CUG assets are currently somewhat above what they were last year, totaling $142,449.79 on May 2, 1997--but not all expenses/income are in from the Silicon Valley CUG. The largest portion of these assets is in T-Bills and interest-bearing accounts. Our goal is to maintain liquid reserves of about $200,000. The reserve serves to protect CUG against liabilities from a conference that may be canceled or disrupted by natural or political events (e.g., an earthquake or an airline strike).
The increase in dues, from $300 to $500 a year, takes effect January 1, 1998. With current membership numbers, this increase provides about $15,000 a year to replenish reserves that were depleted from several years of losses. The board has also taken steps to become more efficient. These savings as well as savings in publications will be used to support new conference activities, such as topical or regional conferences.
In addition, we are embarking upon a new focused marketing effort to attract new membership. Fran Pellegrino from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center will be making contacts with Cray sites that are not current members, both to recruit new members and to assess why sites have not become members.
The transfer of CUG office activities to West Virginia from Eagan, Minnesota, is complete, with Bob Winget well assuming the role of CUG office manager in addition to being our Proceedings publisher. CUG has a new checking account and a new credit card processing agent. These changes, and automating membership and invoicing processes, have decreased our operational costs.
More significant savings were achieved by moving the CUG newsletter, CUG.log, from hardcopy to a Web-based product. Lynda Lester and Bob Winget deserve our thanks for these and other cost-saving efforts, which have made CUG more efficient and added new value to our products.
My philosophy as treasurer is to make CUG operations as cost-effective as possible--but foremost, to make sure that your money is working hard to provide value-added for the membership. This means that every dollar we save can be spent on delivering more and better products, whether conference program or Web-based information, to you, our CUG membership.
