This is a fundraiser to pay a £750 fine imposed on Wings Over Scotland by the Electoral Commission for being late with some paperwork regarding the 2014 independence referendum campaign.

What happened was that we filed a full and accurate account of our campaign spending, on time. But it didn’t include all the required invoices, because we hadn’t been sent them by suppliers – we’d just paid for stuff up front without waiting for invoices to arrive, because time was pressing. We couldn't send the Commission what we didn't have. 

We offered bank statements as evidence instead, but the Commission refused to accept them as proof. As soon as we did have the invoices we sent them in, but by then we were several weeks past the deadline and after several months of pondering, numerous press stories and a lot of glee from some simple-minded Unionist trolls, the EC imposed the fine. 

(Which was only a few hundred pounds less than other organisations had been fined for not submitting any returns at all. Frankly, if we'd known it'd only cost us a few hundred quid extra we'd probably have saved ourselves a lot of long and tedious admin and just told them to shove their returns up a personal area.)

We should note that there's plenty money in the Wings kitty to just pay the fine, which was our own instinct. (At first we were going to contest it legally, but then found out it would waste several days because we'd have to travel hundreds of miles, and even if we'd won it wouldn't have been worth the lost work time.) 

However, numerous readers asked us to launch a dedicated fundraiser for it in order to send a message, and when we posted a poll on the site asking whether to just pay or have the fundraiser, over 1,500 people voted and by a three-to-one margin said "run the fundraiser", so here it is.

We also want to make clear that we will NOT be donating any money raised over and above the target to charities, because we don't want to raise money for ourselves off the back of a charity appeal. Effectively asking people to donate to foodbanks but skimming the first £750 for ourselves seems rather unethical, so this campaign is done expressly and explicitly on the premise that anything raised above the goal will be spent on sweets and fizzy pop for us. If people don't want to donate on that basis, that's perfectly fine.

Since the target sum is small, there are no extra perks. Anyone donating £5 or more gets a badge, and that's it. 

That seems to cover everything.