Training Log Archive: iansmith

Happy Christmas Eve!

This past Thursday, December 20, the OUSA Board put together a draft budget for 2019. While there was some motivation to pass the budget at the Board meeting, it was agreed to make the budget proposal available for public commentary. Clare, the OUSA President, e-mailed the budget out on December 23; the Board will be voting on it at a meeting on January 2. I wrote a document explaining the various categories of income and expenses that was also included.

Draft 2019 OUSA Budget
Budget Description and Details

High level summary:

• The budget is only for unrestricted income; restricted donations, e.g. a donation for a particular team or project, are not allocated by the Board. The teams especially tend to receive a bump in their budgets from generous donations from donors and clubs.
  
• The budget is not set in stone; the Board can change it at a future date. This isn't generally responsible for long-term planning, and it hasn't generally been our practice. Our current budget also includes some reserves for flexibility.
  
• A little context - at the end of 2016, OUSA was in the red, i.e. the sum of our financial commitments exceeded the amount of money we had in the bank. Given that, we have tried to be better about our financial discipline.

1. Income: the budget conservatively forecasts an income of $176,255; I don't have the numbers from past years off-hand, but Pat Meehan made projections on past years.
   
2. Expenses: the budget currently has expenses of $187,140 for a budget deficit of $10,885. These expenses are divided among three categories: 1. Basic organizational services (48.6%), 2. Teams and coaching (23.0%), and 3. Programming (28.4%).

My thoughts (not the Board's):
I had written several paragraphs that were unfortunately deleted when I accidentally refreshed my browser.

1. Basic Operating costs: While OUSA doesn't formally have a strategic plan (this is a problem), I think our core objectives - which would be in our strategic plan are:

1. Improve offerings - technology, resources, and services - for member clubs and OUSA members; increase the value of OUSA. Likely two separate goals.
   
2. Following the LTAD model, expand youth programming to increase the number of youth who try orienteering
   
3. Continue and support our elite development at the junior and senior level, including expanding coaching, holding training camps, and building team unity
   
4. Provide resources and strategies for clubs trying to grow, including marketing, promotion, advertising, and social media strategies (meetup, . Expand Bob Forgrave's marketing effort with Facebook adwords.
   
5. Relating to (1), cost-effectively upgrade OUSA's infrastructure and technology.

In our expenses budget, the basic organizational services category is largely "mandatory" spending - money to "keep the lights on" that isn't directly used for programming or advancing our strategic vision. To that end, it should be minimized. Mandatory examples are insurance (25k), accounting and financial fees (19k), and organizational dues (4k); hopefully Jitasa, our non-profit accounting service, will reduce the cost of accessing and managing our money. Other areas that are essential include the NEON database (3.5k), website (2.2k), Eventreg and e-punch (2.3k), annual fund drive (2k), Board expenses (3k), a reserve (8k), and money for a convention (500). Two areas that might be amenable to reduction are ONA (19k) and championship medals (2.2k). I think the latter is absurd. ONA is an excellent publication and service to our membership, but it's both very expensive and not currently optimally used. With 1250 members and five publications per year, ONA costs $15/member or $3/copy. It's underutilized, as evidenced by frequent calls for additional articles.

One possible idea: reduce the number of print copies of ONA to two per year - one fall teams issue, and one spring issue. In addition to the monthly newsletter, have four electronic e-zines. They don't have to be as comprehensive as the electronic ONAs, but an electronic format with articles, maps, exercises, and so on would be less expensive than current ONA but still be a vehicle for community information dissemination. Still, reducing our mandatory spending below about $75k seems impractical.

2. Balanced budget: I am disappointed that our budget proposal is not balanced. The income projections are by Pat Meehan and based on previous years; they are somewhat conservative and reality may exceed these estimates. Also, it's unlikely we will spend all of the budgeted expenses - $8k are a reserve (BOD and President's) in case a cool project comes along and needs funding, and not all the programming budget was spent last year. It's conceivable for instance that not all of the $15k for redesigning the website is spent in 2019. Still, we should come up with a balanced budget - especially in light of the disaster that culminated at the end of 2016 with OUSA having more financial commitments than it had money in the bank.

Our fiscal policy should be to keep a sustainable reserve, but to otherwise use the available money to advance our agenda and strategic vision. (That fiscal reserve has to be in excess of all commitments + 25% of our annual discretionary budget.)

3. Programming: I would like OUSA to be spending more money on programming. In particular, I think youth programming needs a bigger chunk of our available budget. We're currently budgeting $45k this year to technology and infrastructure improvements, but perhaps that can be modestly reduced to better fund junior initiatives. Barb has put together an ambitious agenda that mostly consists of providing materials, lesson plans, and school map grants.

I'm wary of a $30k commitment to Eventreg - we've woefully underfunded it, and Ed's ideas are very good, but I want to make sure we're getting something that increases our functionality and offerings for clubs. Eventreg is an event registration system that is cobbled together and requires major revision, but ideally the updates will make it easier for clubs to use and its utility to the community will increase.

