I’m surprised that you charge for the assembly!

Hi Hannah, really happy for feedback, do email me with your thoughts. Thanks, Amy

Hi. Really pleased to see an assembly section but disappointed that there is a charge. I do primary assemblies and have no facilities for powerpoints etc. Because of this I wouldn’t buy an assembly that I hadn’t at least seen first as I may find that it was all not appropriate and I had wasted my money. If they were free I would maybe at least be able to use them for inspiration for something I can develop to suit the junior school.

Hi, thanks for your comments, this is part of a useful process for us and we want to know your thoughts. I took on board your thought Jean about needing more detail and have added some more information to the description. At the moment we only have a secondary school assembly available but in the near future we hope to expand this area to include primary resources. For now, some great primary material for the Easter season can be found here. It was written for Easter last year, but is really good stuff. Do email further if you’d like to follow up on any questions you have. Thanks, Amy

Hi. Can I wade in here as one of the team helping run the site. The challenge we have is figuring out how to run the project on something other than thin air. Right now it costs, not surprisingly, quite a bit to keep it rolling. We’re always going to offer 99.9% of it free, because it’s about mission and ministry and our passion is to make a difference. But we’re also trying to figure out ways of developing income other than filling the site with banner ads from Google. Having a section where there are a few resources (that have taken someone considerable time and effort to write!) seems like a good experiment, especially if it’s only £1.99. I’ve just bought a coffee from the shop down the road for more than that this morning! So please bear with us while we work out how to make this project work in the long term and, if you really believe in what we’re doing, hit the ‘make a donation’ button at the bottom of the page and join us in making this site the best possible resource, inspiration and support for Christians working in schools!!

Is the fee going to be for assemblies developed by the schoolswork.co.uk team only? What about a way to have outline ideas shared by site users available free through the blogs, with additional resources available for purchase if people want full plans rather than ideas?  Then we as users choose to ‘donate’ our resources to help meet the costs of the site. 
Ideally, I guess, if we all donated there wouldn’t need to be any fees at all.

Thanks Wendy. Although this is an interesting way of doing it, it’s actually really helpful to work through this issue in the community and wrestle with the best ways of keeping this going. We’re passionate about supporting people, developing stuff that will be useful and also for providing space for us all to learn from each other. Like Chris says, we just are trying to think long term and need to make this project sustainable. We are looking at other ways to share ideas and generate resources for the site, most of which we will offer without charge. Bear with us as we figure out how to best serve you!

Thank you for the resource, as always inspirational and very helpful :)

Looks like a great use of money when I need fresh ideas, thank you…

£1.99 surely won’t break any banks (even in credit crunch Britain) - and if Chris had wanted he could have quoted Luke 10:7.

Just a personal plea - isn’t £2 a bit more honest? Or is there a reason it has to be .99??

Hi Froudie, good question. I guess we were inspired by the Proost model who set their resources at £1.99 per download.

£1.99 guys! Great value, this site costs a fortune to run so please don’t moan. Use your expenses!

I understand the need to make some money, but I think the charge cuts against the spirit of the site where people share ideas for free. It’s not a huge charge but I don’t think I will buy the resource as I think there will be several free offers from other users. Call it a protest if you like, but I would not normally charge people for my own resources, although I might ask for a favour one day. Perhaps you should make £1.99 a ‘suggested donation’ leaving it up to the individual to pay or not. So many Christian websites are focussed on flogging new resources, someone’s dvd or new life changing book. Please don’t go down that route.

Hi Richard,

Do you know how much it costs a year to run this website?

Amy could you enlighten us?

Lee

Hi Lee,

I have no idea how much it costs but I am grateful for the free services it provides.

Seriously - people are upset that the assemblies cost £1.99? Are we taking into account that to be a member of schoolswork.co.uk is free in the first place? If you look at any assembly guides elsewhere on the net, I guarantee that you’ll struggle to find a) a resource that is free or cheaper than £1.99 (most are more expensive) or b) find an assembly resource that’s as good quality and well put together. With all the time and effort that has been poured into providing a resource that’s here to save us time, I don’t think that £1.99 is asking much is it really? You could spend 2 hours on google finding resources or you could get quality here now - and spend those 2 hours in school with young people - bit of a simple decision surely?!

Thanks everyone for your comments…I genuinely want to listen to them all. In answer to your question Lee, it does cost a lot to keep this project running. This year costs are just over 20k, and next year we’re looking to develop the team to increase the efficiency of the project, taking the costs to between more like 40-50k. This involves upkeep of the site, web developments, training we’re developing (this is really exciting by the way), staff and a whole host of other costs, which until you run a project like this, have no idea that exist. Charging £1.99 per resource isn’t going to impact greatly on the overall costs just yet, but even from the first couple of resources we’ve put on here, we’ve been able to pay for a few more hours of our web designer’s precious time to add some more features that will hopefully make this site more useful and effective for you.

Hope that helps!

Thanks Amy, keep up the good work :)

£1.99 is less than a latte in St. Arbucks mmmmm food for thought

Hi, I am really grateful for this website!! Keep up this amazing work!! I would be happy to pay anything for your ideas, they are always up to date, and modern and well presented, which shows how much time goes into them!! I sometimes get stuck and have offen been inspired by an ide from here even though I do primary assemblies, the ideas can be adapted slightly for a younger age.  God bless you in your work.