ECF Funding

[Roger de Coverly]

Part of the challenge is that many individual players do not realise that a slice of their club subscription is funding the ECF because it is at such a remove, i.e. the sub includes an amount to cover league fees levied by the League or County Association, which in turn has to charge these to cover the cost of Game Fee payable to the ECF.

I'm not sure I saw much about the proposed collection mechanism. I don't think you are proposing to bill everyone directly from Battle, or are you? If you collect through County Associations, it will still look remote and will just go back to the pre Game Fee position where County Associations financed the BCF and Congresses and non-territorial leagues paid next to nothing. Other than that it's a hybrid, is there any particular reason why Leagues cannot be billed on a games played basis for infrequent players?

[Andrew Farthing]

I'm not sure I saw much about the proposed collection mechanism.

You didn't. I deliberately tried to keep the focus on the what rather than the how.

I don't think you are proposing to bill everyone directly from Battle, or are you?

No, I'm not.

If you collect through County Associations, it will still look remote and will just go back to the pre Game Fee position where County Associations financed the BCF and Congresses and non-territorial leagues paid next to nothing.

I agree that it could still look remote. Getting the message out to everyone is part of the challenge.

Other than that it's a hybrid, is there any particular reason why Leagues cannot be billed on a games played basis for infrequent players?

Option 1 in the proposals includes a specific approach for dealing with infrequent players. The suggestion here is of course possible but would not be consistent with the requirement for a non-hybrid system.

[Roger de Coverly]

You didn't. I deliberately tried to keep the focus on the what rather than the how.

I think you have to focus on the how as well. Basically you are reverting to the pre 1993 method of funding with the added feature that you would impose sanctions (what sort?) against clubs or leagues daring to allow previously graded non-members to play. If you want to make it almost compulsory to be an ECF member to play in club (and county) chess, you need to spell out what happens to those who refuse. In particular the reverse case where the organisation (like the local Yorkshire leagues) opts out but the players want to opt in.


There were a number of difficulties with the pre 1993 method which seem to have been forgotten about. One of them is how do you deal with the player who is a member of several clubs and plays in several leagues either for the same or different clubs. How do you determine which is the lead organisation for collection if you are expecting to devolve the cost of individual collection away from Battle?

[Roger de Coverly]

I have already suggested that grading could be outsourced to a separate company so that such a company could remain below the VAT threshold.

Presumably such a separate company would have to bill leagues and tournaments directly for grading services. If it was paid by the ECF, you might struggle to demonstrate independence. How would such a direct payment be calculated? You would do it by player or game count presumably so that the turnover of the grading company reflected the size of the task.

I think the BCF was wrong in 1993 and thereafter to give away grading services as a freebie to tournaments who could demonstrate the presence of direct members and it still seems to be part of the new funding proposals. Membership based federations such as the USCF still charge for grading services as does the ECF for international rating.

(edit) I've long thought that the hypothetical grading body should call itself "English Grading Organisation" if for no better reason than before the game you could ask your opponent the size of their EGO.

[Carl Hibbard]

I've come home to an invoice in the post (how quaint ~ I hope the new IT manager has heard of email) for the Brighton International and surprise surprise it's wrong.

No contact from IT so far here, but it's not hard to beat the previous holders of the post!

[Carl Hibbard]

I should say that it had been my intention to start a thread on the Funding proposals when they appeared on the website, but I was beaten to the punch! The ECF webmaster was on leave today, so I hadn't expected the documents to be posted until tomorrow.

It's called traffic generation - have to be on the ball here as we generate far more interest than the main ECF web site

I'll try to keep a watch on the posts here and respond as quickly as I can. Bear with me, however, because I am still spending a lot of time on my ECF work and won't be able to read everything as soon as it appears. As I said in my comments on the ECF Home Page, I invite questions by e-mail to [email protected] and will use my blog on the ECF site to maintain a summary of the questions received and answers given.

