Supporting Your Club

PLEASE SUPPORT YOUR CLUB THROUGH THIS CRISIS

As you will have seen from the myriad of emails in the past couple of weeks, we have been working hard to provide you all with the opportunity to play bridge online.  Every day presents us with new challenges, not only with the coronavirus but also as the world gets used to living and working online.  We are having to make daily changes to keep up with these demands.

In the coming days we will also be offering online lessons, initially with Anita and Jessica but with plans to expand these further.

The Club’s committee and management have not only been focused on providing you with the opportunity to play bridge online, we are also aware that many of our staff members rely on their income from the club.  All our staff, as you would expect, have been extremely supportive of helping us to make the transition at the same time as having to deal with their own personal situation.

In the short term we have been able to support the staff financially but as it is clear that the physical club is going to have to remain closed for a considerable period of time. Paying our staff will become more difficult if we are not earning any money.

A further complexity to this situation is that we recognise many of our members have no doubt also been impacted financially having either been stood down or had their income reduced significantly.  For those in that situation we do not want to make playing bridge unaffordable.

We have therefore decided to ask you all to consider making donations to the club from time to time as we continue to operate only online.  Rather than the normal process of charging you to play for each session we would ask you to make a donation at the level that you can afford and that will support us being able to continue to support our staff.

You can make a donation using this link.  Scroll to the bottom of the screen and you will see the section “Lessons and Donations”.  Select the amount you wish to donate from the drop down list under “Select Amount” and then enter your ABF number in the following box.   The facility supports the use of credit cards and PayPal or you will also find our bank details here if you prefer to make a bank transfer (please use your ABF number as the reference).

Alternatively, for members registered for Pre-Paid you can simply hit reply to this email with your ABF number and how much you wish to donate and this will be debited from your Pre-Paid account.

Link to page to make a Donation

Finally, please be aware that the BBO platform is experiencing unprecedented volumes.  So far their technology has coped but they have had to make investments to support this growing demand.  We may well see them change their business model and introduce charges to play tournaments (like the ones we run).  This is obviously outside our control so please be understanding if we write to you again in the near future advising of further changes.

The whole NSBC team are all extremely grateful for your donations.

Please stay safe and healthy.

Kind regards

Mike Prescott and the NSBC Committee