Membership and levy consultation

[Mrs H]

There is a mighty document just appeared on the BOF site about a future membership and levy consultation - well I say future it says it should be happening now prior to discussion at th October clubs conference and decisions at the next agm

Given all the upheaval in recent years regarding membership and levies I'm not quite sure why this is necessary unless there is a sudden panic at HQ over how the wage bill is going to be met. There are some odd phrases which perhaps give an indication of where this is coming from - and possibly where it is going to such as :

more than 50% of participant runs are at events which do not contribute to the costs of orienteering through the payment of a levy of any sort.

by which I took it to mean the cost of BOF admin as the orienteering will have been covered by the entry fee.

Also is it my imagination or is there a hint that the club-centric nature of the sport is a "bad thing" as is the junior 3 for 1 levy?

It seems to be a fairly major topic for debate but has been unveiled in a rather low key way.

What do you think?

[graeme]

I think there's a panic at HQ about how the wage bill is going to be met. Not sudden: they knew this was coming; MikeH discussed it at the Edinburgh roadshow.

[smf]

There is a mighty document just appeared on the BOF site about a future membership and levy consultation

This document is a repost of the news item from 3rd August 2011.

[Scott]

Yes, this document was first posted (and emailed to clubs and associations) nearly two months ago - Spookster even posted it on here, but nobody replied - but so far there have been surprisingly few responses. Hopefully there is more feedback to come at the Conference.

As the document (hopefully) makes clear, this consultation is not looking to raise more money, but at how we should be raising the amount we currently take. There are a couple of things driving this.

One is the apparently widespread feeling (it's been criticised on here often enough!) that the current membership system is too complicated - apparently the BOF office staff spend currently spend a disproportionately large amount of time on the phone just trying to explain it to people wanting to join, and I think many clubs are having similar issues.

The other is the nature of the levy system, which is currently designed to raise most of its income from larger events. There has been a noticeable change in how people participate over the last year or so: participation at larger events has fallen, but the number of smaller events, which pay little/no levy, has increased. Although this is probably a good thing from a development point of view - more "local" orienteering certainly fits in with BOF's overall development strategy - it also means that that the amount of income raised by levy is decreasing sharply even though the overall event participation figures are themselves relatively static.

It's worth emphasising that this is a genuine consultation - the Board don't currently have any particular model in mind (keeping the status quo is an option, if that's what people want), and it's important that whatever we end up with works for clubs and participants as well as for BOF central.

Also is it my imagination or is there a hint that the club-centric nature of the sport is a "bad thing" as is the junior 3 for 1 levy?

Hopefully it's your imagination - I helped (in a rather minor way) to write the document, and I generally think that both of those are very good things. In fact (speaking personally) I would probably argue that one of the weaknesses of the sport is that it's not club-centric enough, but that's a different topic...

[Mrs H]

This document is a repost of the news item from 3rd August 2011.

so far there have been surprisingly few responses

Well perhaps posting in the middle of the week most of us were camped in a Scottish field was not the best of ideas

Surely the membership scheme is complicated because of the requirement to join BOF at the same time as joining a club. It used to be a bit more straightforward. Join the club - then join BOF when you felt ready to.

[SeanC]

I've always found the concept of joining BOF or a region rather odd. I've occasionally been known to support Watford Football Club and I guess I might have considered joining their supporters club - but I wouldn't have expected to join the Watford Chamber of Commerce, the FA or any other organisation Watford Football Club belong too after I'd watched a few games

But if we are just to join a club and not BOF, how do we raise the £112,000 membership fees currently raise?*

* If you're of the opinion that we should simply pay BOF 112K less, please start another thread entitled "how much should we pay BOF and why?" as this thread is about how, not how much.

[Wayward-O]

So much is outside the remit of the consumtation, including:

1. The totals raised or how spent,
2. Club and Association member subscription structures,
3. The current system of club affiliation to British Orienteering,
etc...

that I find it hard to answer the questions posed by the consultation. The structure that best suits the raising of the current total from membership and levy may not suit a situation where 2 or 3 times that total is being sought - assuming that the current expenditure areas and levels are maintained and that reductions in UK Sport, Sport England etc. funding are to be made up through increased membership and levy income.

To me, this is putting the cart before the horse - we first need to decide what we as a sport require and expect from BO central, determine how much this will cost to deliver and only then determine the routes of funding appropriate to delivering that service, noting that any UK Sport, Sport England etc. funding is declining and ring-fenced. Deciding the split between subscription and levy income is, to some extent, fiddling around the edges.

[Paul Frost]

For the purpose of this proposal lets assume that the amount of money required is agreed.

I propose that the amount should be raised by a levy/tax on every single competitive run (not training).
So it's just a matter of adding up the total entries of every event at every club for the last 12 months.
Then add the amount raised by the existing event levies to the £112,000 from membership fees and divide by the above to come up with a single amount per run.
Clubs then add this to whatever they need to charge to cover their costs etc. for each entry.

