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<< back to the 2002 archive listing << Dairy, Food and Environmental Sanitation Commentary From The Executive Director Please help us by doing your part to promote IAFP to your colleagues
at every opportunity The past year has been both rewarding and disappointing. Rewarding in the accomplishments we achieved; disappointing in the financial results we must report. The accomplishments were many. We again had record attendance at the Annual Meeting, excellent participation by our exhibitors and sponsors, and we enjoyed an abundance of people attending our social events. The Annual Meeting workshops were well attended, we experienced an increase in Silver and Gold Sustaining Members, and our overall Membership remained stable during a year when many economic events kept the world unstable. During the year, we placed the Journal of Food Protection Online. In addition to the current year issues, this past fall we began placing the 2001 volume online. Soon, we expect to have two full years of JFP Online available to our users. This allows instant access anywhere in the world to the leading food science journal! That was the driving force behind our decision to make JFP available in an online version. You can now access full-text articles through JFP Online, even prior to the month of publication, if you have the online option added to your IAFP Membership. We also undertook the change of name for Dairy, Food and Environmental Sanitation. Beginning with the January 2003 issue, DFES will become titled Food Protection Trends. Food Protection Trends will be more easily identified as a journal dealing with “all” food safety issues, not just “dairy” or “sanitation” issues. In addition, the new name will be effortlessly linked to IAFP with the common words “Food Protection” in both the journal name and our Association name. IAFP continued our support of the 3-A Sanitary Standards during the year by assisting in the establishment of a new entity named “3-A Sanitary Standards, Inc.” The new entity will conduct all business for 3-A including standards writing functions, administration and authorization for the 3-A Symbol use. There will be a separate office created for 3-A that should be up and running at the beginning of 2003. During 2002, we established a new system that allows online Membership renewals.
In the first couple of months there was a 25% renewal rate using the online
method and more recently we have seen close to a 33% usage. These are very promising
numbers and will help improve our efficiency and speed the renewal process for
all Members. In addition, we implemented both a front-end (for new Members)
and a traditional (for expiring Memberships) retention program to keep the Members
we now have. You may have received a phone call or an E-mail from our staff
encouraging your quick Membership renewal. Believe it or not, this is one sure
way that you can save the Association from spending our resources. If you renew
on the first contact, you save our time, paper costs, postage costs, and / or
long-dis-tance telephone costs. You can see the savings — please help us Our financial results for the year ending August 31, 2002 are presented on page 1045. The general fund results show a loss of $62,000 for the year. This is the disappointing news referred to in the first paragraph. We had our sights set much higher than this as the past few years had helped us to reduce our negative general fund balance to a mere $1,500 at the beginning of this fiscal year. There are many factors that led us to this result, and I want to share a few with you. The first and largest factor was a loss on our investments of about $20,000. Just so you are aware, the Association has an investment policy that is very clear about what investments can be made with Association funds and of course; it is very conservative on what type of investments can be made. Otherwise, we might have incurred a much larger loss. These results are disappointing especially when compared to our budget projection showing a $20,000 gain on our investments! Another place where we strayed from budget involved JFP Online. This was not in our budget for FYE August 31, 2002, but we saw advantages to completing this project prior to the end of the fiscal year. We expended about $10,000 to get JFP Online up and running. We did collect some revenue to offset this expense, but not in full. We also incurred expense exceeding budget to print and mail both the Journal of Food Protection and Dairy, Food and Environmental Sanitation. This was due to increasing the number of pages printed to accommodate an additional flow of articles submitted for publication. Although we had an increase in Annual Meeting attendance, San Diego was an expensive location to hold our Meeting and we came up about $10,000 short on our net income results when compared to what we budgeted. Our workshop financial results were similar to the Annual Meeting. We ended up about $10,000 short of what we projected to make on our workshops. None of these results or unplanned expenses was terribly harmful by themselves, but when they are all combined, they totaled a result that makes us very disappointed. We have made changes to address the financial shortcomings and look forward to a much brighter financial future for IAFP! Please help us by doing your part to promote IAFP to your colleagues at every opportunity. You are our best source for growing the Membership in IAFP. So as this year closes, the staff at IAFP wishes you and your family a happy holiday season and a most successful New Year! |