Ever-more ambitious fundraisers a sign of the times

THE inter-county season may have ended but the business of the GAA never stops and over the past few weeks and months, the fundraising efforts of counties have cranked up a gear. Around the country, there are ever more ambitious schemes being undertaken to keep pace with the rest. Fundraising schemes now are bigger and bolder. They have to be.

This week, Mayo announced plans to host a dinner in New York to coincide with next year’s Connacht Championship clash in the Big Apple. There’s nothing new in that except for the fact that they’re reportedly hoping to raise around €1m to go towards their new centre of excellence. Kerry have long been masters of tapping the diaspora in the US.

These days, counties are playing big in the hope to win big. And as such the prizes on offer have become ever more valuable. Meath and Roscommon have gone the way of many GAA units and raffled a house.

The Connacht men are offering a house in Dublin worth €425,000 at €100 per ticket. The Royals have opted for a similar strategy as they look to fund the ambitious redevelopment of Páirc Tailteann. On October 31, they will raffle the first of three houses in Navan, worth around €275,000 each, from which they hope to raise around €1.5m.

“The clubs would have been very supportive and would have felt there was a need to upgrade Páirc Tailteann,” Meath GAA operations manager and former county captain Seamus Kenny explained. “Whilst the pitch is immaculate, the stand is well out of date. We had enormous goodwill from the county council and all other stakeholders so to build on that momentum we felt the best way we could get buy-in from everyone was a house draw which would offer a substantial prize, while also giving the clubs back some money.”

The clubs of Meath were given 100 tickets each to sell at €100 each. However, the process is incentivised. The more tickets sold, the more the club could keep for themselves. But to make the scheme viable Meath realised they had to tap new resources beyond their traditional membership through their royalhousedraw.com website.

“The online sales is a key component to it. The draw is for Meath GAA but it is open to members of the public. You don’t have to be from the county or even a GAA background to take part. That’s very important to us.”

To give the project some context, the Royal County’s biggest annual fundraiser is their race day at Fairyhouse which takes in roughly €75,000, followed by a golf classic which brought in around €20,000.

But with bigger rewards come bigger risks. Glenveagh have provided the homes at a cut-down price but the Royals will still need to cover the costs of all three houses before any profit can be made.

Outgoings

“There is a lot of outgoings on it but we have been fortunate with the partnership we have. We have to cover the costs of them. We’d hope that by selling the capped amount of tickets we have which is 12,000 and that over the three draws that we will raise over €1.5m,” Kenny said.

Meath’s recently opened centre of excellence is up and running and operating at close to full capacity. Kenny agrees there’s a balancing act between developing infrastructure and coaching networks. “There is a fear that if you concentrate on one aspect of your development another side loses out so we are very conscious of that. At the moment we have nearly 20 full-time coaches in the county which is very much on the higher end in terms of the rest of the country and that’s something we have put a huge emphasis on over the last three or four years.”

Work on Páirc Tailteann is expected to start at the conclusion of the National League next year. By that stage, the county hope to have all the relevant monies in place. And when this project is over it’s only a matter of time before they’ll have to raise more funds.

“There is a commercial reality to it. It costs money to run county teams and the organisation on a day-to-day basis and for large-scale infrastructural projects there is a huge amount of money that has to come from ourselves before we can be in receipt of any other funding elsewhere.”