Dear Members
We would like to let you know about some changes we are making to the club membership process in 2020. Please note that this only applies to membership types which require an annual fee to be paid (this does not apply to Junior U12 or Associate membership types)
At present we have a system whereby members renew their membership on the anniversary of the date they joined. You may not know this, but out of the £30 paid by First Claim members for club membership, £15 (increasing to £16 in 2020) goes to England Athletics (EA) to make them an affiliated athlete. The affiliation fee has to be paid between April 1st and June 30th every year, regardless of when they joined the club. For people who joined (and therefore have a renewal date) at the end of the year, this means that their EA affiliation fee has to be paid up front by the club. When they renew their membership later in the year they are reimbursing the club for the money already paid out for their affiliation. If people don’t renew their membership when the time comes, the club has lost that £15. That may not sound a lot but last year the club paid affiliation fees for 70 people who didn’t renew their membership, meaning that we overpaid EA by over £1000. This is money we could be using for the benefit of the club members.
In order to fix this problem we are going to gradually move everybody’s annual renewal date to April 1st, to align with the EA year. This means that the next time you renew your club membership you will only be asked to pay for the amount of time that takes you up to April 1st 2021. Details of the pro rata amount will be posted on the club website.
During this transition period we will be asking all EA affiliated members who pay membership fees between Jul 1st and Dec 31st to pay their EA affiliation fee during the period April 1st to June 30th. This will ensure that they remain an affiliated athlete until their club renewal date. They will then pay the pro rata amount of the £15 club membership later in the year. The total amount that they pay will be less than last year.
We appreciate that managing this change through the transition period is going to be challenging, and that there may be issues, but we feel that the end goal makes it worthwhile.
If your membership type requires you to pay an annual subscription in the 1st quarter of 2020 we will contact you again shortly with further information about renewing your membership.
Kind regards
The HRC committee