Welcome to the inaugural QPR1st annual report. In this we aim to tell you, the members of QPR1st, what we have been up to since our April 6th meeting at Hammersmith Town Hall and where we plan to be in another year’s time.
We have come a long way since our initial meeting in the Uxbridge Arms in March last year. We firmly believe that we are influencing the way that the club views and deals with its supporters and we will continue to use every endeavour to make sure that the concerns and needs of supporters and shareholders are represented to those in charge at QPR.
We were formed with eight basic principles as our guidance. These are:
* To canvass the views of our members on a regular basis, and act in accordance with the majority opinion.
* To be a listening organisation, with every member’s opinion being considered valid.
* To make our Trust open and accessible to every QPR fan, regardless of age, race, gender or disability.
* To run the Trust openly and under democratic principles, and deliver in a controlled manner.
* To keep QPR fans informed to the best of our ability of all issues affecting Queens Park Rangers Football Club and the role of QPR 1st in relation to that.
* To work towards constructive partnership with the board and all democratic QPR organisations
* To promote and nurture support for Queens Park Rangers Football Club.
* To foster the role of QPR within the surrounding community, and to recognise at all times that the QPR community exists far and wide.
The information that follows will tell you about our successes and our failures, because we believe that we can only progress if we continually monitor our own performances. It will describe our dealings with those within the club and with those bidding to buy QPR. It will tell you about other, less celebrated facets of our work. And it sets targets for the year to come.
Democracy and inclusiveness
One of our core principles is our commitment to democratic decision making. From the moment we were sanctioned at the Hammersmith Town Hall meeting to develop QPR1st as a football supporters trust we have striven to be as open as possible, both to members and non-members.
In August, we successfully staged our first election of management committee members, with eight people gaining the support of voters.
Next August, we will repeat the election process.
We have held ballots on a wide range of issues, including the proposed ground-share with Fulham, confidentiality, and our approach to the bidders.
We will continue to ballot members on individual issues. We are also putting together a questionnaire which will ask members for their views on all issues connected to QPR, so that we can have an accurate idea of members views on issues as they come up.
We let ourselves down by falling out with the QPR Loyal Supporters Association. The immediate reason for this is probably best kept between the two bodies for now, but QPR1st recognises its failure to communicate adequately with the LSA in the months running up to the split.
We will continue with our efforts to re-establish links with the LSA, which is entitled under our constitution to take part in our management committee. We firmly believe that all QPR fans should stand together.
Our web-site, initially developed by trust member Andy Lynam and now being improved further by co-opted committee member Peter Gridneff, has evolved into a magnificent shop window for the trust.
We can already accept membership applications, whilst the site has become a valuable medium for spreading news and views and is accessed 700 times a day on average with the most unique visitors in a day currently standing at 1823.
We aim to develop the web-site further. Shortly, we will be able to accept donations via the web and we will also be able to offer QPR1st merchandise via our own online store to help with our fundraising initiatives.
Polling of members via the email system has also allowed us to quickly canvass the opinions of our membership on a variety of issues, we would like to thank all our members who have taken part in these polls it is your responses and also the postal replies of those without internet access that shape QPR 1st policy.
Dealing with club management and those bidding for ownership of QPR
Our approach to the club’s period in administrative receivership has been to seek information about the various bids for ownership of QPR, in order to help our members to form a view on whether or not to back or oppose a bid. To date, no prospective owner has revealed enough about themselves to receive our wholehearted support. QPR1st has taken a hostile stance to just two proposals so far – Wimbledon Park Rangers and the Ron Noades/Bees United approach – but has maintained a stance of sceptical neutrality to all others, on the grounds that anyone with a realistically viable bid should be able to explain it to us without fear.
Every bid put forward so far has been asked a series of questions which aimed at revealing the financial viability of the proposal, the strategic aims of the bidders and the degree to which fan participation in board-room decision-making is planned. We have received patchy responses to our questions and, since the beginning of the year, hardly any information has come through. Because of this, we sought and received members’ sanction for the management committee to offer a degree of confidentiality to bidders. So far this policy change has not won any further information.