You are to be applauded for your efforts Andrew, although my personal opinion is that 85% is a bit of a fantasy - sorry

[Matthew Turner]

The ECF has lost the government grant of £60,000. Effectively the report says (as I read it) despite cost savings the ECF needs to fund approximately three quarters of that internally, or to put it another way the ECF is currently burning through £4,000 of capital per month.

Matthew,

I don't understand your figures. The combined effect of the changes in Game Fee/Membership Subs and the cost savings achieved to date is that the ECF is budgeted in 2011-12 to make a deficit of about £16,000. This means that the actions already taken have offset the effect of losing about three quarters of the government grant (your comments suggest that the proportions are the other way around, if I've understood them correctly).

Since the new funding options will require a year to implement - or at least the "Membership Only" option would - the Board is proposing to seek Council's agreement to a one-off injection of capital (£15,000) from the PIF to cover the gap. We shall also be approaching the John Robinson Youth Chess Trust for a grant to cover the bulk of the Junior Chess budget (£5,000). These are not actions we could repeat every year, hence the need to decide on a solution which balances income and expenditure from 2012-13 on.

Andrew,
I tried to give the fairest assessment of the figures as I understood them. If I am in error, then I do apologise. As I saw it the current income of the ECF is Game Fee £59,500 + Membership £52,500 + bits and pieces. The proposal that you have put forward suggest that the ECF needs to raise £155,000 (I assume that the bits and pieces are fairly constant and irrelevant to the overall figures). That means that the ECF need to raise an additional £43,500. I took this to be approximately 3/4 of the government grant. I entirely support your approach, but I fear your remedies may be a decade too late and the ECF may be beyond the point of no return.

[Alex Holowczak]

Re: collection of the money; I think there needs to be either a Manager for Game Fee or Manager for Membership - or both - depending on which road it is decided to go down. If I was feeling brave, I'd suggest that these posts should be paid an honorarium, and in turn the Office staff could be relieved of that particular duty. The Office don't seem to have all the information to hand, and it often needs unpaid volunteers to explain fully. For example, when they see the Lancashire Chess Association and the Blackpool Congress, they send a request for Lancashire's £52. Yet people within chess know instantly that Lancashire doesn't need to pay £52, since Blackpool's Game Fee more than covers it, and it's run by the Lancashire Chess Association. How are the Office supposed to know that? There are probably tens of other things like that across the country. I don't think it's necessarily the Office doing a bad job. I think it's the system that has evolved has got to the stage where it's so complicated that it's virtually impossible to do this sort of thing effectively. To that end, at least a Membership Scheme is (almost?) black and white, whereas the alternatives are basically the same as we have now but the options have the same prices. At the moment, 100% collection is impossible, since it takes an awful long time to work out what 100% is. At least with membership, you know instantly who is a member, who isn't, and who needs to be chased up for money. You might not actually get the money, but at least it would be easier to understand what's going on.

[Roger de Coverly]

At least with membership, you know instantly who is a member, who isn't, and who needs to be chased up for money. You might not actually get the money, but at least it would be easier to understand what's going on.

Are you quite sure about that? If you have a proliferation of individual bodies responsible for membership, would you not proceed at the pace of the slowest and not know who was a member.

Try University based clubs as a for example. The Overseas students could be exempt on the proposed "ungraded exemption", but what about British or English? On 1st October, how would a County with a University club know who was or wasn't a potential ECF member when the University itself might not know who its players were? If someone was prepared to play both for their University and their "home" club how do you decide who handles the ECF membership?

[Roger de Coverly]

If I was feeling brave, I'd suggest that these posts should be paid an honorarium, and in turn the Office staff could be relieved of that particular duty. The Office don't seem to have all the information to hand, and it often needs unpaid volunteers to explain fully.

