The Trust Committee met on Wednesday evening for their monthly meeting.
Membership
Trust membership is up to 328 which includes 66 Exiles. There has been an additional number of memberships sent into our PO Box which will be processed over the next few days in time for our next Newsletter which is intended to be sent out on Monday 1st July. The annual sign up has been a success but concerns were raised as to those whose details may have changed over the past twelve months. All will be emailed before the end of July to ask with regards to this.
Work with the club
A date has been agreed for the Fans Forum, with an announcement taking place in the next few days with all the details with regards to this.
A meeting is due to take place with the club in the next few days specifically regarding the Former Players Association. Unfortunately, this has had to be rescheduled a couple of times already but will happen soon.
Several questions have been sent in from members. These were discussed at the meeting and will be asked at the meeting. Should that meeting not have sufficient time to deal with them, a further meeting will be arranged. A report from those meetings will be published on the Trust website.
Feedback from the Season Tickets roadshows in which three Trust committee members joined the club at was discussed, with agreed feedback to be shared with the club.
Discussions took place regarding the next step for our fundraising for the 5-a-side pitch. It was decided that this would be an agenda point for the next meeting.
Friends of the Trust
All existing Friends of the Trust have agreed to be Friends again for the 2019-20 season. There are a further two in the pipeline that we hope to announce soon. Discussions were had as to how the Trust could further publicise the Friends and the discounts that Trust members can receive.
Welfare
The two main focuses for the Welfare section of the Trust for the 2019-20 season are to be Cholesterol and Mental Health. Discussions took place as to what follow up work could take place with these focuses.
Exiles
Exiles Day has been agreed for the home game against Burton in March. The Exiles Away Day will take place with the visit to Wimbledon in October. Tickets for that will be on sale from Monday 1st July. The Trust voted to subsidise this event as a show of appreciation to our Exiles.
Trust Events 2019-20
A race night has been agreed for November. It proved to be popular earlier in the year, raising close to £2,000. However, we were concerned that we chose the wrong time of the year to host the event so we have brought it forward this year to November. A booking is in place for this event to be held again in the Dale Bar with the same team who put on last year’s event.
Concerns were raised about the date for this season’s Curry Night. The event is traditionally held on Maundy Thursday, but with the fixture list giving us a Good Friday trip to Blackpool, there was a worry that many supporters may opt to head straight for the seaside on the Thursday evening. We would consider a number of alternative dates.
With the Trust having a significant number of Junior Members that as a Trust we don’t actually do an awful lot for, discussions took place as to what we could do. It was decided to investigate the possibility of hosting a Christmas party at the club for our junior supporters. We will look into this ahead of our next meeting, with hopefully a plan in place.
One of the proposed events that has been suggested many times without getting off the discussion stage was a Beer / Gin Festival. Three Trust members have been put in charge of researching the feasibility of putting on such an event ahead of the next meeting.
Matchday Activities
The Trust desk will once again be in the Dale Bar on matchdays, and we have secured two new banners to support with this.
We agreed to bring back the “Guess the Crowd” that we have run in the past, and we were also looking into introducing a matchday quiz that would be on tables in the Dale Bar. We agreed to have this double sided with a feature pushing our Friends of the Trust.
We would repeat the work we did at the start of the 2018-19 season by taking the Trust desk into additional venues for the opening home game of the season. This was to be looked into before the next meeting.
It was also agreed to commit to running the Trust desk before every League games. Traditionally, the Trust desk is something that was just run on Saturday home games but we will endeavour to do every home game with the exception of EFL Trophy matches.
Next meeting
Monday 22nd July.