A share of every Chantlings book sold — £1 per copy — goes toward a football community charity, chosen by public vote of our mailing list. As a new start-up, what that adds up to won't be huge at first. This page sets out exactly how it works, honestly, so the pledge is checkable at every stage.
A share of every Chantlings book sold — £1 per copy — goes into a shared charity pool. It doesn't matter which club's story you buy — every copy, from every story in the collection, contributes the same amount.
Chantlings is a small, new start-up. In the first year, or the first several, the pool this pledge produces probably won't be large. That's an honest reflection of where we're starting from, not a shortfall in the pledge — it's expected to grow as Chantlings does, and we'll always say plainly where things stand.
The pool is counted once across the whole Chantlings collection, rather than kept separate club by club, so the amount raised has a real chance of making a difference to the cause chosen — instead of being split into amounts too small to matter to anyone.
The charity pool is totalled once a year, at the start of the football season, based on copies sold in the previous 12 months. That figure is the amount available to award for that year.
Nominating a cause and voting for one are both open only to people signed up to the Chantlings mailing list. This keeps the process contained to people who have actively chosen to hear from Chantlings, in line with GDPR, rather than open to anyone passing through the website.
Anyone can join the mailing list at any time to take part in the next nomination and voting round — sign up on the homepage. This is also where you have a say: which cause the pool goes to is decided by the people who read the stories, not by us.
A nomination is not just a name. Each cause put forward must be football-community related, and must set out a specific need and its cost — for example a stated amount tied to a stated purpose.
This keeps the vote grounded in a concrete ask rather than a popularity contest, and makes it possible to check afterwards that the money awarded did what it was meant to do.
Mailing list subscribers vote for their preferred nomination. More than one cause may share the pool in a single year, where that better matches the stated needs against the size of the pool — for example, if the pool is larger than any single stated need, or if two strong nominations both deserve support.
While the mailing list and nomination process are still getting started, an example of the kind of cause Chantlings has in mind is Fans Supporting Foodbanks — a fan-led, now formally registered charity founded by Liverpool and Everton supporters, tackling food poverty around matchdays. It's exactly the kind of grassroots, football-community cause the pledge is built for.
This is a suggestion to illustrate the spirit of the pledge, not a fixed choice — any football-community cause can be nominated once voting opens, and subscribers decide the winner.
Chantlings is a new start-up, and we're confident there will always be some sales — so a pool of exactly zero isn't the real risk. The more likely scenario, especially in the first year or two, is a pool that's simply too small to meaningfully help a cause.
When that happens, rather than awarding a token amount, the pool rolls over and combines with the following year's total — so when a nomination and vote does take place, the amount awarded actually makes a difference. This will always be stated plainly wherever the pledge is mentioned, so nobody is caught out by it.
After each year's total is confirmed, Chantlings will publish the size of the pool, the cause or causes chosen, the stated need each nomination was tied to, and the amount awarded — on this website and by email to mailing list subscribers.
Taking part in a nomination or a vote requires being a mailing list subscriber, which means giving Chantlings your email address and consenting to be contacted. This information is only used to run the mailing list, the nomination process, and the vote, and to send you the outcome. It is not shared with third parties beyond what is needed to run these services — for example, the email platform that sends the messages.
You can leave the mailing list, and therefore stop taking part in nominations and voting, at any time using the unsubscribe link in any Chantlings email.