I think you are completely correct on that. One of the advantages of Game Fee was that Counties no longer had to chase individuals for relatively (in those days) small amounts of money. If Game Fee collection had been devolved to Unions or Counties, it would have been quite obvious that it's cheaper to collect from a handful of organisations rather than hundreds of individuals. Also local knowledge would rapidly have identified the non-paying backsliders. I suspect the BCF took a step backwards by abandoning the idea that it needed a chess-playing CEO. Somewhere along the line the notion that the "General Secretary" (Paul Buswell as an employee for a number of years) was the CEO seems to have been lost - I'm sure I saw the idea in contemporary magazines from the 1980s.

[Andrew Farthing]

Andrew,
I tried to give the fairest assessment of the figures as I understood them. If I am in error, then I do apologise. As I saw it the current income of the ECF is Game Fee £59,500 + Membership £52,500 + bits and pieces. The proposal that you have put forward suggest that the ECF needs to raise £155,000 (I assume that the bits and pieces are fairly constant and irrelevant to the overall figures). That means that the ECF need to raise an additional £43,500. I took this to be approximately 3/4 of the government grant. I entirely support your approach, but I fear your remedies may be a decade too late and the ECF may be beyond the point of no return.

No need to apologise. The ECF's finances aren't the easiest to decode that I've seen!

Now that you've explained the basis of your comment, I think I understand what's going on. The key element is the VAT. The 2011-12 budget will show income figures of £62,000 for Game Fee and £53,750 from Direct Membership. These figures are the net figures after deducting VAT of 20%. The £155,000 funding requirement is the figure before VAT is deducted, so you're not comparing like with like.

[Andrew Farthing]

I suspect the BCF took a step backwards by abandoning the idea that it needed a chess-playing CEO. Somewhere along the line the notion that the "General Secretary" (Paul Buswell as an employee for a number of years) was the CEO seems to have been lost - I'm sure I saw the idea in contemporary magazines from the 1980s.

I may not score better than average on quality (my grade puts me on the median for graded players) but in terms of quantity (135 games last season) I'd like to think that I qualify as a chess-playing CEO.

[Andrew Farthing]

I think the BCF was wrong in 1993 and thereafter to give away grading services as a freebie to tournaments who could demonstrate the presence of direct members and it still seems to be part of the new funding proposals. Membership based federations such as the USCF still charge for grading services as does the ECF for international rating.

There is a summary of the current USCF arrangements in Appendix C of the paper. The rating fee is fairly nominal - in most cases, if the organiser submits results and payment online, the amount is 25 cents for the game, i.e. about 10p per half-game as we would put it. This compares with the basic membership cost of £21 per annum, which is paid by the vast majority of players. Those who want to play in tournaments without joining the USCF have to pay an extra $12 per event (they can get $10 of it back if they join the USCF within a certain period).

[Andrew Farthing]

No contact from IT so far here, but it's not hard to beat the previous holders of the post!

Carl,

Don't blame the new Manager of ICT. I have committed to supplying him with a list of the key people he needs to contact, and I've been too busy with other tasks to get around to it.

[Roger de Coverly]

I may not score better than average on quality (my grade puts me on the median for graded players) but in terms of quantity (135 games last season) I'd like to think that I qualify as a chess-playing CEO.

I should have added the word employed of course to chess-playing. Nevertheless the BCF didn't appoint a CEO until Susan Richards about ten years ago. This is notwithstanding references from the early 1980s that Paul Buswell's General Secretary title meant that he was the paid CEO. When he left, the concept of a CEO left with him. You may of course get the "who's in charge" power struggle at its worst in the Walsh Regan era.

The rating fee is fairly nominal - in most cases, if the organiser submits results and payment online, the amount is 25 cents for the game, i.e. about 10p per half-game as we would put it.

I'm aware the rating fee is relatively small, nevertheless they don't give the rating service away for nothing. The USCF with compulsory membership doesn't have anything like our league culture and the few leagues it does have run as unrated because of the difficulties of overlaying compulsory membership onto team chess.