Finance Committee/Minutes/2024-06-05

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

Minutes of the Finance Committee held on 05 June 2024.

Administrative Matters

Present

  • Craig Allan, OSMF Board,
  • Guillaume Rischard, OSMF Board,
  • Harrison Devine, Advisor,
  • Mikel Maron, Advisory Board
  • Roland Olbricht, OSMF Board,

Apologies

  • None

Approval of Minutes

The minutes of 22 May 2024 were approved after one amendment by Guillaume.

Fundraising Sub Committee

Fundraising Advisors

  • Identify and ask OSM-US representative: Harrison will liaise with his OSM-US Board members with a view to him taking this post. Issue remains open.
  • Identify and ask HOT representative: Mikel will contact the HOT team and see if there is a person who can take on the work. Issue remains open.
  • Delete Tyler Radford from the list of Strategic Advisors: Agreed. Craig to action. Done. Issue closed.
  • Discussion on including OSM-FR and FOSSGIS in Fundraising discussions. Craig to approach OSM-FR and Roland to approach FOSSGIS. Some concern that this duplicates work in the Advisory Board. New issue opened.

Benevity

Craig advises that the application is complete with the necessary document uploaded. A glitch on their website is stopping final submission. They are working on resolving it. Content of our page on Benevity to be written after we are approved. Issue remains open.

Open Technology Fund Funding Application.

Roland advises that there is no update on the progress of our application. Issue remains open.

Meta

Roland: Issue remains open.

Grants and Foundations

Write our policy and guidelines for fundraising from grants and foundations: Agreed. Assigned to Craig. Update next meeting. Issue is open.

Discussion on the typical low success rate per application. More success can come if we work at building relationships and connections with a small selection of philanthropic organisations. Communications are very important.

HOT support for fundraising

As above. Mikel will contact HOT. Merging this issue with appointing Fundraising advisors. Issue closed.

Fundraising Plan

Draft fundraising plan: Located at Plan. Assigned to Craig. Further comments are welcome. The plan is being improved. Issue is open.

Using CiviCRM

Capturing Corporates to CiviCRM: Status has not changed. Planning document needed. Issue remains unassigned and open.

Craig is working on learning CiviCRM: Guillaume upgraded Craig to Administrator. Craig's learning continues. Issue stays open.

20th Birthday Events

Communications is leading on building a 20th birthday website. There will be a fundraising component to the communications and an opportunity to follow up with our funders. Mikel to provide updates. Fundraising action as yet not planned. New issue created.

Accounting Sub-Committee

Responsiveness of the Monthly Reports

We are still chasing the target of a process that ensures that we routinely see the previous month's accounts at the Board end of month public meeting. Harrison is doing good work on this project. The issue remains open.

Funds Expected but not yet received

After discussion we decided that funds we don't have in the bank we will not show on the books. But where do we record expected income? Once we have a planning budget we can show "expected income" with "likelihood %" on a donor by donor basis as part of our fundraising analysis. We will also plan our expenditure and show our planned 'burn rate'. This links tightly to the Strategic Plan. While we are not yet implementing planning the budget, we will keep planning for income and expenditure on the agenda. Issue stays open.

Reflecting Committed funds

Funds allocated to a project must be taken into account in planning expenditure and must be deducted from the pool on the day the contract is signed. Those funds are committed and are no longer available for reallocation. Commitments are part of the planning budget. New issue opened.

Invoices expected but not received

Because slow expenditure is not a critical problem, we tend to to worry about it. However donors do want to see spending reflected as a controlled steady flow. Some of our contractors are slow to submit invoices on a monthly basis. This results in lagging expenditure records and sudden demands for payment of large sums. Lumpy invoicing makes projecting our expenditure into the future very difficult and raises a number of knock-on issues. To tell the financial story appropriately we should be trying to get it to be relevant on a monthly basis. We need to get that message to the Working Groups and remedy the problem. Some expenditure, like microgrants, will be happening late in the year - as long as we can predict that expenditure it is acceptable. . We may need to include some invoicing requirements in our contracts. This is a new open issue.

Report to the Advisory Board

Mikel reports no specific suggestions from providing the monthly report to the Advisory Board. However we will keep upgrading our reporting formats. Fine tuning the reports to the Advisory Board will stay on the agenda. Issue stays open.

AOB

None

Next Meeting

12 June 2024, 20:00UTC, Venue: Finance Meeting Room

ENDS

Minutes prepared by Craig Allan 10 June 2024

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