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Atlanta Reef Club
Executive Committee Meeting
May 23, 2018
Members Present: President, Brett Cavalli
Vice President, Dave Ball
Treasurer, Adam Nitschke
Secretary, Doug Lockett
On the above date at 7:30 PM the Executive Committee met at the Mad Italian Restaurant. Adam presented a handout which showed that there was less transactions (payments) this year as compared with 2015/16 figures. He was concerned that the club was losing membership. It looks like Adam used subscriptions to arrive at his figures.
Brett was able to point out how difficult it is to get an accurate reading from these figures. As an example, people will sign up through the subscription service then cancel a week or a month later. We can't easily capture those figures.
Adam turned to page 3 where he had a better depiction of where we stand as an organization financially. He showed that our revenue was down 15% from last year. This was derived by adding both Stripe and Expo dollars. Adam had pulled these numbers earlier today. Brett explained that he pulled numbers just before he came to the meeting and had 111 successful payments, 30 of which switched from PayPal to Stripe. He also pointed out that people use different PayPal accounts such as their spouse's which makes it even more difficult to track.
The bottom line for Adam is that our revenue stream is down 15% from last year’s figures. Brett asked if Adam could attach a dollar figure to that. Adam stated that it was roughly $3700. By adding the Expo dollars plus Stripe, the total revenue is $21,640. Pulling the Expo dollars out give a total of $18,393.
Brett showed us a paper where he had pulled all the PayPal from January 1st to July 7th, 2018. There were 160 cancelled PayPal accounts. Jul 8th through December 31st when we took the web site down, we had 60 people cancel. Dec 31st to present we have had 68 cancellations. This puts us at 92 for the same period last year but we still have 5 weeks to cover the entire period. We all agreed that that was a high number of cancellations. He stated that we should go through PayPal to get the same numbers for 2012-2016. This would provide information that would allow us to track how many people are getting out of the hobby yearly. He said this information would be helpful in helping develop a plan to help keep more people in the hobby.
Adam pointed out that there are more additions to PayPal this year due to vendors for the Expo using PayPal to pay their fees. Dave asked if our site could tell us how many paid members we have. Brett said yes, as of now we have 448 including the BOD, MODS and Executive Committee. With renewals we will have 597 in January. Dave asked if we could tell where we were at this time last year. Adam said that now that Lee Bolton is gone, there is no way to get this information. We had a difficult time in comparing revenue stream and reconciling memberships. Brett stated that the back end of the web site showed 647 members through January 15th. It also showed the end of term date for each member.
Adam asked why this date was important for those of us who did not know. Because everyone must have a end of term date in the system or them could go on not paying anything. Dave asked if the figures could possibly be inflated on the site. Adam didn't think so because his figures were only off just a bit from those provided by the site. Brett pointed out that we lost $2000 during the Expo last year whereas this year we made a profit. Also, last year’s figures would have shown an additional revenue of $6,000. This was due to us having run the David Grimm memorial auction. There were four auctions tha produced income that was donated in his name. Adam said that this fact would mean that our income for 2015-2016 was then even lower.
Dave pointed out that membership did not really seem to be down as much as activity on the site was down. He said there had not been any work done by moderators since the new site went up. There were less people having less discussions, leading to a need for a moderator intervention.
At this point, there was a discussion about people using social media i.e. Facebook to sell rather the ARC forum. Brett is aware of a member who will come to him and purchase 20-30 frags and then go to Facebook and have an auction for those same pieces. People get around Facebooks policy by not posting prices or forming private groups, etc. A vendor from up around Pennsylvania told Brett that most of the local clubs up and down the East coast had folded because of Facebook and other social media sites.
There was discussion about whether the site change had anything to do with people leaving the club. The consensus was no. It was pointed out that prior to the change, there were lots of people saying our site was antiquated and should be updated. After the change, they left anyway. Doug commented that he timed the upload of a message last night at 32 seconds. Brett said that he has been in contact with third party developers about this issue. Each one that he talks with seems to give him a different answer. Some think it's a hardware issue and others say it's a software issue. We all would like to see our site more efficient with more bells and whistles. However, we recognize that financially, we cannot support anything more than we are doing now. Our membership numbers will not support anything bigger.
Brett stated that we would be moving over to a cloud-based system in the next few weeks and hopefully that will help speed up our platform. Dave motioned that we earmark an additional $3000 to speed up the website. It was second by Adam. All concurred. We agreed to wait until after the site had moved over to the cloud service to see if that would speed things up. Also effective at midnight tonight, if we do not lock the European Union from our site because of new regulations, we will be required to pay an access fee. Brett will lock them from our site before the deadline tonight.
Adam: We need to get sponsor letters mailed out early to get our date for the 2019 Expo on their calendars. May 18, 2019 has been identified as the date for our next Expo. Brett was voted to go ahead and pay the required $2000 deposit to hold our date to the Gwinnett Energy Center.
The next Board of Directors meeting has been scheduled for June 27, 2018 at 7:30 PM at a place TBD. The Executive Board will meet the same date at 7:00 PM. The next club meeting will be held at Feed Me Algae on June 14th.
