DAIS Fundraising Meeting

A meeting to discuss the situation regarding the pitch and to discuss fundraising ideas was held on Tuesday.

Points raised by members of the board

* Major contribution from the Shirt Sponsors Purves Group, and DAFC Directors John Meiklem and Rodney Shearer to get the pitch work on track. Has helped keep the cost down considerably and got 8 weeks work down to about 3 weeks.

Turf was being cut tonight and shipped up overnight (Tuesday), to be laid from tomorrow.

* Club has received a lot of emails/calls re fundraising ideas. The response has been "amazing".

This meeting was to try and co-ordinate what to do - which of the ideas to go for and particularly whether to set up a specific committee to oversee the ideas, pick the best, plan for implementing them and do so. This would hopefully represent a cross section of fans and fan groups.

* The club does not want to have to take money away from the youth setup, or the budgets regarding players (wages, fees, etc).

This meeting was to try and co-ordinate what to do - which of the ideas to go for and particularly whether to set up a specific committee to oversee the ideas, pick the best, plan for implementing them and do so. This would hopefully represent a cross section of fans and fan groups.

* The club does not want to have to take money away from the youth setup, or the budgets regarding players (wages, fees, etc).

* Three forces come into play:

1 - The club have to write off the cost of the plastic pitch (approx £250k)
2 - There is the cost of buying the new pitch (approx £200k capital cost)
3 - There is the loss of income from hiring out the pitch (approx £100k P/A)

Together, these present a huge challenge to the club. Point 1 is basically unsolvable - not much else they can do (although see below). Point 2 is covered by soft loans, and the contribution of the above-named companies. Point 3 is where DAIS comes in and can hopefully help.

The club has already cut costs (player wages down from £60k p/w to £23k p/w, also off-pitch costs), and is striving to improve revenue. Good progress is being made, but there`s still a significant gap. It works out at about £2k p/w, but as stated the club don`t want to trim this from other budgets.

If the club could get an extra 500-1000 fans at home games it would help a lot. Last season (with all that entailed) walk-up fan numbers dropped from 1600 per game at the start to about 700 per game by the end of the season. If this could be avoided (obviously affected by success on the pitch) it would make a massive difference.

The club does not want to get any further into debt (even though a lot of it is `soft` debt, there are limits to how far this can carry on). They also do not want to ask for handouts without giving something back, and making sure that fundraising activities don`t conflict or work against each other. The board-members present were very keen to stress though how much they and the club all appreciate the efforts and goodwill of so many fans, and were not in any way trying to show anything other than gratitude for this, and are not asking people not to carry on doing so.

* One idea that was mooted was of a regular car boot sale at EEP (presumably on the car park) - this could provide good revenue without too much outlay, but needs further investigation.

* It was suggested that the club could sell the plastic pitch to another club, but JY stated that although clubs have been interested, they have been looking to get it for free. Discussions with parties unnamed are continuing though re whether a sale of the pitch is possible. There had been a grey area over who actually owned the pitch, but it does seem to have been resolved now that the club do.

One option considered was to put the pitch onto the site of the car park, and keep hiring it out as before, but due to Fife Council this is a no-go. There are transport issues regarding the space nearby.

We are interested in finding out how much support there is for a Pitch Fund. Initial discussions were for some form of prize fund with £1,000 won at each of the home games this season. More to follow.

To begin with we`d like to know if you would support paying an extra £20 to say sponsor a square metre of the new grass surface.

If you would be interested then let us know by filling in the online form at by **** clicking here ****

more to follow on the fund itself....