We have adopted a policy of maintaining a business-like dialogue with the behind-the-scenes management of QPR, which we believe has enabled a degree of mutual respect and trust to develop. The situation has been complicated recently, by the news that the present management is behind an initiative to re-finance the club and purchase shares from current owner Chris Wright via loans, but we feel our current approach should steer us through this situation also. The club’s management have indicated to us that fan participation in decision-making is planned, but we do not yet know in what form.
Once the ownership question has been sorted out, we aim to promote to our members a policy of working with the new regime, but retaining our critical stance on all aspects of the clubs management. During the next year we aim to:
· Maintain our campaign for fans/small shareholders to be represented on the board of QPR;
· Continue to develop dialogue with the club’s behind-the-scenes management;
· Use our membership questionnaire and ballots to maintain pressure on all aspects of the way the club runs, from financial management to the quality of the catering;
The QPR community
If things have been busy for us looking at ownership issues, that has not deterred us from achieving things in other spheres. Our efforts to build links with the QPR community, both locally to Shepherds Bush and overseas, have met with substantial success.
One of the first things we did as a trust was to contact local politicians and MPs. Former-chairman of the Labour party Clive Soley gave us his support at the Hammersmith Town Hall meeting and, following our latest meeting with him in March, reaffirms this. In addition Andrew Slaughter, the mayor of Hammersmith and Fulham, has once again pledged his support and we have access to several councillors.
We will maintain our dialogue with local elected representatives at all levels, since the value of their generous support is clear to all. We have acted to build links between the club and local councillors and we aim to carry on that work
Last Summer we were contacted by a QPR fan, Dan Cashdan, who is currently doing some voluntary work for an organisation called CHEP (Copperbelt Health and Education Programme) who are based in Zambia, Africa. One of their programmes is called Games for Life which is a project for after/out of school youngsters which encompasses football games with health education on diseases such as malaria and HIV. Dan asked us if we could put out an appeal for any old kits that fans no longer use in order to put them to good use for these youngsters as they are short of suitable clothing for the games.
The response, after such an appeal at one of our home games back in the Summer, was overwhelming. Amongst the collection were shirts, shorts, socks, boots, complete kits and a number of miscellaneous items. The consignment was safely despatched, thanks to the generosity of QPR fan Chris Leach, and we have since published photos of the youngsters wearing some of the donated kits on our website, in akutr’s and also in the matchday programme (see photo).
Due to the success of this initiative, QPR fan Dettie Clinton arranged for a school North/South exchange trip to take place between a school with a QPR connection and one in Zambia. A teacher from both schools will spend a week at the school giving advice and information on health issues. We will update on this when it happens.
In the meantime with the youngsters still in need of clothing and equipment, particularly shorts and especially footballs, we will be holding another appeal at the final home game of this season against Brentford. So if anyone has any old/discarded kit, or equipment which is unlikely to be used again, how about putting it to good use and bringing it along and dropping it off at the club shop.
Before the start of this season US-based QPR fan, Tom Rizzo contacted us informing us that under the Supporters Trust Community initiatives Group, he would like to donate a family season ticket for the use of local disadvantaged children/youngsters, under the umbrella of the local social services, in order to enable them to watch QPR and hopefully to encourage these youngsters to support their local club.
Midway through the season, social services informed us that because of various factors, they were unable to use this facility for the remainder of the season. The family season ticket was then donated to the QPR Study Support Centre, where local children were given the opportunity to win the tickets on a fortnightly basis for the remainder of the home games.
We hope to repeat this exercise in the coming season. We would like to publicly acknowledge Tom’s generous gesture and to thank him.
A big factor of any Supporters Trust is the degree to which it includes all minorities in its policy-making. We are extremely keen to apply this for all, but to date we have concentrated on racism, aiming to reach out to all local ethnic groups.
