Claimaday
Having raised a total of £292,000 to date, Claimaday is now raising the final tranche of funding available via SEIS to accelerate the growth of this already proven events portal.
The holy grail when planning to run an event or attend one, is to have one online, searchable site which list all events. We believe that Claimaday is fast becoming that resource for event organisers – permitting them to search the calendar for potential date clashes and enabling them to ‘claim’ the perfect day for their event.
With users rapidly populating Claimaday, the company has launched Findaday, a consumer-focused site (automatically populated with Claimaday’s information) providing a much-needed resource to help people find out what’s on when, where & why.
The main aim is to help charity, business and public sector event organisers nationwide to set their event dates so as not to clash with others aiming to attract a similar audience. Until now there has been no reliable single point of reference to our knowledge that provides local information with national coverage to assist in planning dates.
This is one reason why Claimaday is rapidly gaining traction with event organisers and currently lists over 21,000 events. Organisations such as The English Tourism Society, The Institute of Directors, Kent Invicta Chamber and The British Cycling Association amongst many others are committed to uploading all of their event details.
With all of this information becoming accessible Findaday, despite only having been launched in Dec 2014, has been able to reach agreements with a National radio station and with Kent County Council to embed the Findaday search feature into their web sites thus referring large volumes of users to Findaday. We anticipate that rolling this out nationally will ensure that the user traffic on Findaday will become highly valuable.
We have calculated that there are over 17 million public events in the UK each year, which we estimate supports more than 380,000 companies that provide products and services to these events. Events typically need high attendance levels to ensure that the organisers cover their costs and the participants, suppliers and advertisers receive value for money. High attendance relies largely on no clash of dates with other events attracting the same audience. Not knowing potential date clashes could easily result in a loss-making event.
By resolving this issue Claimaday intends to become a crucial part of the event planning process and in doing so ensure that Findaday will become the dominant UK listings site.
To date the company has been funded by £171,000 of investment by the founders and other direct investors, supported by a further £121,000 from the Tiger Fund – a Kent based regional development fund.
Investors to date who will put their full weight behind this fund-raising:
– Ex-MD Barclays and CSFB, owner of family investment office
– Director of a leading asset management firm
– Ex-MD of large publishing company
– MD of leading insurance brokers in South East
– Director of financial services company
– Divisional Head of global investment bank
As a result, Claimaday is already operational and focused on Kent as its springboard to national coverage. As marketing activities have gained traction event holders have already started to populate the site and we are currently listing in excess of 21,000 events and 33,000 suppliers. There is a continual need to ensure full input of important national and regional events and to achieve this the company aims to form working relationships with national associations and organisations. This allows head offices to highlight the benefit of entry on claimaday.com to their member associations, clubs or branches.
Recognising Claimaday’s outstanding benefit to event organisers, Dover District Council have agreed to work with Claimaday to list events that they license.
Amongst others the following organisations are already providing their support to Claimaday:
British Tourism Society
Charities Aid Foundation Bank
Institute of Directors
Heart FM
British Cycling Association
Kent County Council
Having established and proven both the core functionality and commercial relevance of the model through its initial focus on Kent, Claimaday is now starting to expand nationally from this base through 2015.
Funds raised will be used to provide the working capital required to roll out the development plan for the business over the next 18 months.
To date the company has been funded by £171,000 of investment by the founders and other direct investors, supported by a further £121,000 from the Tiger Fund.
The company is now raising a minimum of £40,000 available under its remaining £50,000 SEIS allowance.