Making the Alumni Association sustainable

[Pete Smith]

We’ve already achieved enough to know that there is a demand for the AA, even though it will take us a little while to define its role properly. The original ‘gang of 5’ members agreed to push as far as trying to build a sustainable model, covering legal, relationship with SC, technology etc. Part of that challenge is finding a sustainable funding model. I took an action at the recent AA meeting to put a plan into action. This is it.

I have researched and set up a GoFundMe crowd funding account. Basically I am looking for about 65+ volunteer alumni to donate £5 in each year. Entirely voluntary, and no perks for funding other than the thanks of all alumni. As currently there are 440 alumni and we want to get to 1,000 asap, finding 65 of you each year prepared to donate £5 doesn’t sound too hard.

Here is the address to donate: https://www.gofundme.com/sc-uk-alumni-association-expenditure

If you are in a position to donate, thank you.
Below is a note I put together explaining my thinking.

I took an action on Wednesday to research some options on how we could fund the AA. Before we get to a practical suggestion, the background is:
a) The £5k annual turnover limit on Unincorporated Associations (UA) is important. As soon as we go above that, we become far more ‘official’ and are forced into time consuming admin – at least a set of annual accounts (which means having a formal officer), probably a limited company and one day the dreaded VAT. I suspect the VAT threshold will have to come tumbling down post Brexit – it’s less politically sensitive than income tax, even though it’s technically a regressive tax hitting the poor most. I’m sure the £5k UA limit will be raised over the years – no political party wants the bureaucracy that would ensue if every pub darts team in the country had to submit a set of accounts. I wouldn’t be surprised at all though if we end up with the UA limit being the VAT threshold in a few years.
b) We should therefore plan for say the first 5 years on the basis of staying as an unincorporated association. Let’s leave the challenge beyond that to the ‘next generation’.
c) During that time, our primary spend will be on the website though there is nothing to stop us raising a little more for ad-hoc expenditure. We just need to be clear on the phrase we use when raising money, although remember we are NOT subject to the charity commission ‘earmarking’ rules. The only legislation involved I can see is simply fraud – we can’t raise money for the AA and then spend it on our holidays ?
d) So in terms of spend, my suggestion would be to stay on the core current web products for a couple of years, and then research to see if there is something materially better in the approx. price bracket. I am fairly sure that currently there is nothing a quantum better for what we are paying – I did shop around 12 months ago and nothing much has changed.
e) Staying in our price-bracket, we can look at a few bells and whistles (eg we are using the ‘free’ version of our mailing product which is a little cumbersome). The one I’d like to explore at some point is a product that offered easy column formatting on the newsletter. There is also the possibility of targeted LinkedIn advertising – that might be an interesting way of reaching national staff around the world if we had say a spare £500.
So if that’s the background, how could we do it?
1. I don’t want to raise money directly on our site. Although we are a lot more secure than ‘the pub darts team’, we need to plan on the basis that one day, one of the hacking attempts will succeed, and someone malevolent will get our names and emails. That’s an annoyance but if they got credit card details as well, it would be awful, so let’s not risk it. Although there are cheap add-on products that would allow us to do it, personally I wouldn’t use the internet for financial transactions with anyone who isn’t spending at least £50k a year on their website. Banks are fine, Amazon is fine, SC UK is fine, but your local corner shop isn’t.
2. That probably precludes all formal subscription systems we could afford.
3. What we are left with are the generic ad hoc funding sites. Of these, the most attractive one because of its size (and therefore security) and proposition seems to me GoFundMe. The gist is:
i. The service is paid for by them taking a slice of what is raised – there is no upfront or rental cost. If you don’t raise anything, there is no cost.
ii. They are responsible for security of payments. They are serious enough on this so I personally wouldn’t mind paying money on a credit card through them.
iii. I’ve done a little calculator here. On small donations, the technicalities of their costing algorithm mean they are taking about 8%, which is a bit steep it seems to me, but so are all the others.
Annual Sub 5.00
Paying members 65
Net to AA 299.33 after GoFundMe fees
Cost % 8

iv. Basically my thoughts are we would ask people to pay say £5 a year on entirely a voluntary basis if they can afford it. We’d need about 65 of them, though I suspect some people might pay more.
v. We would get a URL which we could put at the bottom of each newsletter along with a running total for that year. Most of the expenditure is in May.
vi. GoFundMe allows this to be ‘private’ ie it won’t come up in google searches, though anyone with the URL link can see a list of donors. Nothing to stop you subscribing as Eglantyne Jebb of course ? – you are allowed fake names.
vii. You can make payments to our GoFundMe address using any standard credit/debit card from anywhere in the world.
viii. We DON’T have to have a formal separate bank account (this is another advantage of this approach). There’s no problem at all linking this to one of our existing personal accounts. The money stays with GoFundMe until we do a transfer across which we might do say once a quarter to keep the admin easy.

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