Compulsory Membership?

[Alex Holowczak]

What is the current estimate for when the CVENT Online Membership Payment System will go live?

This is the only question I know a definitive answer to. It is expected that the online membership solution will be ready for July 1st, in order for people to take advantage of the offer mentioned here: http://www.englishchess.org.uk/?page_id=18755

[Alex McFarlane]

think it was wrong to allow the junior ammendment to be moved at the meeting at all as it gave no opportunity for the impact to be considered as there was no prior notice of the amendment.

I disagree Sean.
It is perfectly acceptable to propose a change to amounts at the AGM. What was not available to allow an evaluation of the impact was anything approaching a breakdown from the Board as to how it expected the money to be achieved.

I firmly believe that a budget along the lines of

x Gold members @ £27
y silver members @
etc

plus figures for anticipated league and congress income figures should have been provided.

A simplish spreadsheet along those lines should have been supplied and people would have been able to do their own 'what if' calculations. Indeed the meeting could (and should) have been told at the time what effect various changes would have.

Whilst I don't think the ECF calculations were really carried out on the back of a cigarette packet, I can understand why people thought this to be the case.

I believe the figures were based on an 85% uptake of membership but I don't recall any predicted ECF figures on the effect of an 80% or 90% uptake.

Albeit a simpler scenario, but I have done this sort of thing when preparing a budget for a congress with regard to entry fees and expected uptake.

[Roger de Coverly]

I think it was wrong to allow the junior ammendment to be moved at the meeting at all as it gave no opportunity for the impact to be considered as there was no prior notice of the amendment.

The ECF Directors had the chance in October 2011 to change the constitution to eliminate voting on the level of Game Fee. They chose not to do so. For that matter, there had been little or no debate or discussion about the effect of the ECF changes on the Junior scene, even if implicit in the ECF proposals was the intent to raise quite a bit more from that source.

Looking up the numbers and starting from the expected outrun in 2011-12, the ECF was forecasting a most recent annual income of around £ 57,000 from Game Fee. I expect this is net of VAT so the actual amount collected is that much higher. This it will no longer be charging. Leagues, Congresses and Counties get this as a straight saving. So it has to make this amount up from somewhere, basically by selling memberships to existing non-members. Has the ECF ever carefully looked at the profile of these non-members using grading data, particularly to check whether they were juniors? The reaction of junior organisers is that it was relying on raising additional funds by selling memberships to junior participants. The resulting price rise looked financially unattractive to the parents of potential participants, so they pressed for a cheaper deal against the threat that the ECF would receive nothing.

On top of that the £ 6 pay to play should bring in some income, but on the revenue side the extra £ 6 or £ 15 demanded from Basic Members might be offset by downgrades to Bronze or Silver from categories that become Gold or Platinum.
I

[Angus French]

Perhaps it would have been better to set game fee and membership rates using the median method (as has been done previously and as the agenda flagged would be the case).

[Andrew Farthing]

What was not available to allow an evaluation of the impact was anything approaching a breakdown from the Board as to how it expected the money to be achieved.

I firmly believe that a budget along the lines of

x Gold members @ £27
y silver members @
etc

plus figures for anticipated league and congress income figures should have been provided.

A simplish spreadsheet along those lines should have been supplied and people would have been able to do their own 'what if' calculations. Indeed the meeting could (and should) have been told at the time what effect various changes would have.

A spreadhseet along these lines was included in the Council papers, which were available several weeks in advance of the meeting at http://www.englishchess.org.uk/?page_id=897. Specifically, it was item C16.11B Funding Calculations.

It is not a simple matter to estimate the impact of the kind of changes which were made at Finance Council, and I do not believe that it is reasonable to assert that this could and should have been possible at the meeting itself.

[Roger de Coverly]

I firmly believe that a budget along the lines of

x Gold members @ £27
y silver members @
etc

plus figures for anticipated league and congress income figures should have been provided.

There was this one
http://www.englishchess.org.uk/wp-conte ... ations.xls

It doesn't bear up to much critical scrutiny as a reliable model of the ECF's funding for 2012-13 because there are so many salient features left out. So no estimate of the effect of the runoff of Game Fee up to 31st August or the run-off of existing membership categories. The estimate of Junior Silver members seems based on the assumption that all junior events would be Congresses and would insist on membership for all participants.

The run-off point could be relevant in two ways. Firstly the scheme only expects to charge a proportionate amount to renewal memberships that extend beyond 31st August 2012, which will depress income in the first year. Secondly for memberships that expire towards the end of the 2012-13 season, players may elect not to renew if they don't anticipate playing again until September 2013.

[William Metcalfe]

Our club has always given reduced fees to Direct ECF members this year they paid £12 less as that was the cost of MO membership.The reason we can do this is that none of the 3 league we play in charge game fee so they charge zero league fees other than registration fee per player

[Andrew Farthing]

A recent example of how a Union can still have an impact is the issue of Junior Membership / Game Fee. Neill Cooper initially raised his concerns at SCCU level and won over a number of sceptics (me, for instance).

We may need to wait a while [i.e. until the new budget is published] to see if that's a good example or not. That particular decision may yet have serious repurcussions.

