DSA funds study group activities to help you organise events and refund expenses. Study Group funding is decided at the start of each financial year. For 2024/2025 this is £750 per Study Group per DSA year (Feb – Jan) though we will consider higher requests, if a case can be made.

Please complete our Budget protocol form (xls) and send it to membership(at)devstud.org.uk as well as a (maximum) one-page summary of the event, providing as much detail as possible and clarifying what you hope the DSA to fund.
Once these are sent to us, they will be reviewed by the Council member in charge of Study Groups and you will receive a decision within one month. If you do not send in this information in advance, we may not be able to refund your costs.

If your funding request is successful please send details of you activity to the Communications Officer at: comms(AT)devstud.org.uk.

We ask that you and others pay the various costs of your event up-front and then submit receipts to us to be reimbursed.

After your event and/ or after expenses have been paid for that were agreed in the original budget, please then complete our Study Group expense claim form (Word doc)  – to reclaim your expenses. This can be completed by individuals who attended, so we can refund them directly (e.g. their travel expenses) or it can be completed by you as the SG convenor to claim other costs for the event (e.g. catering, venue charges etc). Just complete and sign this form and send it to the DSA Administrator membership(at)devstud.org.uk, with the scanned receipt(s). We ask that all travel is booked at the lowest cost available, and we prioritise students or people whose organisation cannot pay for their attendance.

To check how much funding your group has left at any point in time, contact the DSA Administrator.

As a Study Group convenor, we need your help to keep track of what DSA funding is spent on. So we will email you in January each year asking and reminding you to complete our short SG report. There are two parts to the report:

You must read these convenor guidelines (PDF) – which were updated in 2017.

If you have a question about running your Study Group just ask the DSA Administrator:
[email protected]

It all depends on what activities you organise. We expect you to hold at least one meeting a year, though many groups hold more than that. Some groups work through email discussion lists, and some even collect together papers and publish books. What you do is very much up to you, but we will help wherever we can.

Usually prospective members will email you. Just add them to your email list (or other records). Some convenors set up a standard email reply as a response – this might be handy if you would like to send new members information about the group, or if you email the list quite infrequently. If you would like any advice on filtering emails automatically into a study group email folder or managing email distribution lists, you can always contact the DSA Administrator for help – we can suggest ways to streamline your admin.

Anybody can join any number of Study Groups, however we do ask that you check (via the members directory) if those joining are DSA members and, if they are not, that you encourage strongly all those who regularly engage with your SG to become individual DSA members. Please do help us by encouraging people to join the DSA. If somebody contacts you asking to join the DSA, please point them here. We do, however, expect the Convenor(s) to be an individual member of the DSA, unless their department has an institutional membership with the DSA. In that scenario, convenors do not need to take out individual memberships of the DSA. If you are unsure if your department is a DSA member, you can check here or email membershipadmin(at)devstud.org.uk to find out. You can use the members directory to see if somebody is already a member.

DSA income largely comes from membership fees, and as these membership fees help fund Study Group activities, we are keen that paid-up members feel the full benefit – rather than subsidising non-members.

Yes. Most SGs have a mailing list for informing SG members of events and for discussion within the SG, but you can reach the entire DSA membership by adding your group’s news to our website. Email [email protected] to share your news at any time. You will receive monthly reminders from our Communications Officer to submit your SG events and news to them for DSA website and social media publication.

If you’ve just taken over running a Study Group, you should inherit an email list from the previous convenor. If not, contact the DSA administrator. If you are convening a new group, we can help you set up a dedicated mailing list for your Study Group and help you to administer that. If you are a new convenor, you should read the study group guidelines (PDF).

All Study Groups have a webpage on the DSA website. You might like to use your webpage to inform members about recent events, upcoming events, papers from meetings and/or other materials they can download from the website, as well as links to topic-specific research. To update your pages email the DSA Communications Officer: comms(AT)devstud.org.uk.
Your webpage can help you simplify your SG mailing list messages – just include a link to your webpage rather than sending large attachments to a big list.