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Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2017 4:17 am
by Mr_Tibbs
£43k it is :)

Well spotted :thumbup:

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2017 8:58 am
by dfc4me
Is anything in place yet to allow those of us who don't do Internet banking to join in the fund raising?

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2017 12:20 pm
by Mr_Tibbs
dfc4me wrote:Is anything in place yet to allow those of us who don't do Internet banking to join in the fund raising?
I just sent you a PM with the email address to contact and enquire about alternative ways to pay. I don't like putting email addresses on this forum because they can get picked up by spammers too easily.

For anyone else the address is the "cs@..." one which is you can find at the bottom of this page...

http://fundraising.darlingtonfcsupporte ... ue-2-pitch

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Sat Apr 29, 2017 12:54 pm
by Quakerz
I see that the pitch fund is now £36,778 (85%) and the boost the budget is at £16,120 (20%) - looking good on both fronts.

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Sat Apr 29, 2017 1:47 pm
by Darlo_Pete
Once the pitch funding has been raised, which is more important, the budget fund or the start of the stand fund? I'd say the budget.

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2017 9:06 am
by al_quaker
90% funded :clap:
Darlo_Pete wrote:Once the pitch funding has been raised, which is more important, the budget fund or the start of the stand fund? I'd say the budget.
There's no point having a team capable of finishing top 5 next season if we aren't allowed to participate in the playoffs...

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2017 2:35 pm
by Darlo_Pete
al_quaker wrote:90% funded :clap:
Darlo_Pete wrote:Once the pitch funding has been raised, which is more important, the budget fund or the start of the stand fund? I'd say the budget.
There's no point having a team capable of finishing top 5 next season if we aren't allowed to participate in the playoffs...
You could also argue, what is the point of having a ground good enough for the play-offs and a mid table team. Also if we have a mid table team, that will have an adverse effect on the crowds and the budget.

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2017 6:40 pm
by shawry
Darlo_Pete wrote:
al_quaker wrote:90% funded :clap:
Darlo_Pete wrote:Once the pitch funding has been raised, which is more important, the budget fund or the start of the stand fund? I'd say the budget.
There's no point having a team capable of finishing top 5 next season if we aren't allowed to participate in the playoffs...
You could also argue, what is the point of having a ground good enough for the play-offs and a mid table team. Also if we have a mid table team, that will have an adverse effect on the crowds and the budget.
Ideally we'd have both which is why we have 2 pitches for fundraising, but I think having a team reach the play offs for the 2nd season running and not being able to take part would be worse for our fan base than a mid table team.

Also, once the ground is of a standard, clearly we could focus on the squad.

Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Mon May 01, 2017 11:58 am
by Spyman
And you never know how a team might perform. You could spend all the money in the world and miss out on playoffs, or you could spend less and put together a team that achieves beyond expectations.

Let's get the ground sorted so that when the time comes, we can take promotion.

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Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Mon May 01, 2017 3:56 pm
by al_quaker
Just over 2k to go :clap:

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Wed May 03, 2017 7:52 pm
by Vodka_Vic
Just a warning about pledging for the Boost the Budget. Don't know if it's the case for the other pitches. When giving your sort code, if you don't insert the hyphens then it crashes.

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Wed May 03, 2017 8:32 pm
by Quakerz
Good to see the first 43k raised - I hope that doesn't stop fans contributing between now and the next pitch going up.

Boost the budget also looking good with £19,759 in it, though still a hell of a long way to go to 80k. Whatever we can raise in this, it reduces the cut it MGs playing budget.

As said before even £10 a month is £120 over a season, and £20 a month is £240 over a season. If 4 people do £20 a month, thats £960 - nearly 1k, just from 4 people. If every day 4-5 new people contribute, the fund will go up by c£1000 a day. Every penny counts on this.

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Thu May 04, 2017 6:07 am
by Mr_Tibbs
Vodka_Vic wrote:Just a warning about pledging for the Boost the Budget. Don't know if it's the case for the other pitches. When giving your sort code, if you don't insert the hyphens then it crashes.
I can't remember how I did mine but I usually don't insert hyphens in my sort code when I enter it anywhere so I'm not sure if this is an actual bug, or if either your connection dropped out at just the wrong time or they had a momentary server glitch.

I'd be hugely surprised if an established online payments company such as GoCardless didn't have both ways covered in their form handling script so I suspect one of the latter, but it might be something else.

Did you try it without hyphens more than once?

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Thu May 04, 2017 11:32 am
by Vodka_Vic
No. It may have crashed at the wrong time, but without hyphens it appeared to crash.

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Thu May 04, 2017 11:11 pm
by lo36789
I didn't put hyphens in and went through fine.

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Fri May 05, 2017 9:42 am
by Mr_Tibbs
lo36789 wrote:I didn't put hyphens in and went through fine.
That's good to hear. Must've been just bad luck then.

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Fri May 05, 2017 1:02 pm
by al_quaker
Someone's just chucked in £5000 :shock: :clap:

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Fri May 05, 2017 1:11 pm
by Mr_Tibbs
al_quaker wrote:Someone's just chucked in £5000 :shock: :clap:
Yes, just saw it! 12% funded on the latest pitch already - what FAN-tastic fans we've got!

