'We hope you feel your subscription to the Friend is still keeping you connected to the Quaker community across Britain – and the world.' Photo: Josh Appel / Unsplash.
‘We’ve made a commitment to keeping Local Meetings connected to decisions made at a national level.’
On the money: George Penaluna discusses financing the Friend
This week is the twelfth annual Good Money Week, when we’re all encouraged to consider how our money can do more good.
The week is certainly good for the Friend because in the last couple of issues we’ve had some quality advertisements from organisations that offer individual and corporate ethical investment services. It’s also good for you, the reader, on two fronts. Firstly, you learn about financial services and investments in which your money can make a positive impact. Secondly, the revenue generated by the advertisements helps finance the production of the magazine. This means that the cost of your subscription is subsidised by the advertising revenue, so what you are asked to pay is reduced.
Each year the trustees of the Friend have to look at our income and expenditure over the previous year and decide on whether we should make a price increase. While we’re not trying to make a profit (we are a charity, after all) we do have to try to cover our costs. Not doing so would mean the end of the Friend.
In very simplistic terms, we arrive at the cost of a subscription by taking our total running cost, deducting the other revenues, and dividing the balance by the number of subscribers. Isn’t that easy?!
Unfortunately, inflation increases our costs. The price of paper is relatively stable – and sustainable. But postal costs in particular are on the rise (you’ll know this from the price of your stamps). Our switch to eco-friendly potato starch mailing wrappers also comes with a financial impact. This results in a larger increase than the general level of inflation would suggest. We’ve also made a commitment to keeping Local Meetings connected to decisions made at a national level. This means, for example, that we send every Meeting free copies of our coverage of Yearly Meeting. We hope you share that commitment. We’d like to extend it to readers, often younger, who cannot afford our full rates, and make sure we update our digital presentation to stay in touch with those who read that way.
The actual increase in the subscription rate for the Friend this year is effective from 1 October, delayed from the usual date of 1 July to try to minimise the burden on subscribers. The new annual rate is £92, or £7.75 monthly: increases of 4.5 per cent and 4.7 per cent respectively. Over the next year we’ll also be adding new flexible ways to pay with your bank card.
We hope you feel your subscription to the Friend is still keeping you connected to the Quaker community across Britain – and the world. We also hope you’ll take the opportunity of using this year’s special Quaker Week issue to help us recruit new subscribers. That’s significant because more subscribers would significantly alter our calculations. Attracting new ones means the costs are shared among more people when we look at next year’s price increase!
George is the advertisement manager at the Friend.
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