Hi everyone,

Our crowd funder is now live on GoFundMe!

In normal times, we rely on being with the community in physical venues to raise funds. With seven branches and over 1,000 members, we have been phenomenally successful, but Covid-19 has hit us hard.

Finances are something that many of us dislike discussing, but we have always been transparent with our members. Putting our cards on the table, when we are open, we pay all our venues in advance to secure our booking for the upcoming quarter and support our local communities immediately. With more Covid restrictions on the horizon, we do not expect our clubs to be running at the same level of attendance they had been before lockdown.

The budgeted reserve we have is normally sufficient, however, we have been shut for 9 months now, and looking at another 3. Our budgeting pays for a lot of venues, which is our biggest outlay. Even with the doors shut, our costs are not zero. There are additional costs of running an organisation this big: our website, insurance and deposits which are all paid upfront. We have also paid to upgrade our Discord Server to handle everyone’s gaming needs. We’ve made a big investment into online gaming in order to keep our community together, combat the effects of lockdown and ensure that everyone has space to roleplay. During this time, it is important to us that our gaming is freely accessible.

It has not just been us affected, but the venues too. Some have stopped trading and others have announced for next year that they may have to limit numbers. This means new locations and additional costs for each branch, depending on the situation. Other costs we will be facing are the measures we will be putting in place for you to game safely when we can go back to the venues. Depending on guidelines at the time of opening, these could include, but are not limited to, cleaning materials for each table, hand sanitisers by the bulk, dividing screens and spare masks. We will also be launching cashless payments via our website so that there is no handling of anything unnecessary by either our lovely committee or wonderful members.

With this subject, our website. It simply can’t do the job we need with Covid-19, it is an old workhorse but the time has come now that we desperately need to replace it. We need an updated site which will be able to handle the booking and payments for each of our seven clubs. We can’t have a website that is as slow and clunky as it is now, it has been a source of frustration for us and many of our members. It’s now the time to get this fixed and ready for safe real-life gaming.

Some of you awesome people have been donating to your branch’s charity via our Paypal link, and this money is ring-fenced by us for the branch charity you selected. This money will never be used by the Role Play Haven, that isn’t why you donated it and as such, it will be given with all the donations for that branch’s charity.

The Role Play Haven now needs your support more than ever so we can continue to raise money for charity while we game. We have teamed up with many well-known and awesome people from the tabletop games industry with a big message. Please follow the link below to our GoFundMe page and help us save our wonderful community which is close to all our hearts.

Thank you and stay safe, stay positive, and keep on gaming!

https://rphaven.co.uk/gmblog/save-the-role-play-haven-go-fund-me.html