ECF Funding

[Roger de Coverly]

Ah, yes. We don't have many of those in the South-West. (If nothing else, how would the county captains know about them?)

Three perhaps four ways really

(1) you know them from their past activity
(2) an existing member of the county squad recruits them at a non chess related event or occasion
(3) you encounter them at a Congress (the previous season perhaps)
(4) something to do with Facebook or similar network contact sites.

[William Metcalfe]

You could only play in the NCCU county champs if you were either a direct member or a MO member.
This never caused me any problems when i captained the county Durham team.

Roger you look for problems where they do not exhist

[Roger de Coverly]

However, in the medium/ longterm it would surely be better for the ECF to take payment directly. .

That has the advantage ( from the local club viewpoint) that the ECF is the hated body. So according to the local club , yes, you can play in the local league or event but first you have to register and pay the ECF tax.

[Roger de Coverly]

You could only play in the NCCU county champs if you were either a direct member or a MO member.
This never caused me any problems when i captained the county Durham team.

Well I think you were lucky. From my experience as a club or county match captain, you are on the front line as far as combating apathy and reluctance to play is concerned. So it's a very good excuse that you are not a member of the ECF and it would cost £ 18 to play, therefore you won't play.

When you have more players than slots in the team then it isn't a problem. I notice though that inter county chess in the NCCU has next to disappeared, in particular at Open level. Reducing the pool of available players to members of the ECF cannot help.

[Mike Truran]

Roger, the ECF isn't hated in our club, and I suspect many other clubs. I do wish you would stop constantly trying to stir the pot with inflammatory comments which require rebuttals. I note also that when you are challenged, you regularly fail to acknowledge the correctness of the challenge but simply ignore it as if it hadn't been made.

[John Upham]

I note also that when you are challenged, you regularly fail to acknowledge the correctness of the challenge but simply ignore it as if it hadn't been made.

I'm pleased I am not the only one who has noticed that!

[Sean Hewitt]

The issue on this is that at present the league treasurer doesn't have an awful lot to do. You collect entry fees from clubs ( it's usually the same person every year) and you pay an estimated Game Fee amount to the ECF (you use the fixture list to work it out). At the end of the season you pay or agree a balancing amount to the ECF (you ask the grader or use the results web page). You also have to draw up accounts for the AGM.

Compare that to the job of collecting from each individual taking part in the league.

This is the big hole in your position Roger, as there is no need for the league treasurer to collect from each individual taking part in the league. Instead, he collects the membership fees from the clubs. So he deals with club treasurers, just as he does now. Indeed, the league treasurer no longer needs to calculate estimated and actual game fee twice a year.

That's why MO's, those who have experienced membership in action, say that it's simpler and choose to stick with it rather than switch back to game fee.

[Matthew Turner]

MO's work because the fees are £12 per year. The schemes are operated at local level so players who play the odd game can be conveniently forgotten (There needn't be anything wrong with this if it smoothes things through). Would the schemes be equally successful if the fees were £18 or £25? Remember members in the rest of the country pay £25 and still have to pay game fee in league chess.

[Ian Kingston]

I note also that when you are challenged, you regularly fail to acknowledge the correctness of the challenge but simply ignore it as if it hadn't been made.

I'm pleased I am not the only one who has noticed that!

Spotted it a long time ago - one reason why I stopped posting in this thread.

[Angus French]

I note also that when you are challenged, you regularly fail to acknowledge the correctness of the challenge but simply ignore it as if it hadn't been made.

I'm pleased I am not the only one who has noticed that!

Spotted it a long time ago - one reason why I stopped posting in this thread.

... and yet you've just posted.
I think these comments are getting a bit personal.

[Carl Hibbard]

I am here and still watching although this thread has got a bit long and is repeating similiar posts to be honest

[Angus French]

I'm sorry if the Game Fee paper wasn't clear. It's a complicated subject, and the paper as finally presented was an attempt to balance (relative) brevity and accessibility with a wish to show enough of the underlying analysis to give some confidence that the figures weren't just plucked from the air. I may well have got the balance wrong.

The basis of the 9% figure is a comparison between the predicted income due and the actual income figure. I suspect that the confusion has arisen because the latter is essentially in line with the budgeted income figure (despite the fact that the methodology for arriving at the budget figure is - to be frank - nonsense). As a result, it is an understandable mistake to believe that I was comparing the calculation of predicted income due with the budget, but in fact I was comparing it with the actual income.

Underpinning the analysis in the Game Fee paper is a large, fairly complex spreadsheet which lists every event that generates Game Fee and calculates how much should have been paid (based on the nature of the event and the number of ECF members participating). As a result, the paper is founded on precisely the type of case-by-case analysis recommended by Angus, except that it is not based on a sample set of events but a dataset encompassing all events.

I accept that the estimated under-collection quoted in my Management Services paper was wrong. The figure wasn't central to the conclusions of that paper, but it's never satisfactory to include erroneous figures, so I do apologise for this. The simple fact is that I understood the data much less thoroughly at that time. The Game Fee paper represents the results of a lot more work - not just by me, but particularly by Alex Holowczak, with help from Richard Haddrell - which gives me much more confidence that the findings are robust.

