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How We Use Your Donations
The ITP Support Association is a national charity which was established in 1995 to support sufferers of the rare autoimmune bleeding disorder Immune Thrombocytopenic Purpura. There is no charge to become a member of the Association, anyone with an interest in ITP may join our mailing list and use our services but instead, we invite donations. Even overseas members only pay a small fee to cover the postage cost of quarterly newsletters. Because there is no annual subscription we avoid the extra work and cost of sending out renewal reminders and organising annual AGMs. This system has worked extraordinarily well. In addition to a regular stream of spontaneous donations from our membership, we are fortunate to have many generous hearted supporters who hold fundraising events, some raising thousands of pounds. All such contributions, unless raised for a specific project, initially go into the general fund. After fulfilling our primary objective of providing information to ITP sufferers (for which the expenditure includes postage, stationery, printing materials, telephone bills, office machinery etc) spare funds are regularly transferred to a high interest account from which we finance ITP research projects.
Some of our running costs are subsidized by drug companies with an interest in ITP. Amgen, Baxter, BPL, GlaxoSmithKline, Grifols, Octapharma and CSL Behring jointly sponsor the costs of printing and mailing out our quarterly newsletter The Platelet. In addition Grifols fund our Where to Get Help leaflets which are distributed to hospitals, CSL Behring the Adult Registry pamphlet sent to new members, and BPL, GSK and Amgen have assisted with computer equipment. Although ITP publications are free of charge to our membership some items are sold to generate funds. These include healthcare cards (emergency medical cards), Christmas cards and logo items.
The Association is run primarily by volunteers from their own homes, with one part-time paid assistant administrator. Three key volunteers (chief administrator. publications editor, website manager) work from home and nearly all ITP business is carried out by phone or e-mail with just the annual meeting of trustees, a discussion between volunteers and medical advisors on the evening of the Patient Conventions and on very rare occasions a trip by one or two of us to meet the Association’s medical advisors.
The speakers at our Medical Seminars and Conventions, despite being highly respected and distinguished international ITP specialists, selflessly make no charge to speak at these events. This, along with the generous subsidy from the above mentioned drug companies allows us to price Convention tickets at a rate which does not even cover the cost of each delegate’s refreshments, let alone the other expenses of the day.
By keeping our daily running costs to an absolute minimum, and with the generosity of the Association's membership and friends in making personal donations and holding fundraising events, we have been able to finance various research projects to learn more about of ITP in the hope of finding the cause and cure.