Information for potential sponsors

Information for potential sponsors

See our main Sponsorship page for an introduction to why we are looking for sponsors

The Tree House Bookshop is doing pretty well; we sell second-hand books and manage to pay our overheads and (small) wages for two people (one full-time, one part-time) and just about make it to the end of each month. There are some extras – bits and pieces that the shop and business need to keep going – stationery (including till rolls, printer ink, paper, pens, etc), carrier bags, various shop fittings and fixtures – light bulbs, display stands, etc. It all sounds like trivial amounts, but it all adds up.

We feel we are offering a service – recycling people’s books in order for others to read them, keeping out of print books in circulation, giving a home to people’s unwanted books and saving them from landfill or pulping. We give each month to a number of charities – local, national, international. People come in to browse, sometimes to chat, there is a real sense of community here. The two of us who run it work hard for relatively little pay, but enjoy what we do. The shop is busy and popular and we have been told – and believe ourselves – that it is an asset to Kenilworth. It is more than a shop, it has become a social space offering low-key arts events as well as lots of inexpensive reading material.

It’s when bigger bills come in that it gets hard to manage sometimes, and so we are wondering whether there are businesses or even individuals who might sponsor the events that generate these bills but also provide something unique in a small town, bringing professional musicians from around the country – even around the world – to perform and offering arts-based events which we believe are intrinsic to any healthy community and society.

If you are interested in being part of ensuring we can keep going, please read on!

Firstly, the figures:

Our overheads are around £2000 a month (rent, rates, utilities) and our wages for two people are also around £2000 a month. We just about cover these costs. In addition:

PRS/PPL licence: £750 a year

Film licence: £180 a year

PGR poetry evenings: £20pcm a month

Music events at URC: £400 per gig, sometimes more (venue hire, sound engineer, hospitality for musicians). These take place 4 or 5 times a year, most of our gigs are at the bookshop (see below).

Live music has been woven into what we do at the Tree House since we opened – literally: we had live music to celebrate on opening night, and regularly since then. Gigs are once, occasionally twice, a month. It costs us £400 to put on a gig at the URC; it doesn’t cost us to put on gigs at the bookshop, beyond the licence fee and use of electricity, though we often provide accommodation for the musicians, and with an audience of 35 it is hard to make the finances work. A lot of time goes into organising, promoting and hosting the gigs.

If we could find sponsorship of £50 per gig that would help enormously, to enable us to keep providing top quality live music in our small town.

The PRS/PPL licence is a legal requirement for us in terms of both playing music during the day (radio, CDs, streaming) as well as live gigs. It is worked out partly on the floor space of the bookshop, but the basic cost is required from any business playing music to the public, something we feel enhances the atmosphere of the shop enormously, making it a more welcoming space than a silent shop would. It works out at around £65 a month this year, but goes up every year.

Showing films is difficult – we have an annual licence, but it doesn’t allow us to charge to show films nor to advertise them, so it’s very restrictive. We would love to show more films, and can work around the lack of advertising, but the licence needs to be paid for.

With all these things, I give my time on top of my daytime commitments to the bookshop, and don’t begrudge that, but it can be hard, doing 12 or 13-hour days.

The PGR Poetry event is organised by someone else and we host it; we ask them to pay £20 a session for hiring the space (the sessions take place once a month), but as it’s not a commercial thing for them, they struggle to pay that. They aim to pay their guest poet, and the audience who come to listen or to grab an open mic slot pay a small entry fee. I you would like to support this initiative to provide a poetry night – often with a published poet plus the chance for others to share their work - £20 a month would help ensure that we can keep offering them the space and pay the bills.

If you are interested in being involved, we have tiers of sponsorship outlined in the separate tab for Sponsorship Tiers, but are entirely flexible if you would like to offer your own subscriptions. We can talk to you about how much you would like to give, and what you would like in return.