(a charitable company limited by guarantee)
Registered Charity No. 1054914
Company Number 3182826
Our Annual Fundraising Dinner was once again a very enjoyable evening of networking and discussion for the 480 guests. We were very pleased to have Dame Suzi Leather – Chair of the Charity Commission - as speaker. She called on Finance Directors “to be the ones turning our mantra of accountability and transparency into reality”. In an evening supported by the Royal Bank of Scotland and Chantrey Vellacott DFK, many of CFDG’s subscribers sponsored tables and invited CFDG members. Despite the extra cost of the new venue we still managed to maintain the surplus from the event of over £44,000.
2006/07 also saw a 13% rise in corporate sponsorship for CFDG events and training courses. As we are providing services for an ever increasing number of delegates, as mentioned above, this sponsorship, mostly coming from our corporate subscribers, enables us to keep fees for events as low as possible for charity employees. Companies sponsoring and hosting CFDG events in 2006/07 included: Addleshaw Goddard LLP, Anglo Irish Bank, Baker Tilly, Bank of Scotland, Barclays Bank, BDO Stoy Hayward LLP, Chantrey Vellacott LLP, The Charity Commission, The Co-operative Bank, Credit Suisse, Deloitte, haysmacintyre, HBOS, Horwath Clark Whitehill LLP, Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, PKF (UK) LLP, Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLP, Rathbone Investment Management, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Rensburg Sheppards, The Royal Society of Arts, Sarasin Chiswell, Thomas Miller, Touchstone, and UBS Wealth Management.
As part of our plans for the year we had decided to change the location of our largest two events, the Annual Conference and our Annual Fundraising Dinner. Both of these moves went well and achieved our aim of exploring larger venues to accommodate our increasingly popular events. Our Annual Fundraising Dinner moved from The Brewery in the City of London to the Royal Courts of Justice. Whilst it was clear that our members appreciated the larger and magnificent venue there were issues to do with acoustics and the high level of security that have prompted us to try another venue in 2007. We moved the Annual Conference to the QEII Conference Centre in Westminster, this proved very successful and enabled us to comfortably accommodate our largest conference ever whilst also allowing room for growth. We will be remaining at this venue for the foreseeable future.
We had planned to look at a range of new events and start to roll them out by end of year. We partially achieved this objective by putting on the Accounting Software Forum in October. We discussed various other options for new events with potential partners and sponsors but none of them was far enough advanced to launch by the end of the year.
Over 2,700 delegates attended more than 50 CFDG events during the year. (This does not include our Annual Fundraising Dinner, which is mentioned elsewhere). This compares to an equivalent figure of just over 2,500 for last year. We planned to increase attendance at CFDG events and training courses by 10%, in the end we achieved a creditable 8% increase.
Page 7 - Annual Report and Financial Statements 2007