Committee member Tracy Stent has attended an anti racism conference recently and, along with Tom Rizzo again, is currently working on an anti racism fanzine to coincide with FARE (Football against Racism in Europe week) in April 2002. QPR players have been interviewed for the fanzine, which will also be published in April 2002.
Membership/Fund-raising
In some respects the weakest part of our performance so far, our fundraising functions were left to one side during much of the year as we concentrated on other issues. The main fund-raising event of the year was the publication and sale of the QPR/QPR1st calendar, which sold all of its print-run. Otherwise, our committee has functioned using cash derived from membership fees. Since the New Year, we have devoted a substantial amount of time to reorganising our fundraising functions and we now have a team in place to take this part of our work forward.
On the membership side, Leon Stent has done a marvellous job setting up our system. We now have over 625 members and every one of them is held on a data base which lists individual talents and skills.
In a joint venture with the club, we published the QPR/QPR1st calendar. Organised by Libby Magrill and photographed by QPR1st member Simon Cherry. This was a great success, selling out its print run.
We are reviewing the photos to see if there are further opportunities to raise money from them. We aim to continue co-operating with the club on tightly defined projects. We hope to repeat the exercise in 2002/03.
Apart from the calendar, fund-raising in general has been a weakness of QPR1st. Whilst there have been plenty of reasons for this, we decided at the turn of the year to concentrate more resources on developing this.
Under new team leader John Dyer, we have a new fund-raising team in place, which we expect to bring forward plans and merchandise for increasing our revenues. We are also putting in place the final touches of a web-based system for receiving donations and selling merchandise.
Our membership now stands at 626, 5% of the average home gate this season. We aim to push membership up to 10%, meaning we have to pass 1,150, over the coming year.
Although we are pleased to have raised our membership to such a high level, we are aware that we have failed to persuade all of the 1,800-odd people “that initially signed up to us” to join formally.We will continue to chase those original members that have not subsequently signed up.
Campaigning/Shareholders’ interests
Not surprisingly, our campaigning this year has concentrated on our attempts to secure information on the various bids/proposals for ownership of QPR that have been floating around. This will remain our focus while the future of the club remains in doubt, but we expect to be switching our focus when the ownership issue has been resolved. We will then begin to operate more as most other football supporters trusts do, as a pressure group representing the interests of QPR supporters and the community which is local to QPR to the club’s board, whether we have representation on it or not. Our future campaigns will be driven by the needs and wishes of our members, which we will establish via the questionnaire that we will be sending out shortly.
We also aim to take a greater role in supporting and campaigning on behalf of football supporters nationally, as a part of and through Supporters Direct. One of our committee members, Tracy Stent, is likely to put herself forward for the Supporters Direct management committee. QPR1st would like to acknowledge and thank Supporters Direct, particularly Dave Boyle, Brian Lomax and Sean Hamil, for all of the advice and help that they have given us through our foundation and our first year.
We are building a data-base of Loftus Road plc shareholders and, as happened at the last extraordinary general meeting, we aim to contact all to seek either their proxy votes, for use whenever there is an AGM/EGM, or a pledge that they will vote according to our adopted line. We will adopt the same approach to Weareqpr plc, assuming that it becomes an integral part of QPR’s ownership.
Future targets
We have set ourselves a series of targets, for all areas of work, which we will strive to meet over the coming year. But we have grander ideas as well. At the moment we are setting up or planning:
· A promotional video, to be used in the City and elsewhere to promote QPR as an investment opportunity. We have already spoken to prospective camera operators and aim to have something ready early next season.
· A means of supporting the club’s youth teams. We are in negotiations with the club about potential sponsorship and, if that avenue is not open to us, we will look at other means of support.
· A QPR business directory, an independent guide to QPR supporting business interests. As our early promotional material says, “why give your money to a Chelsea fan?”
We Are QPR1st