Andrew, thanks for responding to this and other comments I made.
Your paper does say "as may be seen, this predicted amount is some £5,400 (9%) higher than the budget [my emphasis] figure of £59,000". I believed it was the budget figure which was used to derive the shortfall because that's what was stated.
Anyhow, is it correct that the actual income figure is "in line with the budgeted income figure"? We're looking at figures for the current 2010/11 year (which ends this coming 30 April), aren't we? If so, then the Budget Report for 2011/12 gives a projected outturn not of £59,000 but of £56,900 (suggesting that the shortfall in game fee payments might, I calculate, be 13.5%). These figures should, of course, be caveated as we've not yet reached the end of the year.

You say "Underpinning the analysis in the Game Fee paper is a large, fairly complex spreadsheet which lists every event that generates Game Fee and calculates how much should have been paid (based on the nature of the event and the number of ECF members participating). As a result, the paper is founded on precisely the type of case-by-case analysis recommended by Angus, except that it is not based on a sample set of events but a dataset encompassing all events".
And I wonder: why didn't the paper say this - surely it's essential information? Further, if this spreadsheet facility is available, I would have expected the paper to have shown some statistics such as:
a) how many events are liable for a game fee payment;
b) for how many of (a) has a payment been received;
c) for how many of (a) is payment overdue;
d) for how many of (b) is the payment not as expected;
e) what is the distribution of the differences for the events which made up the (d) count?
For cases where there is a significant difference, I would like to know exactly why these have occurred and that something is being done to resolve them.
As it is, the conclusions reached seem pretty vague to me.
It would also be reassuring to know that action was being taken to recover underpayments or non-payments from previous years.

[David Clayton]

You could only play in the NCCU county champs if you were either a direct member or a MO member.
This never caused me any problems when i captained the county Durham team.

Roger you look for problems where they do not exhist

Roger, the ECF isn't hated in our club, and I suspect many other clubs. I do wish you would stop constantly trying to stir the pot with inflammatory comments which require rebuttals. I note also that when you are challenged, you regularly fail to acknowledge the correctness of the challenge but simply ignore it as if it hadn't been made.

.......That's why MO's, those who have experienced membership in action, say that it's simpler and choose to stick with it rather than switch back to game fee.

I can only reiterate, membership scheme works for us and it is successful. People employ the collection method that works best for them, individually, club level, league or county. It might not be perfect, but neither is game fee.

All this discussion on details is of course missing the big picture. We need individual chess players to engage with the ECF. Individual chess players do not directly pay game fee. Becoming a member of the ECF forges a link between the individual chess player and the ECF.

Regards

David

[Andrew Farthing]

Anyhow, is it correct that the actual income figure is "in line with the budgeted income figure"? We're looking at figures for the current 2010/11 year (which ends this coming 30 April), aren't we? If so, then the Budget Report for 2011/12 gives a projected outturn not of £59,000 but of £56,900 (suggesting that the shortfall in game fee payments might, I calculate, be 13.5%). These figures should, of course, be caveated as we've not yet reached the end of the year.
[...]
Further, if this spreadsheet facility is available, I would have expected the paper to have shown some statistics such as:
a) how many events are liable for a game fee payment;
b) for how many of (a) has a payment been received;
c) for how many of (a) is payment overdue;
d) for how many of (b) is the payment not as expected;
e) what is the distribution of the differences for the events which made up the (d) count?
For cases where there is a significant difference, I would like to know exactly why these have occurred and that something is being done to resolve them.
As it is, the conclusions reached seem pretty vague to me.
It would also be reassuring to know that action was being taken to recover underpayments or non-payments from previous years.

Sorry for the "vagueness". When I first started producing papers for the ECF (e.g. Business Plan; Strategic Plan), the feedback was consistently that they were too long and that I needed to keep them short. Ever since, I've tended to try to reduce the various papers I've done to the essential minimum, thereby maximising the chances that they would be read by the greatest number. Some people may think that the papers are still too long! For my part, it does sometimes pain me to eliminate information that I find interesting, but which I have to accept is probably superfluous. In the case of the Game Fee paper, I could have written at much greater length, but I felt that most of the potential readers wouldn't thank me for it. The fact that the analysis was itself relegated from being part of the Funding paper (which was becoming too long and complicated) to a kind of "optional extra" for the Council meeting was a factor in not expanding it further. Time was another element - at that point I was putting an awful lot of hours into the ECF, and I had to start being selective about priorities.

At the time that I wrote the paper, the Finance Director's expectation was that Game Fee would come in at about the budgeted figure. I don't have any later information than the Budget Report. If Game Fee does fall short of budget, this would imply a greater degree of under-collection than stated in the paper.

We have been making efforts to recover underpayments and non-payments, and this will continue.

It would have been an option to include the statistics suggested, although I don't know how much extra work would have been involved in generating the figures. I didn't consider it at the time, because my main aim in producing the paper was to examine the overall extent of the under-collection (if any) and to understand the basis of the Game Fee budget figure. In the latter case, my interest had been sparked by a comment from a previous ECF Finance Director at Council indicating that the budget figures for Game Fee had always been created on an unscientific basis (or words to that effect).

The essential point was to establish whether better collection of Game Fee could turn out to be a sufficiently important "rabbit from the hat" to resolve the funding gap. Disappointingly, it turns out that it wasn't.

[Ian Kingston]

Spotted it a long time ago - one reason why I stopped posting in this thread.

... and yet you've just posted.
I think these comments are getting a bit personal.

And having said my piece I return to my bunker.