About the Admin fee for our Charity Fundraising Events

As most clubs will be aware from my emails, we have been obliged to change the way we handle donations and administration for our Charity Fundraising Simultaneous Pairs. In the hope of simplifying it all, and also keeping it transparant so you can all see what is happening, we are going down the "Just Giving" route.

For each event now we will set up a JustGiving page to the relevant Charity or Charities that we are fund raising for. For the Charity Challenge and the Summer Charity Pairs there will be a choice of two charities and you can donate to one or the other, or half to each. For other events there will just be a single Charity (Children in Need for example). We suggest that £3 per person would be a reasonable donation for the Charity.

However, we do have to charge an admin fee, and this will be 90p per player inclusive of VAT and an invoice will be sent to each participating club for each day they took part in at the end of the event.

We have always taken an admin fee, and that was always clearly stated on the website – previously it was 70p+VAT but for ease we have made it 90p inc VAT. We never tried to hide the fact that we take it. I also recall sending emails to clubs explaining that we would be charging an admin fee and that it would be taken from the donations before we sent them off to the charities concerned.

We feel that by doing it this way, it is all much clearer.

What the admin fee covers :

All the work setting it up:

• setting up the sessions as they happen
• the general administration of email contact with the clubs,
• paying for and preparing the commentaries and all the necessary files,
• sending them out;
• helping clubs having issues with scoring etc,
• finalising the event and allocating the master points ready to send to the Home unions etc,
• day to day maintenance of the website and provision of all the detailed information;  
• The EBU licence fee (except for CiN which they generously waive)

then there is the cost of the servers to run it all

• that is the hardware,
• the Service Provider fees which include the server room where they are held which is a specialist cold room,
• all the bandwidth, electricity and general power needed and so forth (a cost of some £10,000 per annum allowing for a budget for new servers as and when required).
• And of course, the necessary software licences and specialist anti-virus licences.

Without charging it – we couldn’t run the events.

I am sure you understand the need to do this – the only alternative would be to stop running the events altogether and close ECatsBridge – something we don’t want to do and hopefully you don’t want us to do either!

Note: This is completely separate from any donations made to the Charity by either the clubs or the individuals taking part.