Executive Committee Meeting
May 23, 2018
Members Present: President, Brett Cavalli
Vice President, Dave Ball
Treasurer, Adam Nitschke
Secretary, Doug Lockett
On the above date at 7:30 PM the Executive Committee met at the Mad Italian Restaurant. Adam presented a handout which showed that there was less transactions (payments) this year as compared with 2015/16 figures. He was concerned that the club was losing membership. It looks like Adam used subscriptions to arrive at his figures.
Brett was able to point out how difficult it is to get an accurate reading from these figures. As an example, people will sign up through the subscription service then cancel a week or a month later. We can't easily capture those figures.
Adam turned to page 3 where he had a better depiction of where we stand as an organization financially. He showed that our revenue was down 15% from last year. This was derived by adding both Stripe and Expo dollars. Adam had pulled these numbers earlier today. Brett explained that he pulled numbers just before he came to the meeting and had 111 successful payments, 30 of which switched from PayPal to Stripe. He also pointed out that people use different PayPal accounts such as their spouse's which makes it even more difficult to track.
The bottom line for Adam is that our revenue stream is down 15% from last year’s figures. Brett asked if Adam could attach a dollar figure to that. Adam stated that it was roughly $3700. By adding the Expo dollars plus Stripe, the total revenue is $21,640. Pulling the Expo dollars out give a total of $18,393.
Brett showed us a paper where he had pulled all the PayPal from January 1st to July 7th, 2018. There were 160 cancelled PayPal accounts. Jul 8th through December 31st when we took the web site down, we had 60 people cancel. Dec 31st to present we have had 68 cancellations. This puts us at 92 for the same period last year but we still have 5 weeks to cover the entire period. We all agreed that that was a high number of cancellations. He stated that we should go through PayPal to get the same numbers for 2012-2016. This would provide information that would allow us to track how many people are getting out of the hobby yearly. He said this information would be helpful in helping develop a plan to help keep more people in the hobby.
Adam pointed out that there are more additions to PayPal this year due to vendors for the Expo using PayPal to pay their fees. Dave asked if our site could tell us how many paid members we have. Brett said yes, as of now we have 448 including the BOD, MODS and Executive Committee. With renewals we will have 597 in January. Dave asked if we could tell where we were at this time last year. Adam said that now that Lee Bolton is gone, there is no way to get this information. We had a difficult time in comparing revenue stream and reconciling memberships. Brett stated that the back end of the web site showed 647 members through January 15th. It also showed the end of term date for each member.
Adam asked why this date was important for those of us who did not know. Because everyone must have a end of term date in the system or them could go on not paying anything. Dave asked if the figures could possibly be inflated on the site. Adam didn't think so because his figures were only off just a bit from those provided by the site. Brett pointed out that we lost $2000 during the Expo last year whereas this year we made a profit. Also, last year’s figures would have shown an additional revenue of $6,000. This was due to us having run the David Grimm memorial auction. There were four auctions tha produced income that was donated in his name. Adam said that this fact would mean that our income for 2015-2016 was then even lower.
Dave pointed out that membership did not really seem to be down as much as activity on the site was down. He said there had not been any work done by moderators since the new site went up. There were less people having less discussions, leading to a need for a moderator intervention.
At this point, there was a discussion about people using social media i.e. Facebook to sell rather the ARC forum. Brett is aware of a member who will come to him and purchase 20-30 frags and then go to Facebook and have an auction for those same pieces. People get around Facebooks policy by not posting prices or forming private groups, etc. A vendor from up around Pennsylvania told Brett that most of the local clubs up and down the East coast had folded because of Facebook and other social media sites.
There was discussion about whether the site change had anything to do with people leaving the club. The consensus was no. It was pointed out that prior to the change, there were lots of people saying our site was antiquated and should be updated. After the change, they left anyway. Doug commented that he timed the upload of a message last night at 32 seconds. Brett said that he has been in contact with third party developers about this issue. Each one that he talks with seems to give him a different answer. Some think it's a hardware issue and others say it's a software issue. We all would like to see our site more efficient with more bells and whistles. However, we recognize that financially, we cannot support anything more than we are doing now. Our membership numbers will not support anything bigger.
Brett stated that we would be moving over to a cloud-based system in the next few weeks and hopefully that will help speed up our platform. Dave motioned that we earmark an additional $3000 to speed up the website. It was second by Adam. All concurred. We agreed to wait until after the site had moved over to the cloud service to see if that would speed things up. Also effective at midnight tonight, if we do not lock the European Union from our site because of new regulations, we will be required to pay an access fee. Brett will lock them from our site before the deadline tonight.
Adam: We need to get sponsor letters mailed out early to get our date for the 2019 Expo on their calendars. May 18, 2019 has been identified as the date for our next Expo. Brett was voted to go ahead and pay the required $2000 deposit to hold our date to the Gwinnett Energy Center.
The next Board of Directors meeting has been scheduled for June 27, 2018 at 7:30 PM at a place TBD. The Executive Board will meet the same date at 7:00 PM. The next club meeting will be held at Feed Me Algae on June 14th.
