu, right as they type. Whether someone’s on a mobile phone or not super comfortable with technology, it’s simple to select the correct address with just a tap or click.

This means fewer typos, less confusion, and no more formatting errors. Every address is standardized and validated on the spot.

Now, the club can instantly tell if someone lives within Palo Alto city limits and automatically apply the right membership pricing. No guesswork. No cleanup. Because the data is accurate from the start, volunteers spend less time reviewing applications and more time focusing on what really matters—Pickleball. 😉

Jotform address autocomplete with Smarty didn’t just streamline the signup flow—it transformed the club’s operations.