Image

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Fri May 05, 2017 8:14 pm
by Neil Johnson
super_les_mcjannet wrote:
44 years wrote:It feels strange to me that people are saying they are waiting before investing in the community share scheme until they know the investors etc. especially as it is a loan rather than a gift. I believe that whoever the investors are they cant be in it for our assets as we have few (and we have debts and yearly commitments with paying the landlord) and also doubt they have millions to invest so this will need to be a co-operation between the investors (if they actually come on board) and us as fans to drive the club forward and make the experience for current and future fans exceptional. I have just put in my investment (plus an amount for the budget). Please lets not go back to expecting others to provide funds as the experience of the past (feethams and the arena) means we as a fans group will become less involved and not as united and the therefore more likely that we go belly up. Its been a great 5 years - the best continuous period I have known since following the mighty Quakers and long may it continue.

Personally I have other things I can spend my money on, I seen it as a sacrifice I could live with as we were fan owned. However I think MG said that investors would want more than the 15% ownership allowed and more than 51% to give them the balance of power.

If I was putting in a substantial amount then I would probably want the same so I don't blame them for that but if someone else other than the fans is the main owner who I now can't vote out at an AGM then, I would rather spend my money on something else.

I have seen this view with a few others and this is where MG announcement has now put us, some will put in which in theory is a loan and can be taken back between 5-20 years but it's not for me.
The MG v DFCSG PR gaff is unfortunate when we are in the process of raising funds again for keeping the club going forward.

With 51% of the power lost we could end up with the community shares value & the fans' say being worthless. 2 sets of share classes were created at Leeds with the fans' share type demoted to non-voting and thereby worthless by a set of incoming owners.

Having invested a lot (with assurances on interest & withdrawal) I wouldn't want the face value of my shares to be donated to any fly by night future owners.

With the current community share based fundraising there must be guarantees that the club golden share is held by the fans and will not become worthless.

Apart from any share "miss-selling" accusations, I wouldn't want any new investors usurping the fans' ownership as we've been bitten many times by con-men owners, usually without any connection to the town.

The FA ground development issues to reach FL level are a relatively temporary nuisance (4-8 years say?) which isn't very long compared to the life span of DFC. In a "relatively" short time we should not be burdened with satisfying any more FA vanity seating demands.

Using FA logic there are tens of thousands of unsafe grounds in non-league football, because they dont have a large percentage of covered seating. There may be grounds for a multi-club legal challenge to this latest mismanagement by the FA, because their seating preferences may be deemed a restraint on trade.

Rather than MG bemoan fan ownership and fundraising he could consider the small matter of 4 seasons without any serious income / crowd building generated from cup runs.

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Sun May 07, 2017 1:52 pm
by Darlofan97
Quite staggering really that c£64k (dis-counting the £10k for the investor) has been raised in little over 2 weeks.

Personally I think that, for the short-term, focus has to be switched to the "Boost the Budget Scheme". It's imperative that we keep this squad together over the summer.

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Thu May 11, 2017 8:38 pm
by Quakerz
It's great to see after about 5 days complete fundraising stagnation, that now the RS interest is over, that money is piling back into the stand pitch and boost a budget.

We need to keep this going now.

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Fri May 12, 2017 6:51 pm
by Allan Quatermain
Is it just me or has there been some pledges taken back out?

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Fri May 12, 2017 6:56 pm
by al_quaker
Allan Quatermain wrote:Is it just me or has there been some pledges taken back out?
Yeah about 5k I reckon. I'm sure I saw it up towards 19k earlier today. Which is a pain

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Fri May 12, 2017 9:09 pm
by dfc4me
Didn't the same thing happen with the first pitch near the end when, I think, £3000 was suddenly withdrawn. Is it possible to find out if this is the same person?

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Fri May 12, 2017 11:50 pm
by Mr_Tibbs
dfc4me wrote:Didn't the same thing happen with the first pitch near the end when, I think, £3000 was suddenly withdrawn. Is it possible to find out if this is the same person?
Could be a number of innocent reasons - maybe someone meant to put in £300 and put an extra zero on the end so went back in to cancel it and do a new pledge, or decided to drop it in the Boost the Budget pitch instead, or some urgent expense cropped up.

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Tue May 16, 2017 7:22 pm
by al_quaker
Just tried to log onto the CS website (fundraising.darlingtonsupportersgroup.org) and got the following message

"Your connection is not private

Attackers might be trying to steal your information from fundraising.darlingtonfcsupportersgroup.org (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards)"
:shock: :shock: :shock: :shock:

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Tue May 16, 2017 9:00 pm
by mikkyx
Getting reports via Twitter that it's not working properly for a few people - am looking into it.

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Wed May 17, 2017 9:36 am
by mikkyx
Think we've got a handle on what's gone on here, fix is in place and will roll out over the next few hours (DNS related, so it needs to propagate...)

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Wed May 17, 2017 9:37 am
by Quakerz
How come the pitch fund seems to be open again, with 2 days left to pledge and now 44k in it?

Has someone taken a pledge back out of the initial 43k?

Re: Community share pledge

Posted: Wed May 17, 2017 10:31 am
by divas
Quakerz wrote:How come the pitch fund seems to be open again, with 2 days left to pledge and now 44k in it?

Has someone taken a pledge back out of the initial 43k?
The days left on the pledge has a bit of a bug in that once the deadline has passed it starts to count days from the deadline so it'll increment every day. The pitch isn't accepting any pledges tho

I added a missing pledge made offline this morning hence the uplift from 43K to 44K. Once all monies are collected if all come in I'll roll any surplus over to the next community share issue