Financial Announcement

As you can see, the SCA is forecasting, roughly, to break-even for this budget cycle (2010). At this time, this is only a forecast, and will be monitored and modified as the year progresses.

For the year ending 2009, we project a net income of $31,174.64. Please bear in mind that all 2009 financial data has not been processed, so this remains a projection. This is a substantial turn-around from our 2008 loss of over $180,000. The corporate staff and directors worked diligently throughout the year to review and reduce all expenses, and eliminated anything not deemed "mission critical". The directors would like to recognize and commend the outstanding efforts by the VP for Corporate Operations, Renee Signorotti, and the Corporate Treasurer, Mazelle Attiya. These two individuals worked tirelessly to control costs. They have our great thanks.

Moving forward into 2010, we will continue to work to minimize costs, and to provide value for our members.

It must be noted first and foremost- the projected break-even budget for 2010 is based on one critical change; membership rates will be increase by $2, effective July 1, 2010. This will be matched with a $2 increase in the NMS. We in no way want to discourage new participants from "trying us out", however, the Board feels strongly that participating non members should also contribute to the organization.

In addition, this $2 increase will be reviewed in the following budget cycle (2011). The potential exists for additional incremental changes in the coming years, based on future increases in organizational operating costs. We have listened carefully to the comments of our membership. We believe that a smaller, regulated and controlled incremental increase is superior to one large increase.

We continue to review additional sources of funding with respect to the grants committee, and we are exploring alternative revenue sources.

The budget for 2010 continues the cost cutting measures noted below.

1. The elimination of one quarterly in-person meetings of the Board of Directors, the July meeting, which will be replaced by a conference call. Please note: The directors remain committed to outreach to the membership. The elimination of this meeting was a difficult choice as the directors and corporate staff is committed to public meetings, traveling across the Known World in order to meet the members and gain input from them.
2. The introduction of the online waivers, which will reduce postage and paper costs. We will continue to explore the potential expansion of the online interface to include changes in publication subscriptions. (ie: being able to add subscriptions on-line)

1. Continued development of a grant program, specifically target at supporting our publications and A&S activities.
2. Offering Tournaments Illuminated and The Compleat Anachronist subscriptions to non members, libraries, schools, and others.
3. Raising the rate for these publications to our members.
4. Adding new tiers of member sponsorship such as a Donor or Sponsor level.
5. Examining different membership participation options, with a short term "event pass" for new participants.
6. Increase our ability to fund some internal operations from sales of SCA related merchandise. (Via Cafe Press or other, similar sites. Individual kingdoms currently have gone in this direction. We are not looking to curtail kingdom activity.)
7. Raising membership rates. As mentioned we will review additional incremental increases to align expenses and revenues.
8. Fees for paperwork processing.

Send your comments to: comments@sca.org. Please recall that this is a comment only address. All Directors all see the email from this comments address, however we do not offer individual responses.

Thank you for your time and review of this material. You can subscribe to the Announcements mailing list by going to http://www.sca.org/BOD/announcements/.