Club Arnage

Right then!

As part of my role as Head of Charity I need to find out what you lot think...

We are planning on introducing the option of making a donation to charity for downloading next year's CA Guide to LM.  Initially I need to know if members would rather split these funds between a few nominated charities or champion one charity for the year.

Answers on a postcard please

Dx

I'd nominate any of the Air Ambulances - certainly a few years back they had no central govt or NHS funding.

Good Idea,

Maybe would could split is between the Air Ambulances and the Coastguard.

We hope never to have to use them on our way to LM but they are voluntary also.

Maybe stick with the same horrible disease but then for children? Then again, smokie's charity makes more sense as for support and attention.

I think it's better to stick to only one charity though, might keep it all more clear.

Rick, the Coastguard is not voluntary - it is a government body.
However, the RNLI IS a voluntarily manned charity organisation.


I think a split donation is a sensible option.
I suggest, as the big name charities always seem to attract the most publicity, and, hence, the most public donations, we consider some of the smaller (but equally as worthy) charities.
As we are a motor sport oriented forum, how about the Motor Sport Safety Fund http://www.motorsportsafetyfund.com/

I second all above ideas and throw in a donation to Radio LeMans.

Difficult one.  And there is a third option - to change it every year.  I think we ought to be democratic about it.  Use this topic to produce a shortlist and then vote on it.

I'd go with Cancer Research, or perhaps something like the Richard Burns Foundation.

Whoops, should have hit "post" 2 hours ago

Very difficult.  Most charities are more than worthy of our support, but we can't support them all.

After much thought, I would go with one charity, and to stay with the Cancer theme, and would suggest CLIC (Cancer and Leukemia in Children). 

After everyone who wants to has had their say, I would be happy for our good lady 'Head of Charity' to make the decision - she chose a good one before.

Del

i go for cancer research also :)

Some good points above. I reclon if we can raise enough we could split it between three or four charities. But it has to be enough to make a difference. Anyway, we could have a thread where we can all nominate our favoured charity and offer a brief word why we think it should be on the "panel". Then we have a poll. Top three or four win. Once the charity has been on the panel they should be excluded the following year.

Here's a rhetorical question - we are a motorsport based forum, so would those people downloading the LM Guide be more inclined to give if it were to charities they were vaguely interested in i.e. motoring and/or sports charities?

My own nomination would be for Sport Relief, mainly cos I met the celebrity cricket team when I was in India and  I was interested to hear what they had to say over a few beers after the match against the Bollywood XI in Bombay. I subsequently saw those poor little kids working in the beating sun on that massive sh-it tip. Words cannot describe that stench and filth in which they lived, and really I was very moved by the experience. Indeed I've plans afoot to try and do something on a personal level for Sport Relief later in the year. Watch this space!

just as a pointer, couple of big IFs here.  there have been about 3000 downloads for the 2006 guide, we will ask for each download the equivalent of the autosport LM guide which is about 3-4 GBP's, so potentially there could be 9-12K GBP's in the kitty.

The main part of the guide will be available earlier than this year, which could mean more demand?  So the above is achievable.

my vote is definitely to split the fund across a number of charities.  Hope this helps put it into a little more perspective.  FS

It's a HUGE If.

I know if I found something like this which you had to pay for there is a good chance that a mate and I would go halves, one of us would d/l it then copy it for the other.  Already done it on the TomTom European speed camera overlays.

It would only take one person from another well attended forum to pay for the download, then host it himself as a free d/l, linked to from a forum, for our projections to be totally blown away. OK we could make it copyright but in reality how would that help?

Maybe people would take a different view if the money was going to charity but I don't think the (awesome) number of downloads this year can safely be used as a measure of possibilities for next year.

I'd love to be proved wrong.  :)

..... and a big assumption that 3000 people make a charitable donation.

Further to Smokie's post, I know for a fact that the 2006 downloadable PDF was copied and hosted on the UK Cobra Replica Club site.

http://www.cobraclub.com/forum/showpost.php?p=147442&postcount=3

http://www.cobraclub.com/caguide2006-full.pdf

It's still there!  Who knows how many times it was downloaded from there?

so what is it you are trying to say then Steve?

not to me it ain't

Blimey is that what Autosport costs these days?  Havent been at home to buy it the last couple of years.....

I will always support Cancer Reaserch over other charities for their achievements in the treatment of Cancer - something we are all likely to encounter at some stage of our lives. But its a huge organisation and very well supported.
And I do think we should support a single charity so that we potentially could make a difference with a sizable donation rather than split it.
Maybe if we could find a smaller charity such as a Childrens Hospice that we could adopt and name in our request for donations, and maybe be seen to be handing over a cheque, that way people will know where their donations have gone.   

Don't worry about it Rick, I think Mrs Brown is having an off day.  Lets get back to  letting Doris know about how WE the forum feel the charity money should be apportioned.  :D

My first choice would be too a motorsports based charity like the one already put forward by Steve Brown and one of the worthy cancer charitys, Breakthru breast cancer research being one I have helped in the past.

As steve has already said it will be quite hard to stop it being downloaded and then pasted up somwhere else with the charity donation bit missing.

As an aside by seeming to charge for it will the ACO want anything out of it? they did after all demand an entire book release be pluped as they never gave approval for its release?

That's true Nordic but we could always put the charity call INTO the guide (e.g. first page with a reminder in each page header/footer).

just voted :D still think cancer research should be in there.. my partner got through 2 bouts of spinal cancer (mild luckily!) but helping her through the chemo etc was hard and CR in jersey did a wonderful job helping.. so I have started doing things for it over here.. did the 24hr relay for life and did a hawaiian tropic (le mans theme ;)) see link http://tinyurl.com/ra9al
even a little beer wall was put up and the LM tent was erected.. le mans t shirt sat and pescarolo shirt sunday.. (and tuxedo for the 2am walk!!)

