First Board Meeting in a New Financial Year

David Clayden was welcomed to his first Socitm Board meeting today. David has accepted portfolio responsibility for “the Third Sector & Social Responsibility”. The updated portfolio list follows although, in practice, there is a lot of overlap. Much of the actual work is undertaken in the Commercial and Membership Boards. Board meetings are also attended by Melanie Smith, the Finance Manager, and Pam Larsen, the Company Secretary.

This was a productive meeting, the minutes of which will be published to members in due course. In the meantime, items that you may consider noteworthy are:

• We are working on sharing board members’, main activists’ and staff calendars to facilitate planning. We also intend to publish the calendar of our activities on behalf of the Society via the website. This will say what meetings we are attending, and when, but not provide details of location or people involved for obvious reasons. My own calendar is already included at the end of the Blogspot copy of my Blog, although it needs some tidying-up, and I’m currently only updating it at weekends.


• We expect to publish the Position Statement by the 26th January. This will also be sent to Regional Chairs for the information of all Members.


• The Socitm Membership Board is making good progress in developing the membership category proposals for next year. It is also working on Corporate Membership scheme proposals to be piloted this year, and a detailed professional development framework. There is a lot of work to get through, but it’s expected that a roadmap will be outlined at the April AGM, and details presented for consultation at the next NAC (in May).


• The Board approved the budget for this year. This, we believe, provides a prudent level of contingency, whilst maintaining progress in the development of the Society and maintaining reserves at around the current level. We are reassessing what the minimum level of reserves should be, and expect that it can be set at a lower level following the work undertaken to reduce financial risks. Clearly, ‘though, these are “interesting” times and we’ll closely monitor against the baseline with variance and predicted outturn being considered at each Board meeting.


• We have been struggling to arrange a meeting that everyone can attend, to be hosted by Shey Cobley at Oxford, to consider the proposition for different professional disciplines and, particularly, young people. This now looks like happening on 4th March.
  

After the Board meeting, Mark Barber, from KPMG, joined Adrian, David Bryant, David Houston and myself at Camden Town Hall to discuss potential collaboration or partnership in performance management. We agreed further discussion, of which more anon.