English Chess Forum

One outcome is that the introduction of the membership scheme means that I have joined the ECF. I only play the odd league game (often against D. Fault), but the online membership system made it easy to join when I was signing my son up for Gold membership.

The cvent website says that their software handles all the payment processing to an existing or new merchant account. The ECF will presumably already have one of these and be bearing the cost of processing card payments right now, or indeed of paying in cheques to their bank account. When my charity...

Three!

ITT = Invitation To Tender

Andrew Farthings point are well made. If there is scope to get the entire membership fee Gift Aid eligible and a significant potential for legacies, then those are very clear benefits. The VAT threshold issue is surely only a short-term benefit - any expansion of the ECF is likely to make this a moo...

For Gift Aid eligibility, if membership is set at £12, then the value of benefits received by members must be less than 25% (£3). If the value of benefits (grading plus ?) exceed £3 then the membership could be split into two elements, the payment for the benefit and a separate donation. But the ...

Gift Aid is a potentially viable route. London Zoo certainly use this on their admission fees. The question on eligibility of membership fees is whether use of the ECF grading scheme counts as personal use of the charities facilities. There is also a potential VAT benefit of charitable registration ...

Speaking as a charitable company secretary and finance director for the last 15 years, the move to charity status seems moderately irrelevant to me. It's not clear to me that the financial benefits outweight the costs and resultant increase in regulatory responsibilities. Charities are certainly not...

I fully support the concept of membership rather than game fee. I'm not 100% convinced by the merits of the tiered membership as it stands - why should playing in congresses be more expensive than playing in leagues? The £2 penalty seems to me to be a significant problem. Why not leave it at £1 fo...

Well FIDE have to cover their legal bills somehow. I note from their 2010 accounts that they spent 900,000 euros out of total turnover of 2.4 million (38% of income) on legal bills last year, presumably mostly relating to the presidential election.

It happens in other leisure activities without apparent problems. In athletics and triathlon there are competing websites offering similar functionality: http://www.entrycentral.com/ http://www.runnersworld.co.uk/defaultevents.asp?sp=&v=2 http://www.tri247.com/events.html http://www.sportssystems.co...

I'd like to point out that my son (who appears in that list) attended a state primary school, his local comprehensive and now a state sixth form. I'm sure there are a few others there as well (but possibly not many).

I think the bronze/silver/gold tiering has some merits, but I don't see the benefit in tieing it to types of tournaments played. It seems to me that the goals should be: 1. To encourage mass membership 2. To provide an entry route for new/casual players (pay to play) 3. To provide a route to a bette...

I would urge you to continue to post on this David. Your opening post was excellent in analysing the right factors to determine tiers of membership. My view on lots of these issues is that the ECF tries to do too much. Why produce a yearbook? Why produce Chessmoves? Both of these are made redundant ...

Seems quite straightforward to have a flat rate annual membership and a competition membership. Then any congress or league would have to charge competition membership to those people who wanted to play but didn't want to pay annual membership. This is the approach used in many sports (eg. athletics...