Andy ;D

Cancer research is always a good cause for charity. Being in research, I would also love to see some of the donations go to an asthma fund or a fund for lung diseases in general. the reason being is that lung diseases ar on the rise, they soon will be the number 3 cause of death. Also more and more children are suffering from lung disease, research is needed to prevent this from escalating.

Since I am Dutch and we will be collecting money again on our party on friday night, could it also be a Dutch charity where some of the money goes to????

Here's my two penceworth.

I think that splitting by the money too many ways the amount involved would be too small to make a difference, and surely a charitable donation is intended to make a difference. I would like to see us support a charity that could become CAs official good cause, which I think, as Steve said, really ought to be motorsport based given that, despite all the various tangents, this is a motorsport based Forum. Members could then, if they wished, support the charity in any other fund raising throughout the year.

If the guide is to become an annual publication we could have a quest charity decided on by members that changes every year and give them a percentage of the donations. Personaly, I think the better known charites get support in many ways throughout the country, although maybe not enough. Where we could really make a difference is making our "guest charity" somthing smaller like helping a terminally sick child acheive a dream such as going to Disney.

Only my ideas but I'm happy to go along with the majority.

All good points, the thread is about getting an idea how the forum views apportioning the charity donations, the next step will be to decide which charitie/s we sponsor.

The big IF is how much the voluntary donation will yield, which we will not know until the guide is ready, my personal view, is that it will be 2-3K GBP.

Another factor is that there are other forum members who are/will be raising money for charity apart from Doris, we may wish to sponsor them/as well as Doris for 2007.

Lets not get to bogged down in the minutiae. The question is do we support more than one charity and lets have some ideas about worthy causes.  FS

I may well have downloaded it twice this year, once at work and once at home i believe. I wouldn't go on last years figures as of course it was free. Most of my team did not even appreciate the work I had put into mine and didn't even bother to look at Werners! I expect that it will raise around 4-6k.

I think we should try to find a donation that would assist all the members of the forum. Something international as as Roy said with the DfH party we will raise a lot again!

You won't know if it'll make a difference until you know how much you've got, and I for one wouldn't like to make a guess.
If there's a fee, then most downloaders will be put off, or as Smokie says, get around it one way or another. One option may be to make it a printed version, to be posted out to whoever 'buys' it with an online donation, but this would require extra work at the CA end of things. A bit lo-tech, but maybe worth thinking about.

Another scam, which I've already mentioned to Doris in a pm thus:

"While I'm on, one of many areas of confusion to me has been this 'sell a ticket on CA but only at face value' lark. What happens, as no doubt you saw, literally hundreds of people clog the website looking for tickets and a bargain. Usually it's because they couldn't be bothered to order in time and mostly they've never posted on CA before. I know for a fact that many of them re-sell their tix on e-bay after buying on CA. Opportunists if you ask me. May I humbly suggest to you, in your capacity as Charity Fund Raising Officer, that anyone buying tickets at face value from another CA member has to make a donation to one of the charities that you have on your shortlist."

Worth considering?
H

That would be a good idea as well. On another topic, CA could make it policy not to sell tickets to newbies but only to people who have at least posted more then 100 times on CA, maybe even 200. Of course we could still ask for 5 or 10 % of the face value as a donation for charity. That way it surves two good causes.

I think Roy has a very fair point, especially with regard to DFH's immense hospitality on Friday night this year, and the amount that was raised,  but lets not forget Werners contribution to the CA guide as well, and the contributions from the US. We really need to find an international organisation and cause that we could support.

well we all know, or know of, somebody who has battled cancer.. some successfully and some not.. and this is all around the world.. so i hereby nominate The Association for International Cancer Research (AICR) http://www.aicr.org.uk/

take a look at the sight.. they get my vote!

Andy

that would be a good option. They support young promising scientists and projects around the world, you can see what projects the money goes to and how much. Saw some projects in England, Scotland, Italy, Germany, USA, Netherlands. Could be a great option actually

Good call Fagey, I will go for that.

What I cannot understand is why we have had so many views and only 15 votes??!!

As a proper group, which I think we are, it would be good to have a preferred charity.

We could incorporate the butterfly (logo) into our T shirt designs.

>Martini...

my thought are that most people shouldnt mind one pound, but will stop at four.
best not to loose sight of who the guide is for - CA members or associate ones?
Regardless, a copyright needs to be put on the editorial content, with acknowledgments on external sources.
 
as for charities - Oxfam for me does it.  So many of the others waste money needlessly and Oxfam has one of the lowest costs of the main charities.  that or Air Ambulance as they offer a service which hopefully not, but inevitably, some of us may need at some point.

(Don't forget that each time any one of us comes back to see the updates the counter goes up...I've probably been in this thread six or seven times)

I agree, it looks to be a good international option.

Don’t think we came to any conclusion on this (sorry if I missed that we did) but on last nights Goodwood FOS program they mentioned the newly formed Richard Burns Foundation set up to help people with serious life threatening illnesses. Could be a good option for our support.
http://www.richardburnsfoundation.com/

I think the Richard Burns Foundation would be a good charity for us.

But if Doris wants me to give to her charity again, well of course. Nae bother.

bill

Now tell me why I can't find a "votation" button to vote on, please. I know it'll turn out that I am doing something wrong!!!  :-[

You didn't miss anything Ian.  I've just been somewhat remiss in getting back to you all with the results.   ::)
 
Will start a new thread....

Dx