A market day needs money before it earns any. If you are being asked to put that up, this is the whole of what you are taking on, written in plain words, including the parts that are least in your favour.
Read it before you commit rather than afterwards. Every number in it should be filled in for your day before you sign anything.
A market day earns nothing until tickets and stall fees start arriving, and by then it has already had to pay for things. The venue deposit. The public liability insurance. The council application. The first print run. For a hall sized day that is usually $200 to $1,800, and an outdoor site with marquees and hired toilets is well past that.
Somebody carries that gap. On most market days it is the organiser, out of their own account, for about eight weeks. On this one it is you and the other sponsors, which is the arrangement that lets a community run a day nobody there could personally afford to underwrite.
You commit a capped amount. Not an open ended promise to cover whatever happens. A number, agreed before anything is booked, and nothing in this arrangement can oblige you to pay more than it.
The day cannot commit to costs beyond the total of all the sponsors' caps. If the plan needs a bigger hall than the caps cover, the answer is a smaller day or another sponsor, not a quiet hope that it will be fine. The system enforces this rather than trusting anybody to remember.
Every one of those is a real cost line you can see, with an amount and a date it falls due. None of it is a fee dressed up as a cost.
Your outlay is repaid out of what the day takes, before any profit is shared with anybody. It is repaid in the order the costs fell due, so the sponsor who fronted the deposit is repaid before the sponsor who fronted the print run.
This is the sentence that matters most on this page. If the day takes less than it costs, you do not get all of your money back. A repayment is not a debt the organiser owes you personally. It is a claim on money the day actually made.
A shortfall is yours to carry, up to your cap. Shared with the other sponsors in proportion to what each of you committed.
Cancellation is the worst case and it is worth looking at squarely. If the day is called off:
That total is the number your cap exists for, and it should be worked out and shown to you before you commit rather than described in the abstract.
The fee for running the day is payable whether the day happens or not, and it is inside what you are underwriting. It is not taken after you have been repaid. It is one of the costs your commitment covers, ranking with the venue and the insurance.
It is said here this plainly because it is the thing a business would most object to discovering afterwards, and a sponsor who reads it and decides against the whole arrangement has understood the deal correctly.
The fee is set by the size of the day, by the number of stalls and the number of attendees, so it grows with the event rather than being a figure picked in advance. Ask for it as a number before you sign.
Once every cost is covered and every sponsor is repaid, what is left is split between the community cause and the sponsors, at a percentage agreed in writing before any work starts.
Agreed first, deliberately. A share decided once the number is known is not a share, it is a tip.
| In what order | What happens |
|---|---|
| First | Money held back for refunds is set aside and is not available for anything else |
| Then | Every cost of the day is covered, including the platform's fee and any travel |
| Then | Every sponsor is repaid what they advanced, in the order the costs fell due |
| Only then | What is left is split between the cause and the sponsors, at the agreed percentages |
Market Day Collective finds the venue and signs the hire agreement, so it is the party the venue can pursue, not you. Your agreement is with Market Day Collective and it does not make you a party to the hire agreement.
Those are two different kinds of promise and the difference is worth knowing: a sponsor agreement is a private contract between us, and a hire agreement is between the venue and whoever signed it.
You get your own link to a page that shows, updating as the day does:
No account, no password. It shows the day's money and nothing else: it does not identify a stallholder or an attendee, and it never will.
If a question above cannot be answered yet, that is useful information and it is different from the answer being unfavourable. It means the day is not ready for your signature, not that you should assume the worst.
Filled in for this day, not left blank.