[Finance] Next Board Meeting

[Bill Newman]

Challenging ideas Zen--track how we're doing, where we're going and are we getting there. Perhaps we haven't done enough of this in the past. 

   The annual financial statements do show donation and grant income.  They are perhaps not so good at identifying program vs overhead vs advertising expenses.
  	Our financial reporting has been getting more elaborate recently to the point that I would say we now have more reporting than we have data to report on.
   In the early years we had lots of donations (memberships), some operational grants and few expenses. This allowed us to accumulate a cash surplus of maybe $15K. In the last few years we have taken on fixed expenses, donations have dried up and we've gone through most of our cash reserve. That's pretty much the story. What we need are ideas about how we can support our chosen lifestyle.
   Non profits often report on their financials--little pie charts showing where their money comes from and what they spent it on. This is usually by way of advertising how important their donors are and how low their overhead is. It would be nice to do something like that.

	  Jeremy has done an impressive
job on the bike reports considering the data he has to work with (which a statistician would consider seriously sparse). There are also confounding factors like construction projects and route changes that make year to year comparisons difficult even with more complete data. And of course the weather can totally mess everything up. There is a huge population of cyclists who love a gorgeous summer day but have no appetite for rain. This will hit the bike counts hard. I shudder to see what shows up in the 2014 numbers when we all know there are more bikes out there than ever, don't we? 
   Nevertheless this data is important and until the city comes up with more complete data we are the sole source. Anything we can do to expand and improve the bike count deserves serious attention.

    We might consider monitoring the total number or length of bike lanes in place; the seriously missing pieces; route markings and other signage. A year by year comparison with a little history would be nice (the bike count goes back to 2007).  If we put this together it would show us how far we have come. Do you remember how hard it was to bike around Winnipeg ten years ago? 

   There must be lots of ways we can clarify biking in Winnipeg and how Bike Winnipeg is influencing it.
-- Bill

Sent from my Android phone.

On August 4, 2014 5:23:46 PM CDT, Zen Gagne <zengagne at gmail.com> wrote:
>Hi All - I would like to make a motion for the next board meeting
>August 12
>related to finance. I think that we should implement some new financial
>measure and non-financial measures to evaluate the operating
>effectiveness
>of the organization.
>
>Examples could include:
>Total donations by members/non-members in a year.
>Total Grants received
>Number of bicyclists on a certain route that we do counts
>Number of bike routes (or change in bike routes) compared to prior
>year.
>
>I think these types of measures will help us track how the organization
>is
>doing on an internal basis through finances, and on an overall basis
>through looking if the mission of the organization is being achieved on
>a
>year to year basis.
>
>I would like to bring this motion up that can start exploring types of
>measures to be brought to the board for the next meeting, and maybe get
>some input at the board level of things they would like to see.
>
>Thoughts? Please let me know soon and I can forward something to be
>included in the board package.
>
>Zennon
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Finance mailing list
>Finance at lists.bikewinnipeg.ca
>http://lists.bikewinnipeg.ca/listinfo.cgi/finance-bikewinnipeg.ca
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bikewinnipeg.ca/pipermail/finance-bikewinnipeg.ca/attachments/20140808/bb348312/attachment-0001.htm>