membership

• July Membership Update
  Member numbers

   

  We are conscious we haven't updated you on member numbers since our joint bid for the majority stake in the club with Gordon Scott was completed last month.
  

   

  As of 3 August we had 1,373 members of the trust - numbers have actually crept up slightly since the deal was completed. Of that, around 12% are on the £25 per month membership, which is slightly ahead of our initial target of 10%. 
  

   

  We had always said 1,000 was the minimum we needed to hit to trigger the deal - we are thrilled to have smashed that and want to thank every one of you for signing up.

   

  The more members the trust has, the stronger we are financially and the greater our ability to benefit the club.

   

  There is no upper limit on members, so please keep spreading the word to fellow fans that anybody can still sign up now at smisa.net
  

   

  Spending trust income
  

   

  As you know, the bulk of our income is going towards the share purchase and saving up the cash ultimately needed to buy out Gordon and achieve fan ownership.

   

  But £2 per month from each member will be ring-fenced to be spent on the club as you choose, and at current membership levels, that is just over £8,000 per quarter. 
  

   

  We are still finalising the details of the procedure for spending this but the plan is for us to survey members on where they want to see the money spent, speak to club about where they need investment, and compile the results into a shortlist of options for members to vote on via secure online ballot.
  

   

  We hope to repeat this process every three months, meaning members will get four votes per year. We feel this will be a really good way to keep the membership engaged, while deciding how their money will help the club.

   

  SMISA director
  

   

  As has already been announced, Gordon Scott has asked SMISA committee member Dave Nicol to join the board of St Mirren as the SMISA representative.

   

  Gordon was keen there be some continuity with the guys who had worked with him over the past year, and Dave - who had led on the financial and legal aspects of the deal from SMISA's side - was the obvious choice.

  
  However Dave's appointment was only ever intended to be temporary, as one of the key points of the #BuyTheBuds campaign was that SMISA members elect their own director.
  

   

  We are still working on a procedure through which this will happen, but the plan is to hold an election for members to elect one of their own on to the board before the end of the year.

   

  It is important to stress that as things stand SMISA are only the part-owners of the club - ultimately Gordon controls the majority stake.

   

  In practice, the club will be run by the board, as it always has been. But the key difference is that board now contains a SMISA rep, who can raise issues on your behalf for potential discussion.
  

   

  If you wish to raise an issue with the SMISA director, you can do so by emailing [email protected]
  

   

  Events and member benefits
  

   

  We will have a number of events this coming season - the first being a fan party to celebrate the success of the bid after the Morton game on Saturday in the library at UWS. Entry is free but tickets are required. To sign up and for full details see our Eventbrite page. 

   

  There will also be a number of events for those of you on the £25 per month and £2,500 premium packages - we are still working on these but will be in touch with details as soon as they are confirmed.

   

  We will also be running a draw for each home game this season for a £25 per month member and a guest to watch that game from the director's guest lounge.

   

  Cameron Sanderson was the lucky winner for the Morton game. The rest of you in that membership category have around a one in ten chance of winning at some point - we will be in touch if you do!

   

  Football Pink Magazine Article

   

  The Football Pink Magazine are writing a piece about St Mirren's Scottish Cup win from 1987 and along with some interviews from players from the team they're looking for fans' views and memories of the occasion. If you were there that day and don't mind answering a few questions about the game please drop as an email and we'll forward them on.

   

  Contact details

  
  

  Finally, we want to ask members to keep us updated with any change in your details using our contact page.

   

  If you've changed your email address or phone number, we want to make sure you don't miss out on any events or benefits due to you.

   

  All our updates will come from [email protected] so please add this to your address book to ensure our emails to you don't end up in junk mail.
   
  Thanks
  The SMISA Committee
   
• October Member Update

  Welcome to Jack

  The club this week confirmed the appointment of Jack Ross as the new manager and the SMISA committee would like to welcome Jack to the Paisley 2021 Stadium.

  SMISA's man on the club board David Nicol was obviously involved in the recruitment process and we know Jack really impressed the board with his vision for the club and that they see him as a good fit for their long-term plans.

  It was also encouraging to see him talking up the benefits of fan ownership in his interview on the official website today - for those who missed it, there's a good insight into his approach here.

  It goes without saying supporting St Mirren hasn't been easy over the past few years and maybe the atmosphere hasn't always helped matters on the pitch.

  But we now have a new manager, a new board and a new opportunity to move forward as a club. We hope all members and fans will give their full support to Jack and the team, and hopefully better days lie ahead.

  Latest member numbers

  Current membership numbers as of the start of October are 1344. That is slightly down on last month but we always expected that over time numbers would tail off and we budgeted on that basis.

  Of the handful of cancellations, the feedback we have from those who wrote to us is that their reasons were purely down to finance.

  We have been given no indication anybody has left because they are unhappy with the job we are doing or because of results on the park.

  As always we would stress the work to take the club into majority fan ownership is a long-term project which will take years to save up for, and that means we need a long-term commitment from as many members to stay the course as possible.

  First £2 pot spend

  One of the key ways we will be keeping everybody engaged is by spending the £2 proportion of your monthly membership, which we plan to do every three months.

  We wrote to you last week with the results of the survey we ran on your priorities and the feedback from that will be used to inform future spending decisions.

  As we explained in that update, the bulk of the £8,500 raised through the first three months of #BuyTheBuds money will be used to make up the shortfall (estimated at £6,000-7,000) on the club’s planned disabled platform at the back of the main stand.

