President's Remarks at the 2011 Annual Meeting

From the July 2011 issue of The Crest

Forty years ago Betty Kleiner sent in the application for Hartford Audubon to become a nonprofit. My first thought when seeing the application four years ago was that this must be an extremely boring, legal type document. How wrong I was! This is the most remarkable Hartford Audubon document I have ever read.

 The IRS wanted to know why we became an organization and how we were going to behave as a nonprofit. The application is a series of questions to get these answers. Our answer was that we are birding club that has meetings, trips, lectures and sanctuaries. What is amazing is that if we were to submit an application to be a nonprofit today, it would be nearly identical to what Betty wrote. And she could have written the same thing in 1950 after we acquired our first sanctuary. The essence of Hartford Audubon has changed very little in sixty years.

One thing is certain – the world has not been unchanging for 60 years. We are a birding club and there have been major changes to both the field of birding and to clubs of all types. Clubs were at their peak popularity fifty years ago. There were limited at-home entertainment opportunities so people left their homes for entertainment. Clubs offered experts, activities and face to face friendships. The general situation for clubs today is that the membership is getting older, new members are older, clubs are losing membership, clubs are going out of existence, and clubs have a hard time getting people to do things, including being on the Board.

I think the start of the transition from a club friendly world to today’s situation started with TV. The internet only extended the process. At the same time, though, birding started enjoying fantastic growth. Perhaps the growing popularity of birding offset the decline in clubs so that Hartford Audubon could essentially maintain the same behavior over the whole time period. However, everything that is happening in birding is not good for birding clubs.

 Many birders today follow the rare bird alerts and list servers to get accurate and current information on where to find birds. Many young birders do all of their birding this way and do not need birding clubs. I think Hartford Audubon has been able to survive sixty years with the same activities because we have found our niche which is immune to TV, sports and internet birding. The niche is we offer is face to face fun with members.

 It is fun for members to come to meetings and go on trips to associate with friends. Members having fun will continue to be members. Members having fun will attract new members. We need to appraise every action we take to make sure it enhances fun for members. So who is in charge of fun for members?

The bylaws reserve a few important things for members and give the Officers some specific tasks, but everything else is the Board’s responsibility. That would include fun for members. The problem here, though, is that the Board is widely perceived to be a place that is the not fun. How can a group that is not fun be in charge of fun for others? We need to make being on the Board fun. Fortunately, by sheer luck and good fortune, we have done a number of things that should make being on the Board more fun. The actions were taken to solve particular problems or concerns, but taken together they make it easier to be on the Board. It is very easy for the agenda of a Board meeting to be mostly a number of problems that need to be resolved. I wanted a different agenda for my first Board meeting as President.

I wanted the Board to analyze from a very high level all of the activities of Hartford Audubon. We used the program book as the list of things we do. We spent most of that first meeting appraising the activities in the book. Using the program book was a bit cumbersome so we made a list of all our activities and then divided the list into groups for easier discussions. That list is called the Planning Framework and is the first item under Process Documentation section on the HASmember web page.

About the same time we lost our CPA Treasurer and thought that Quicken might provide a bookkeeping system that would easier for our new Treasurer to use. Quicken can produce financial reports at any time so the Board will be getting accurate and up to date financial statements before every Board meeting and spending much less time at meetings discussing our financial situation.

 Next, we found that several of the items in Planning Framework were accomplished with rather involved processes. We now have several flow charts that describe these processes. Finally, there is the Policies document that provides guidelines for the Board. They are not like a constitution that cannot be violated. A simple Board vote can do something different.

All of these items make it easier to serve on the Board. Discussions will be simpler and shorter freeing up time to spend on member fun. All this process understanding and time saving is extremely important to Hartford Audubon. This is the only way we can devote more time to our niche – having face to face fun with members.

 Fred