George Thurman

As anyone knows that attended the HOA annual meeting in July, we listed three major objectives for this term.  We have completed the first quarter of this board's term and I wanted to give the members a report against objectives:

1. Membership Information System: The MIS taskforce has completed their research and recommendation for action to enhance our MIS data base and reduce costs.  The taskforce headed up by Carl Deane, HOA VP, included members from the BC Communication Committee, the chapel and the HOA as well as a technical advisor. 

The task force wanted to see if there was common ground for shared data base information and found there may be some, but the HOA has far greater need for data base manipulation and usage than any other organization in BC.  The usage of the MIS needed to provide capability for E-blast, On-line payment of dues, tickets to events, telephone directory information, surveys, etc.

After considerable research and discussion meetings the taskforce made its recommendation.  There were two phases to the discussions.  First they discussed who the vendor should be.  After hearing presentations from Memberclicks (who has a proprietary software) and 3x400 using Joomla (an open architecture software).  While both of the final vendors considered were found to encompass all of the features, and were competitively priced, it was the taskforce's recommendation to go with 3x400 with the revised software program.

The next phase was whether to hire our own administrator to run the program or to outsource this to the provider.  After long debates the overriding recommendation was to outsource.  The is based on the fact that a single person would always have to be available (365 days a year) for emergency E blasts and that is just not practicable.  Additionally, there is the concern of retraining replacements, every time there is a turnover.

In conclusion, the new MIS program can save as little as $6,000 per year and much more depending on usage.  Just as important however, is the great reduction of manpower required to manually receive payments, mail out surveys, etc.

We will now move forward to contract with the vendor and that will take some time as well to finalize all the negotiation points, but we do expect this to move along quickly.

I would personally like to thank all the participants who contributed their time and efforts in helping the HOA Taskforce with the MIS program, but special thanks goes out to Paul Goldstein for his invaluable technical advice and research; Dick Hammill for his many hours and efforts in making sure we had everyone's input and no usage was left unturned; and to Carl Deane who trudged through the many deviations of what the program needed to be and came through with solid recommendation.

2.  Communication: The second objective of the HOA this year is the complete review of mission, purpose and future of Smoke Signals^TM and SSOL.  This objectives comes from the many members who have told us what they would like to see included in Smoke Signals or what they believe the mission of Smoke Signals should be or not be.  Some want more hard line reporting, while others want to keep it as a community newspaper focusing only events, life in Big Canoe and other interests. 

The HOA board will address this objective in their planning meeting on October 31.  There will be focus groups and a survey to members asking for input to help the staff provide the news and information our members and advertisers want.  The first priority will be to establish and mission statement for Smoke Signals.  This will help to produce guidelines as to what type of information and how it is handled.

For example, Smoke Signals in published only once a month.  By the time some news is reported it is 4-7 weeks old.  So the question is how do we get out more current news and what news do the members want to receive.

Common Portal: The objective was the support and usage of the common portal for on-line information.  I am pleased to report that everything is now up and running and HOA is proud to support this wonderful tool produced by the BC Communication Committee.  Now we can sit down with our morning coffee at our computer and only have to go to one web site to start getting  the news we want.  If you have not tried this, go to www.bigcanoetoday.com and take a look.  Only one site to remember and I can review everything that is going on in Big Canoe.

Have a wonderful and safe Thanksgiving and while we are giving thanks......let's not forget to give thanks that we live in a wonderful place where so many wonderful people give of their time and reach out to help others.