Twelve Months in and a Charity Partnership

04 Oct

Yourfootballprogramme.co.uk website launched at the start of October 2019. Twelve months on, it’s good to reflect on progress and to talk about a significant link up with the Breast Cancer Charity Legacy4Lucy

More about that shortly.

Since October 2019, nearly 200 customers have bought items from me and a huge thank you to you all! Some have just made a straightforward purchase, others have made multiple purchases, and many have engaged in some fascinating chat about the items bought, or the game in general.

Promotion and visibility

We’ve chosen simple methods to promote the website. Advertisements have been placed in 442 Magazine and in the excellent Programme Monthly & Football Collectable. I can’t recommend this magazine highly enough. It is the bible for Football Memorabilia and Paul Matz deserves a huge shout out for all the work he puts into each publication.

Most of our promotional activity has taken place on Twitter. @YfpFootballProg has a shade under 500 followers, at the time of going to press – thank you to each and every one off you for the ‘follow’. Twitter hosts a great community Football and Football Memorabilia Enthusiasts. To many ‘favourites’ to mention here, but I’ve ‘met’ some amazing kindred spirits in that medium and through my sales.

Twenty or so ‘Programme of the Week’ Blogs have been written. These are great fun to research and write, and have had some strong and positive reactions.

All our framed items

All our framed Football Shirts have now sold out and I’m delighted with the new homes they have gone to. However, a good number of other framed items remain and even though we had one disaster with ParcelForce, I’m quite happy that can ship these items safely. Despatches to Paris and Northern Ireland confirm this.

I never though the site would have global reach, but it’s been great fulfilling orders for the USA; Greece; Australia (twice) and Scandinavia.

Anyone visiting the site will read that this is all about selling of my lifetime’s collection of memorabilia. And I’ve been very disciplined in not buying up additional stock, though the temptation has been great!

Charity Partnership

However, I have put new stock onto the site, mostly programmes and a few books.

Through Twitter, I met up with Jason Guy @wolvespremier who has set up the fabulous Wolf Whistle Podcast @WolfWhistlePod that interviews former players and others, associated with Wolverhampton Wanderers.

It’s a fabulous series of interviews and a must for any Wolves fan via your podcast platform of choice.

I became aware of Jason’s fund raising for Breast Cancer Now via the Just Giving page Legacy4Lucy

He offered me a couple of boxes of programmes and we agreed to sell them on the site and pass on all the proceeds to the Charity. Most items are already available to buy on the website. And there are some very interesting non-league and early sixties programmes amongst them. Put Legacy4Lucy into the website search box or follow this link to see all the Charity items.

Since then, through a programme amnesty, we have received hundreds more!

Once processed, these will sit alongside my collection, clearly identified as Charity items just waiting to be purchased for a great cause.

So, what does the next 12 months hold for Yourfootballprogramme.co.uk?

Absolutely no idea! In these unpredictable and unprecedented times, it’s just ‘day at a time’ stuff.

Let’s hope this pandemic is beaten once and for all and we can get back to some level of what used to be normality.

Oh – and it would be nice to watch sport, live, again.

Take care everyone – Jeremy