IN Trust STFC’s latest column, vice-chair Alex Pollock updates Town fans on the recent Advisory Board meeting and what lies ahead in the coming year.

It’s been a couple of weeks since we last communicated via this column, and a couple of weeks can seem a very long time in the world of STFC.

We were in attendance at Tuesday’s Advisory Board where a plethora of topics were covered. The club were very keen to stress they’re working hard behind the scenes to appoint a new head coach, and they felt it clear that Ben Garner would leave. Contrary to popular belief online, the Trust are not privy to who the potential candidates may be.

A huge topic of conversation on Tuesday was around the newly-proposed matchday ticket prices. Following a new review by the club, the club told us they were considering raising ticket prices, in response to the rising costs they were facing. This isn’t something the Trust or OSC were in support of, and we advised the club we’d provide feedback from our membership.

As a result of this, the Trust circulated a survey in May to all our members with questions on matchday ticket prices and the overall experience offered. 649 members responded, and a generalised overview was published. We provided the full breakdown of qualitative responses to the club for their reference.

Our recommendations to the club included: reconsidering the overall prices for all tickets within the Town End, reconsidering U18 and U11 price increases around the whole stadium, and introducing a wider range of matchday ticket bundles. Within the member feedback, there were also a variety of fantastic ideas, and we hope the club can utilise these in some capacity this forthcoming season. A huge thank you to everyone who took part!

As ever, the minutes from this month’s Advisory Board will be published on the club’s website within the next couple of weeks, and we’d welcome any feedback from Trust members on what is covered.

We have a packed agenda for the year ahead which includes the County Ground purchase, and a new and improved website that will include fresh ideas and details about owning a share of the County Ground. At the moment there are still legalities that need to be finalised and these things take time however, as soon as the purchase has been completed we will be issuing details on how the share scheme will work.

We’ve got the Don Rogers statue to come and we will share more on that when we can, and we are also working with Swindon Town, the OSC and historians on our long-standing ambition to have a Club Museum.

There are lots of ideas around improving our engagement with supporters, ways to generate additional income that will support other work including new environment and sustainability initiatives, and ideas to help get a more diverse and inclusive matchday experience, reaffirming our full commitment to developing the next generation of Town fans.

We’re also going to continue to support Swindon Town Women and look to work with charitable organisations around the Town and wider area. On top of all that, we have other board members who are going to step up and start to communicate more regularly with you. Our aim is to involve our members all the way throughout this coming year, as without your support we wouldn’t be able to achieve anything.

If you have anything you’d like to raise with the Trust, please do get in touch as we’d love to hear from you.