TrUSTS AND PRIZES: explanation of soa management and calculation of fees MAY 2017
1. INTRODUCTION
The Society of Authors administers a considerable number of grants and prizes for writers.
Grants
Grants for works in progress:
The Authors' Foundation
The K Blundell Trust
Arthur Welton
The Authors' Foundation, Arthur Welton and the K Blundell Trust assist writers with research costs or to 'buy time' to write, and grants totalling around £271,000 will be awarded this year.
Grants for writers in need: Between them these funds give about 100,000 per year
The Margaret Rhonnda Award
The Francis Head Bequest
The PD James Fund
The Authors' Contingency Fund
The John Masefield Memorial Trust
All the above are funded by charitable trust funds for which the SoA is the sole or main trustee
Prizes
These prizes for fiction, non-fiction, poetry, translation and drama are worth around £102,000in prize money for SOA awards and £183,000 if you include Baileys and the Sunday Times.
Fiction:
The Betty Trask Prize & The Betty Trask Awards(£25,000 total)
The Tom-Gallon Trust Award(£1,500)
The McKitterick Prize(£5000)
The Somerset Maugham Awards(also open to non-fiction & poetry) (£15,000)
Non-Fiction:
The Somerset Maugham Awards(also open to fiction & poetry)
Poetry:
The Eric Gregory Awards(£27,000)
The Cholmondeley Awards(submissions not accepted)(£8,000)
The Somerset Maugham Awards(also open to fiction & non-fiction)
The Travelling Scholarship Award (applications not accepted)(£7,500)
All the above are funded by charitable trust funds for which the SoA is the sole or main trustee.
The SoA also offers translation prizes. The prizes are funded by donations but the SoA itself bears the cost of running these prizes.
Translation:
Arabic Translation:The SaifGhobashBanipal Prize(£3,000)
Dutch Translation:The Vondel Prize(€5,000 no unsolicited submissions)
French Translation:The Scott Moncrieff Prize(£2,000)
German Translation:The Schlegel-Tieck Prize(£3,000)
German Translation:The Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation(€1,000)
Italian Translation:The John Florio Prize(£2,000)
Modern Greek Translation: The Hellenic Foundation for Culture Translation Prize (entry closed)
Spanish Translation:The Premio Valle Inclán(£2,000)
Swedish Translation:The Bernard Shaw Prize(£2,000)
The SoA also manages a number of prizes for which it is paid a management fee by external organisations:
Biography
The Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography(£5,000 no unsolicited submissions)
Fiction
The Sunday Times Short story prize(£30,000)
The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year (£5,000)
Bailey’s Prize for Fiction(£30,000)
Audio Drama:
The Imison Award (3,000)
The Tinniswood Award (£2,000)
Educational:
The ALCS Award for Educational Writing (£2,000)
Other
Strachey Trust(a small charity which promotes access to literary manuscripts of use to historians, biographers and researchers, as well as assisting in the tracing of copyright holders, by awarding grants).
2management and calculation of fees
Management
The management of the grants and prizes and, unless otherwise stated above, the day to day running of the trust funds, is managed by the SoA which charges a management fee for its time.
Activities
Running prizes and awards is time- consuming. It involves speaking to possible donors and advising on terms of wills and trusts, managing and considering the funds, deciding on the prize money available, dealing with the day-to-day financial management of the prizes, instructing auditors, appointing and overseeing judges and assessors, designing entry forms and running an advertising campaign foreach award, sifting responses and passing eligible entries to the judges and assessors, calling in and distributing books and copies of entries, setting up and managing judges’ and assessment meetings, notifying successful and unsuccessful entrants, organising awards parties, sending out prize certificates, designing and printing programmes and invitationsetc.
Personnel
Paula Johnson, awards secretary, is engaged full time, four days a week on this work. She is assisted by Samia Gundkalli and El Jenyns, awards assistants, who each spend about four days a week on this work. Sarah Baxter coordinates the grants for authors in need, spending about 10% of her time on this. In addition there is a large input of time from the Front line team in fielding enquiries, assisting and sending out post etc., the Communications Department in designing advertisements, presentations and prizes stationery, the accountant in managing the income and outgoings and the financial accounting of many separate funds and the Chief Executive in advising with donors, meeting trustees, coordinating strategy and budgets and dealing with legal advice on the trust terms..
Calculating Management Fees
Management fees are calculated by apportioning staff time and resources spent on prizes and awards. This comes to roughly 15% of the SoA’s total overhead. Management fees had been lagging behind true cost for several years and from 2012 we have been increasing them incrementally each year to make up the shortfall in a phased way over several years. We have also been very successful in taking on new prizes which are both prestigious and provide a small profit to the SoA
The fees charged to funds where the SoA is trustee were around £100,000 in 2016 as against total costs of around £1,250,000. For 2017 we propose a 5% rise in fees to around £105,000. This is still less than the actual cost to the SoA but is nearer the true cost. There will always be a shortfall because a decision has been made to subsidise translation prizes. Our awards and grants are therefore being subsidised slightly by other income, including members’ subscriptions, proceeds from estates and the external awards.
Allocating Management Fees
The fees are allocated between funds by allocating a share of SoA staff time and overhead to the funds proportionate to the time spent. We feel that this is a fairer method than applying a straight percentage charge. However we constantly review and adjust all funds to ensure that they bear a fair percentage of the fee bearing in mind the size of the fund, the risks and the associated work. We tend to charge more for the Prize Funds than for the awards funds as their costs are greater.
Ensuring Proportionality and Good Value
We are very aware of the importance of providing good value. As well as using the methods above we benchmark our fees by finding what information we can about what others charge. Perhaps the best benchmark is to see that external organisations such as The Sunday Times and the Bailey’s Committee consider that we provide good value and pay significantly more for us to administer their prizes than we charge some of our own funds.
We are also keen to ensure that our funds are sustainable and not to deplete them. In consultation with our funds managers and as agreed by the Finance Sub-committee in May 2017 we have resolved to keep the overall spending from each fund (for administration, prizes, awards expenses fees etc.) at around 6% of fund value. The only exceptions are the Masefield, Rhonnda and Tom Gallon funds. These are small funds and we have decided that it is not sustainable to keep them in perpetuity but instead to spend a larger proportion with the aim of running them down. For TheTom Gallon Trust Award we will seek outside funding to continue it (ALCS has been very generous here) but Masefield and Rhonnda overlap with the aims of the Contingency Fund and we consider it more effective to spend the money in them and fundraise for the Contingency Fund in due course if that seems necessary.
Expenses
Out of pocket expenses are charged separately to the funds but general office expenses, such as postage and printing are absorbed as part of the Management fee. Postage is particularly expensive for prizes.
A table of current and proposed fees is attached for consideration and agreement by Management Committee. The Finance subcommittee has considered this and recommends acceptance.
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