The website seems to be a perpetual source of frustration - it has a lot that is useful and good about it, but also requires major redesign. Still, perhaps we can reduce our overall technology budget from $45k to $40k and allocate more towards youth development.

4. Growth: We also aren't really addressing ways to better promote and grow orienteering right now besides youth initiatives. Bob Forgrave led some social media and marketing methods that we need to follow up on. In addition to helping clubs grow, we need to improve the value proposition to becoming an OUSA member. This isn't an easy problem to throw money at, apart from building up our technology infrastructure.

5. Teams: supporting the national teams is part of the OUSA mission statement. Much of the teams' funding is from donations from clubs and the community; it's an unfortunate reality that discretionary funding in practice isn't enough. My view is that we should keep discretionary allocations to the team fairly consistent year-to-year to better allow ESCs to budget, and the 2019 numbers were based on the 2018 numbers. This allocation is more than the $0 given in 2017 that I vehemently opposed, but still not enough to cover even the cost of registration and room and board for the world championships. All the athletes have to pay for airfare, to say nothing of training and travel domestically.

Even the Junior coaches - Greg Ahlswede and Erin Schirm - who will likely have somewhat expanded responsibilities this year, receive 2/3 of their funding from generous donations and only 1/3 from OUSA. This is disappointing, but $24k to the teams and $19k for coaching is about as large a commitment as OUSA can feasibly muster right now.

For elite development, I like the concepts Long term athlete development model is a useful paradigm; the pyramid of development is instructive. While we should definitely support our national teams, they are only a part of the model. Money for travel for the national team may not have very good rates of return on elite development without building up the LTAD infrastructure. At the bottom, you have a broad base of exposure - like Barb's youth initiatives, giving a large number of youth in schools or programs opportunities to try orienteering. Then, the LTAD has several strata - teaching fundamentals, training to train, training to compete, and ultimately training to win. This should be reflected in our elite programming - that we have a large number of competitors in the pipeline who are stratified down to a top performing core.

Foot orienteering has some success with this, with 50k local starts, growing youth programs, an excellent junior pipeline spearheaded by regional coaches, training camps, and the junior national team coaches. Most of the developmental effort should be targeted at youth - who still have time to develop, rather than at seniors. But the senior team lacks organization. I spoke with Greg recently, and I like his idea of holding at least one training camp on each coast for the Junior and Senior national teams. Also, imagine if the top 20 juniors and top 10 seniors of each gender received small honoraria ($100-200?) to attend a team training camp of ~5 days with technical exercises, discussion of training goals, and building team camaraderie. I think that would be more productive than sending a couple more people to Europe.

I have reservations in the budget about allocating as much to the MTB-O team as to the senior team. I think foot-O still needs improvement in the LTAD model, but MTB-O has on the order of 100-200 starts each year. We definitely should support our national team and send competitors to the world championships, but can we justify spending $60/start to fund the national team? I'm not trying to pick on MTB-O, but I think we can come up with better strategies to grow the sport. For example, if we give $3000 for the national team for the WOC and $3000 for growing the sport domestically - map grants, perhaps training, I think it will be better in the long run. The proposal for MTB-O was to send 10 seniors and 6 juniors to the world champs, but I think the world champs have a poor rate of return for growing the sport. I would rather reduce the number of attendees at the world championships in favor of investing at home. Is it realistic to hope for 50% growth of MTB-O starts and events each year? Can we, for example, hit 500 starts? Growing the number of people who try the sport, the number of events, and the number of maps (this also applies to Trail-O especially) seems a more profitable investment than sending more people to world champs.

If I were on the Senior team ESC, I would advocate similarly - for example, sending four men to WOC as a default policy (except in exceptional circumstances) seems reasonable - three for the relay and one reserve for injury. We need more domestic development investment. I also have questions about the WUOC funding; I think WUOC can be a useful tool for the developmental pipeline, but I don't have the impression that it's taken very seriously right now. Perhaps WUOC funding could be rolled into and overseen by the JTESC and Senior team ESC.

I bopped over to Hart House for a morning workout while some code ran; it was refreshing. Whether due to the holiday or the hour, the gym was much less crowded than is typical. I would have preferred to run outside, but some symptoms of my cold are lingering. I didn't want to aggravate my condition by breathing lots of cold air. The erg was satisfying, and I sustained a 2:02/500m split without difficulty, though it was noticeably harder than the same pace earlier in the Fall.

A quick, easy strength circuit. 3 sets of:
10 clean and press, 12 kg
5 pullups
15 box jumps
15 tuckups
20 oblique crunches
45s plank

Squash with Laleh. I was sick most of last week with a cold and unable to train; it was good to be active again.

Toodle around the neighbourhood.

Welcome to December! Easy run in a light freezing rain, 3 C.