  But we asked the members to vote on where the remainder of the money should go – either into youth development or to be left in the pot for future investment.

  Voting closed earlier in the week and the results were as follows:

  Option 1 (Spend on Youth Academy)
  43% 325

  Option 2 (Carry funds over)
  57% 430

  Director election

  As you know, one of the key points of the #BuyTheBuds campaign is that you the members can elect one of your own to represent you on the club board.

  SMISA committee member David Nicol has been doing this role for the past couple of months but it was always our plan to hold an election to be concluded before the club AGM at the end of the year.

  We have now produced a set of election rules, along with a timetable detailing how the process will unfold over the next couple of months.

  The first stage of that will be a nomination period where any interested members will be able to put themselves forward to go on to the ballot.

  The full set of election rules, including details of how to nominate yourself, will be sent out later this week, along with a job description outlining the expected duties of a SMISA rep on the club board.

  Volunteer call to action

  Something both the SMISA committee and Gordon Scott are keen to investigate is how to harness the membership’s collective power to volunteer on projects which will help the club and community.

  The club have approached us with a couple of projects which they need some extra pairs of hands on and have asked if SMISA members are willing to provide them.

  The first project involves the possibility of the club installing an electronic advertising billboard on land at the north end of the stadium, which could be a very lucrative income stream.

  However the companies who operate these boards will only install one if they know there will be a certain amount of traffic at that location each day.

  So to find out if this idea is feasible, the club is looking for a number of volunteers to work in shifts to help electronically count the vehicles at that spot over the course of one day (note - this is likely to be a weekday).

  If you were able to spare an hour or two and would like to register an interest in this or any future volunteering opportunities, please send an email to [email protected] and we will be in touch with more detail when we have it.

  If there was sufficient interest, this could be the start of a SMISA volunteer pool of people who use their collective skills to work on various club and community projects as and when required.

  This could be ideal for members who are perhaps retired and willing to give up some time to, or those who are looking for something to add to their CV.

• SMiSA Members Discretionary Spend Ballot

  Dear members

  As you know we wrote to a few weeks back with a link to an online survey asking where you would like to see SMISA invest the £2 proportion of your monthly membership fee.

  The plan is to spend the pot every three months and what you told us in the survey will help inform future decisions over how we do that.

  The survey is now closed but more than 550 of you took the time to fill it out – and your feedback was hugely helpful.

  There were a couple of questions – the first one asked you to rank a number of areas by importance and the second to submit any ideas you had for specific projects.

  We’ve now been through the results and you can see the full answers to the first question through this link. 

  As you can see, the youth academy was your top priority, but there was also broad support for investment in club facilities of different kinds.

  On the whole, members are happy to see money spent on St Mirren-related community projects although other areas were given higher priority.

  Investment in the first-team squad was the one area which split opinion – 31% of you didn’t feel it was a suitable use of the money but almost 70% did, with 44% calling it important or very important.

  Clearly we won’t be able to keep everybody happy on that point, but we could in future suggest first-team investment alongside other options and ask members to vote – that way the membership as a whole decide if the money goes there or not.

  The second question saw some interesting feedback and some really good ideas and we have already had an initial chat with Gordon about how some of them might work in future.

  We grouped the answers to those questions together to pick out key themes and three came out as the most mentioned.

  As you might expect, youth development and the first team budget were two, and the other which repeatedly came up was investment in disabled facilities.

  Leaving the money in the pot to allow bigger investment in the future was another suggestion some of you made and that may be an option we offer at various points.

  But for now we have the question of what to do with the first three months of money – there is £8,500 available from the July, August and September income.

  As part of the process we asked the club where they wanted investment – and their number one priority is for us to make a contribution towards the disabled platform they plan to build at the back of the main stand.

  Currently, wheelchair-bound fans are housed at the front of the stands, and there is a lack of shelter during bad weather – a long-standing issue the new board have committed to fix.

  This work would also allow the stadium to regain UEFA Gold Licence status – an honour it lost when the criteria for a raised disabled platform was added.

  The club has the necessary permissions in place and has managed to secure some of the funding for this project but not all.

  The total project cost is yet to be finalised but they reckon the shortfall will be around £6,000-7,000 and have asked if SMISA can meet that.

  All things considered it seems the obvious place for this first tranche of #BuyTheBuds money to go – we want member money to go into visible projects which will make a difference to fans and this strikes us as a perfect example.

  There will be points in the future where we will offer members a choice of projects and ask you to pick between them – but in this case we felt that wasn’t needed when there was only one thing the club asked us to fund and lots of our members are telling us they want that very project.

  So we are proposing to make the full £8,500 available to the club to cover as much as they need to complete the platform – however we would like the members to decide what should happen with however much of that is left over.

  There are two choices we would invite you to vote on –

  1) Make £8,500 available for the disabled platform and put any leftover sum into the St Mirren youth academy budget

  2) Make £8,500 available for the disabled platform and keep any leftover sum in the SMISA £2 pot for spending at a future date.

  You will be able to cast your vote via secure online ballot and you will receive a separate email with a link allowing you to do so. If you have any issues accessing the ballot or didn't receive it please contact us.

  Voting will close at midnight on Sunday 2 October and we will email members with the results.

  We and the club will be working behind the scenes to cost some other projects for possible inclusion in future spending rounds – the next one will likely be in January.

  As always, if you have any questions you can contact us via [email protected]