Evening all and welcome to our July update!
While things may have been quiet on the football side of things, we’ve been grafting away on a fair few things for ourselves, and to aid the football club. Today’s actually my first day of a week off on annual leave, and I reckon I’ve done more graft today on football related things than I would do in my normal day job.
Starting with the podcast, I’d like to say a quick thanks to everyone who’s checked that out so far. Think we’ve racked up about 200 listens so far. Going forward we’ll likely look to do something on a fortnightly basis, switching the lads around to keep things fresh and give a few new people the chance to talk some geet shite. I’m also hoping we’ll be able to get some interviews with former players/managers who’ll be good craic so if you’ve got any requests, let us know! Thankfully as we use Spotify, it gives me loads of stats and stuff to mess around with as well and it’s nice know that as expected, our audience is largely middle aged blokes.
Financially things are looking canny at the moment. We’ve not really spent any money this month and membership sales have ticked over nicely. As we go into the season, I’d hope we’ll use about £200 from the pot for each bus to bring the overall price down. Of course, we’ll need to keep on doing bits of fundraising as the season goes on and that, and I predict the summer raffle will net us about £300(ish).
Speaking of raffle tickets, those are selling well at the moment with the winner on course to get about £200! Obviously we’ve got plenty of time to get those sold.
Thankfully after a bit of panic we’ve got access to the twitter account once again. Moral of the story, don’t piss off those bitcoin crypto bro weirdo’s. Mind with Elon Musk doing his best to ruin Twitter, we’ve figured we need to get a bit more imaginative when it comes to Social Media, so we’ve now created an Instagram account https://www.instagram.com/blythsgreenarmy.
We’re probably a few years behind on getting this sorted like, but most of the lads only use Insta to look at tits, admittedly.
The website will also be getting a bit of an update in the near future, once myself and Kipsta can set some time apart to update the current webpages and add some new ones etc to make it a bit easier navigate and read, as it tends to shit itself whenever a hyperlink is used at the moment.
As for the fun stuff we’ve been up to, other than a day at the races were most of us lost a small fortune on the horses but gained some delightful tans (or sunburn in my case) it’s been a chilled few weeks. Jack, Parker and a few of lads were in Scarborough over the weekend to scout out some pubs for next season but that’s about as exciting as it’s been… unless you’re Liam Henderson.
In Hendy’s infinite wisdom, he decided he’d try and chat up young Owen Elliot’s mother the other weekend (he failed) before trying to text her until 5am the next day. You have to hand it to Hendy, at least he’s consistent.
Now, moving onto some stuff with the football club. I’d like to say a quick thank you to those who filled out the 1899 club survey as that feedback has been truly invaluable! At present, we’re working with Scott Gibson (who you’ll likely know from the Tales from the Swamp podcast) who’s been working for the club as a volunteer for some months now to overhaul the 1899 club to make it a lot more interesting when it comes to prizes/rewards, and to make sure communication on how the money is spent etc is vastly improved.
At present I don’t really have a timeline on that, but I know Scott has done a substantial amount of work on this already with support from ourselves, so I’m hopeful we’ll have some news on that front sooner rather than later. Most of you will have had some half cut conversion with myself about this at some point, so you’ll know what my aims are for it.
We’ve also been assisting the club with looking at catering suppliers ahead of the new season, as a result of this year’s survey. So, in the near future you should expect to see new and well known catering vans at Croft Park in the opening months of the season if all goes well.
And I think that’s just about it for now. The only other outstanding thing is our application to join the FSA (Football Supporters Association) as an affiliate. For those that don’t know much about the FSA, they’re the leading advocate group for supporter ownership, better fan engagement, cheaper ticket prices, the choice to stand at the match, protecting fan rights, good governance, diversity, and all types of supporter empowerment. We’ll have more on our involvement with them when our application gets approved though.
But anyway, that’s enough for now as I’m off to the pub. Take care all, hope to see a few of you at North Shields on Saturday.
Lots of love,
Dan xoxo