Indication seem to suggest that this is not a good example after all.

Preliminary indications - in the process of being verified by the Finance Director - are that the impact of the changes made by Finance Council will be to reduce the ECF's income in 2012/13 by an amount in the range £8,750 to £19,750. The range reflects a range of assumptions about behaviours across the country in response to the post-Sept 1 changes, with the higher figure reflecting a worst case scenario.

This is no surprise to those of us who voted against this at council. I think it was wrong to allow the junior ammendment to be moved at the meeting at all as it gave no opportunity for the impact to be considered as there was no prior notice of the amendment.

I would urge the ECF to seek to reverse this decision at the earliest opportunity.

Realistically, I don't see how this can be done ahead of the 2013/14 membership year, i.e. the decision would need to be made at the April 2013 Finance Council meeting to take effect the following 1 September.

[Roger de Coverly]

Realistically, I don't see how this can be done ahead of the 2013/14 membership year, i.e. the decision would need to be made at the April 2013 Finance Council meeting to take effect the following 1 September.

It's an "at a cost" solution, but you call an EGM tasked solely with establishing whether there are savings available on the Expenditure side which don't involve sending the Directors as the Olympiad team ( two IMs after all) and sorting out a realistic Income budget without rose tinted spectacles as to the likely damage that universal membership causes to both the head count and the number of graded games. You might even be forced to have an EGM if the NCCU £10 proposal has any support or momentum.

[Alex Holowczak]

Perhaps it would have been better to set game fee and membership rates using the median method (as has been done previously and as the agenda flagged would be the case).

The membership rates have never been set using the median method.

If a Game Fee rate has the support of a majority, then it will always be the median rate anyway.

[Alex McFarlane]

I don't see how the spreadsheet I was directed to allows you to enter a percentage of those on the grading list at each band of membership which to my mind would have beenan obvious way of obtaining figures. Nor do I see how you can use it to calculate the number of £6 congress fees that non-membership would bring in.
Nor does it seem to allow you to predict league income at either £1 or £2. Am I missing something?

[David Sedgwick]

I would urge the ECF to seek to reverse this decision at the earliest opportunity.

Realistically, I don't see how this can be done ahead of the 2013/14 membership year, i.e. the decision would need to be made at the April 2013 Finance Council meeting to take effect the following 1 September.

I think it could be done, albeit it would be difficult to do so before the deadline for the nomination of the Olympiad teams.

My understanding is that the revised budget is to be submitted for the approval of Council by written resolution. You could instead ask Council to choose between:

a) approving the revised budget;
b) reversing the decision about Game Fee for junior events and approving (something close to) the original budget.

Everyone who knows my background and interests in chess will appreciate that I find the idea of not being able to send representative teams to the Olympiad extremely distasteful. Nevertheless, I would still vote for the first option.

The reason is that I consider the original estimates of the expected income from juniors to be highly over-optimistic. I await an answer to my question about the anticipated level of disaffiliations.

As for the lack of discussion at Council, there was a paper on the subject and I moved a procedural motion to enable that paper to be discussed before the budget was considered. The motion was defeated. C'est la vie.

[John McKenna]

If it transpires that the full-steam- ahead decisions of S.S. ECF's officers has already resulted in 'men overboard' and too few hands to continue to sail the vessel then Sean is right to call for course to be reversed before the point of no return. The officers are busy calculating the best course (budget) still available and always know more than they let slip to crew & passengers. Let's hope the Admiral & Capt. aren't planning to jump ship at the next island just in case the ship hits the iceberg!?

[Andrew Farthing]

Realistically, I don't see how this can be done ahead of the 2013/14 membership year, i.e. the decision would need to be made at the April 2013 Finance Council meeting to take effect the following 1 September.

It's an "at a cost" solution, but you call an EGM tasked solely with establishing whether there are savings available on the Expenditure side which don't involve sending the Directors as the Olympiad team ( two IMs after all) and sorting out a realistic Income budget without rose tinted spectacles as to the likely damage that universal membership causes to both the head count and the number of graded games. You might even be forced to have an EGM if the NCCU £10 proposal has any support or momentum.

Setting aside the slanted references to rose tinted spectacles and so on, I don't believe that this is a realistic option, and all I claimed was that realistically the earliest opportunity to make the change would be the next Finance Council. Now that we are well into the cycle of local AGMs, etc. and the details of the new membership and game fee scheme have been communicated, it would cause unacceptable confusion to start changing it again. Also, I feel that the democratic verdict of Council should be respected, even if I strongly disagreed with the changes and voted against them.

I have tasked the Junior Director and his team with preparing properly costed and researched proposals for junior membership and game fee in readiness for the next Council debate. This seems to me the only sensible approach if a further costly mistake (in my opinion) is to be avoided. The changes agreed at Council were made without a satisfactory understanding of the consequences or any proper challenge of the assertions underlying them (which I certainly considered to be eminently challengeable).

[Roger de Coverly]

Am I missing something?

I don't think so. Obviously the Council meeting moved on by deciding to defer discussion of the budget, but I suspect it would have been torn to shreds had a discussion taken place. There were formula errors in the main budgeting spreadsheet as well.