Board Reports

Secretary-Treasurer's Report

Harry Strothers III, MD, MMM

Despite the addition of new programming, a strong annual meeting, a good membership year, and hard work by staff and volunteers, 2007 will end in the red financially for STFM. We accomplished much over the year but will not end the year financially as we had hoped. We knew after last year’s first net income year following 6 years of deficits, it would be difficult to maintain the positive results of 2006 while moving to fund the Annals of Family Medicine from our regular operating budget for the first time. We ended the 2007 year with an operating deficit of $83,344. To put this into perspective, we funded Annals of Family Medicine at $85,000 from operating funds. If we had funded Annals from long-term reserves as we have the past 2 years, we would have shown net income of $2,095. Fortunately, the Society has strong reserves of more than $2 million to weather these financial dips. Long-term support of Annals and our other high priority programs and services through our operations dollars makes good business sense, and we are committed to finding the revenue to achieve this.

The good news is that membership dues were at 100.5% of budget, Family Medicine advertising income was $43,900 ahead of 2006 (and $6,500 more than budgeted), the annual meeting came in at $49,380 ahead of budget, and our newly launched Predoctoral Directors Development Institute netted $9,500 with budgeted net income of $6,100. Earnings on investments were $33,988 ahead of budget.

The challenges we faced include decreased sales of book inventory, decreased royalties, and overall decreased meetings and workshop net income. Two conferences in particular did not meet budget projections. We optimistically anticipated netting $45,160 from the new IMG Academy workshops but only netted $4,142. We also budgeted to net $45,000 for the 2007 Conference on Practice Improvement, yet net income was only $13,587 for this conference. We continue to face the challenge of decreasing registrations for some conferences and increasing hotel costs. We are committed to determining and implementing the best approaches for turning this around in 2008.

Our plan to achieve a balanced budget has several components. Membership renewals are at similar levels as last year, so with the modest approved dues increase ($10 for physicians, $5 for nonphysicians), we should generate an additional $40,000 in revenue compared to 2007. With membership dues bringing in one third of our operating income, we’ll continue to focus on ways to recruit and retain members. We plan to pursue appropriate partnerships more aggressively in 2008, and we have budgeted far less net income from the IMG Academies to give this program a chance to get up and running. We have made conscious efforts to curtail the over-expended areas of 2007, as some of our liaison and committee expenses exceeded their 2007 budget. Perhaps not in 2008, but long term we anticipate receiving new income from the National Procedures Institute for which STFM is a 20% partner.

While we have several challenges ahead of us, our new leadership combined with our staff and volunteer efforts have a clear vision of how to lead STFM to succeed in the future. The Board has committed to doing an analysis of STFM activities to identify those programs that are most relevant to our core purpose and our outcomes of success. This exercise will provide us with the data to make decisions on where to devote our precious and limited Society resources. We are confident that our disciplined approach to our finances will result in a renewed focus on activities that will move the Society and discipline forward and will improve our long-term financial situation.

It has been a pleasure to serve our wonderful Society as your secretary-treasurer. I have appreciated the opportunity to work with our Board and outstanding staff in this role.