2010 numbers, from the 2010 Annual report.
Levy raised: £87,000
Membership: £112,000
Total: £199,000

Paying Participants (not sure how accurately these were calculated)
Senior: 105,682
Junior: 51,689

So if you charged a single flat levy of £1.60 for seniors and .60p for juniors for EVERY run at EVERY event it would raise £200,104

Now whilst this sounds a lot, at the moment for larger events we are already paying £2.15 for all entries over 66 up to 210, and then £3.55 for the rest. So there would be savings for those of us that go to several larger events.
Plus if it was free membership as I propose, the £14.50 (local BO membership fees) saved would pay the levy for over 9 events. If you are a national member it would cover about 20 events a year and if some of those are larger events even more.

This also stops regular orienteers subsidising casual ones.

If a region (like Scotland) needs to raise money for running costs then it would calculate it's own levy (using the same flat rate model) that would need to be added to the above.

You could then have a nominal membership fee, say £5 year. But collecting fees is a pain in the *****, costs money and is time consuming, so if it were free, in exchange for an email address, all the better. It would be interesting to know how much it costs to collect the £112,000, or is that the net figure after expenses?

But I'm also tempted to class membership as the purchase of an SI-card (or Emit brikke if you insist), so you get a one off fee, a unique identity number and no membership card required and no renewal fees to collect. This would also make registration and results much easier, and less manpower required.

[EddieH]

Mrs H wrote "Well perhaps posting in the middle of the week most of us were camped in a Scottish field was not the best of ideas"

Well this is the body that when asked by the Swiss if there were any big event on in Britain in the first week of August (So that the Swiss O Week would not clash), answered that there were no big events in August So I don't suppose they even realised that the 6 day was happening - after allit is not a BOF event.

[SeanC]

Paul - I think what you propose about 0 membership fee makes sense - but this sounds like registration, not annual membership? If Orienteering were new to the UK there would probably be no membership - just online free registration which doesn't need renewals and all the work is done by a computer system (ie the way ParkRun and countless other organisations work). All the money would then have to be raised through pay as you go or other means.

Someone with a bit more expertise in this area might be able to say whether this would be possible and be a recognised sport with funding from the UK government? I'm pretty sure this would be too radical a step for enough orienteers to make it a non-starter.

[GillJ]

Our club representative for the Club Conference was notified in late August and this was immediately circulated to all members of the club for individual feedback the next day.

Orienteering is one of the cheapest sports in which to participate and belong. it is ironic that whilst the government wants more people to take part in sport,the likes of Sport England tend to fund more 'spectator friendly' sports like those included in the olympics. We have been made aware that Sport England funding for orienteering will be substantially reduced over the next few years and so members will all need to help keep our sport adequately funded. We can then still enjoy the sport we love.

[RS]

Paul Frost's suggestion/idea makes a lot of sense to me(but then I'm a normal punter )

[Scott]

online free registration which doesn't need renewals and all the work is done by a computer system

That's fine as long as you're not delivering any "membership benefits" of the sort that takes time/costs money to produce - magazines, annual membership cards, stuff like that. Otherwise, if you don't make people renew annually, membership numbers (and costs) would continue to grow out of proportion to your income. I think it may also raise questions about who gets to vote at the BOF AGM. You could maybe get round both these issues by requiring people to join a club before/when they "register" as a BOF member.

Without having checked, I suspect that a "free membership" system would probably be okay with Sport England, who don't really care about membership numbers. I'm not sure about the situation in Scotland, where membership is actually their main metric for Sport Scotland, but I guess the relevant figure there is SOA membership, and SOA would still be free to administer that separately.

[kofols]

Hi,
I like to read Nopesport because it is really very informative. I decided to make my first post after some years of just reading it. This thread is also very interesting to me because we (in Slovenia) have tried to implement levy on national events in 2006 but clubs and o community said no.

Just to say that I like Paul’s ideas but I also like a system with fixed entry fees for local/national events. One of our problem was/and still is that federation/clubs don’t want to enforce the strict rule that each club member who wants to compete under the club name on national events pays a flat membership fee. Also club culture is not that strong and almost all big events went out of the clubs. e.g. Lipica Open or OO.cup. Because we are in 90% recreational o community, people don’t mind if event don’t count for ranking or it isn’t on national calendar. They go because they know that they will get good event for their money.

That’s why I am very interested to know more about benefits yours federation gives to the big events. How you convince them to be part of the levy system?

[Sunlit Forres]

What does anyone think about having a flat-rate event registration fee? Given that in 2010 there were 1755 events, it would have generated £52,650 if there was a £30 fee for every event that appeared on the BOF fixtures list (closed fixtures and activties etc not requiring publicity and hence not appearing on the fixtures list should be free).

Even up here in Moray we often get people from well outside the area coming to our small Saturday league events because they've seen them on BOF the fixtures list, so I feel we're getting extra event income as a result of BOF publicising our event.

I'm not saying this is a good idea - I'm not convinced about it myself but as the thought had occurred to me I decided to share it.