Recently Asked Questions
Every so often, we put together a list of commonly asked questions from members and the replies to them.
Q: Does the away loyalty scheme take precedence over being a Dons Trust member?
A: The new loyalty scheme has been designed by the club with Dons Trust board (DTB) input to try to find a fairer way of allocating tickets for away matches where the demand is likely to outstrip supply. This is only going to be for a few matches this season (eg Bromley Away), but it is better to have a scheme now that can be refined in the light of experience than try to put one together at the last minute if we get a high profile Cup draw for example.
Whilst those with the most loyalty points will get the first chance to buy tickets for identified fixtures, Club members are the next priority, before general sale.
Q: Why don’t those with life membership of the Dons Trust get club benefits?
A: Life membership was introduced before the club benefits package was designed and, as such, only included Dons Trust membership and rights. Life members can now ‘top up’ their membership on an annual basis to access the club benefits package. Life memberships are no longer available to buy.
Q: Can I pay for my Dons Trust membership via a monthly direct debit?
A: No. Whilst direct debits are available for larger purchases, such as season tickets (which include club membership), monthly payments aren’t generally available for smaller payments as we are charged a fee to process each one. Whilst we appreciate that to some people, £60 in one go is a substantial amount, arranging direct debits is time consuming for our voluntary membership team. And at any AGM, SGM or Board election, every member who paid by direct debit would have to be checked to ensure they were up to date. Direct Debit will continue to be available for annual purchases.
Q: What is happening with the Kingsmeadow bricks?
A: Whilst the move to our fabulous Plough Lane stadium has been a massive positive for the club, the Dons had built up a lot of history at Kingsmeadow. Some of it was able to be moved more easily than others. We appreciate the contribution that those who sponsored the bricks made. We are working with the club to produce a replica to be installed at Plough Lane and will update when we have more news.
Q: Can the new bag policy be changed?
A: There is a new law (known as Martyn’s Law) that requires public venues to take additional steps to improve security and preparedness. Plough Lane falls into the highest category under the new rules. And whilst we have always worked with the Police and our own security team to make our venue as safe and secure as possible, one aspect of the new legislation concerns the sort of bags that can be brought in.
Many venues won’t allow any bag larger than A4. Others go further and require any bag to be see-through plastic.
We recognise that many of our fans will want to bring bags with them – especially if they are coming from work for a midweek game. We have therefore worked with the club to tweak the original proposal and to allow slightly larger bags (ie those that contain laptops or similar) into the ground. But fans should expect that all bags brought into the ground will be searched by the stewards and that this might result in queues.
The club will continue to work with local partners to provide drop off facilities for large bags and suitcases nearby.
Q: Can international members get a digital version of the match day programme?
A: Yes! The club has introduced this as a valuable new benefit for international members who should be receiving it now.
Q: Why did you create a new fixtures policy (relating to matches against Milton Keynes Dons) without consultation?
A: Over the years, Dons Trust members have passed many policies relating to our attitude, relationships and matches against the team from Buckinghamshire. The updated policy doesn’t contain anything new, but collects all previous decisions in one document. Our aim was to make sure we had everything in one place, fully complying with the law and FA/EFL rules while keeping contact to the minimum.
Q: Why did the Dons Trust set the latest bond target at £1.6m?
A: We did two surveys – one of the people with bonds ending in 2026-27 where we got an estimate of £1.6m needing to be repaid. Then a second fan wide survey where we asked if they would buy a new bond where we got a total of £3m of interest. So we budgeted that we would need to find £1.6m and based on the second survey that we should be able to cover this with new bonds. Any extra raised could go to pay down higher rate bonds. Assuming £1.6m out of £3m would come good was not unreasonable.
Q: Why does the club continue to use X/Twitter?
A: We asked the club what sort of traffic they get on the platform and whether they still consider it to be a valuable outlet to use.
“X continues to be an important channel for the club, both in terms of driving people through to the website and the level of organic reach we’re getting from the platform.
Over the reporting period, the website generated 2,171,507 sessions. X traffic is split across Twitter (79,620 sessions) and t.co (34,204 sessions), so when those are combined, X has driven 113,824 sessions in total. That works out at around 5.2% of all website traffic and makes X our third-largest source of traffic, behind Direct on 967,499 sessions and Google on 627,958.
On top of the website traffic, the platform is also delivering a significant amount of visibility for the club. Over the period, our content generated 22.3 million impressions, as well as 299,500 engagements, a 1.3% engagement rate and 125,500 profile visits. We also saw 137,000 likes, 17,400 reposts, 12,200 replies, 4,400 shares and 2,700 bookmarks, which helps show that the value is not just in passive impressions, but in people actively interacting with the content as well.
The scale of that organic exposure would be difficult and expensive to replace through paid activity. Based on a comparable paid-social cost, generating 22.3 million impressions through advertising would have an estimated media value of approximately £117,000.
Overall, the data shows that X is still a really valuable channel for us. It is driving a meaningful volume of traffic to the website, giving us a large amount of organic exposure and generating a strong level of engagement that would be costly to replicate elsewhere.”
