Donations by schools and individuals

• Why?
• Progress so far
• How much?
• How?

Why?

UKLO is funded by a number of academic organisations and by the Independent Schools Modern Languages Association. (There’s a list of our supporters here). Most of the work behind the competition is done for free by volunteers, so the £8,000 we get from our supporters has been enough to cover our costs such as Round 2, a limited presence at the International Olympiad and the ongoing maintenance of our new portal. But it won’t cover some things we’d very much like to be able to do:

1. Improving the functionality of the portal to make it more user-friendly.
2. Sending two teams to every International Olympiad even when travel is expensive (as it was in 2016, meaning that we could only send one team). This would double the chances for any pupil of getting into the UK team, and our chances of winning medals. Most other high-scoring countries send two teams, so with only one team we’d be at a disadvantage.

We’re still keen to produce material to support you, but we’re unsure on what would be helpful, so please share any thoughts on this. If we do find a promising formula we’ll have to pay for help in producing material.

Our regular supporters have all recently increased their donations and have told us that they can’t give more, so we have to look for alternative sources of funding. One obvious source consists of our participating schools, but we’d very much like to keep the competition completely free to both schools and pupils because we recognise that a compulsory charge (as in the Maths Olympiad) could prevent some of you from taking part. So we’d like to invite schools and individuals to make a voluntary donation to a reserve fund (to be used for the extra items listed above).

Progress so far

• 2019: £1,100 from 11 schools and one individual
• 2018: £1,045 from 14 schools
• 2017: £1,857 from 16 schools and three individuals.

How much?

We’re hoping to raise £2,000 each year, so here are some additional facts and figures for you to consider:

• In 2017, 137 schools took part (of whom 100 are fee-paying). If they all contributed, £15 per school would produce £2,000, but only 16 of these schools actually contributed, with sums ranging from £15 to £250. (The balance came from particularly generous individuals, whose donations are unlikely to be recurrent.) If those 16 schools had contributed £100 each, making a total of £1,600, we might reasonably expect individual donations to bring it up to our target of £2,000.
• We charge nothing for entry, unlike the Maths Olympiad, where charges for the Mathematical Olympiad ladder range from £18 to £27 per entry (2018 prices).
• The average cost of sending each team member to the International Olympiad is about £800.

How?

• BACS: If possible, please pay by BACS directly into the UKLO bank account (08-92-99, 65396322). Make sure that your school name is given as a reference.
  • If this is helpful, you can download an invoice, which you can edit (as it’s a Word document).
  • Please also send an email with the payment details to our schools coordinator, who will record your payment and send an acknowledgement (though she may handle payments in batches, so the acknowledgement could be delayed).
• Credit card: If you prefer to pay by credit card, this can be arranged through one of our sponsoring associations, so please tell the schools coordinator.
• Paypal: You can also pay by Paypal:

We also welcome offers from schools to join our list of regular supporters.