Annual Report, 2006 - 2007

To view the annual report with financial data, Download a copy of the 2006-2007 Annual Report

9 April 2008

This, our fifth year of operation, was one of consolidation. We are no longer trailblazing pioneers. Rather, we are building the long-term infrastructure that will enable us to serve a growing and ever more diverse community of experts.

During 2007 the Institute welcomed over 750 new members and enjoyed 400 renewals. Thus, our organization now has over 1500 members in 82 countries. Although we are a virtual organization we have also had an opportunity to personally meet many of our members at the many conferences and workshops we held or sponsored around the globe.

In 2007 we also saw the development of rich online communities. Following the greatly strengthened online presence provided by our new English-language website, our Spanish and German sites have undergone major revisions and will go live in early 2008. Other languages will also be updated and upgraded during the early months of 2008. And throughout the year, IAs gathered on our island in Second Life to share presentations and engage with one another in avatar form.

In November, we announced we were seeking an Executive Director. Not only is this a practical step that will enable us to better manage our back-office activities, assist with events, and work with our two current staffers, this also marks our coming of age as an organization. Thank you for being part of it all! We plan to introduce our new Executive Director to our membership at the Annual Meeting, scheduled for Sunday, April 13, 2008 at the IA Summit in Miami, Florida.

Scope of this report

Formerly, the Annual Report covered the period from September 1 until August 31, which coincided with the Board terms. As of this report, our annual report is now in sync with our fiscal and calendar year January to December.

ORGANIZATION

Board

Board elections were held in September 2007. Samantha Starmer and Peter Merholz stepped down as Directors to join our Advisory Board. Stacy Surla in Washington, DC was elected to a second term and was joined by two other well-known figures in our community, Jorge Arango in Panama City and Peter Boersma in Amsterdam. They join Donna Maurer, Sarah Rice, Christian Crumlish, and Eric Reiss, who are currently serving the second year of their two-year terms. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank Samantha and Peter for their dedication and profound contributions these past two years.

The new Board reelected Eric Reiss as president and chose Stacy Surla as secretary and Donna Maurer as treasurer.

Four other areas of responsibility were also delegated: Christian Crumlish, IT/Web Operations Sarah Rice, Marketing/Communications Peter Boersma, Membership/Local groups Jorge Arango, Events

It is important to note that these areas of responsibility are not new initiatives. Rather, they are simply a way for us to channel information and provide faster action on key operational issues.

Staff

The Institute currently has two part-time staffers. Noreen Whysel has been our Operations Manager since September 2005 and Melissa Weaver has served as Volunteer/Membership Coordinator since July 2006. It is important to note that in addition to their myriad "official" duties, both of these talented women have also devoted many unpaid hours to making the IDEA conference a practical reality and to keeping many other initiatives running smoothly. The fact that we are as robust an organization as we are is due in no small part to their exceptional efforts.

In August 2007 the Board decided the time had come to hire a part time Executive Director. A budget for this position was presented to our Advisory Board and approved back in July. Out of deference to the incoming Board, the final decision was first made in October 2007 and the official announcement was made in November. Donna Maurer, Samantha Starmer, and Eric Reiss were appointed to the selection committee.

The new Executive Director is expected to join us during the spring of 2008.

Advisors

In October, the Board extended invitations to a new group of Advisors, who will serve from October 2007 until September 2008:

Advisors 2006-2007

Jorge Arango
Liz Danzico
Jason Hobbs
Jim Kalbach
Erin Malone
Harry Max
Jess McMullin
Lou Rosenfeld
Don Turnbull
Dave Weinberger

Advisors 2007-2008

Liz Danzico
Andrew Hinton
Jason Hobbs
Carolina Leslie
Peter Merholz
Dorelle Rabinowitz
Leisa Reichelt
Samantha Starmer
Lou Rosenfeld
Don Turnbull
Dave Weinberger

We would like to express our gratitude for the commitment and enthusiasm demonstrated by all of our Advisors - past and present. A huge thank you for your ongoing support and wise counsel!

Members

The Institute continues to grow at a healthy rate, although with slightly less momentum than in earlier years. This is only natural as we "saturate" our traditional market. Today, we face two key challenges:

  • To reduce our attrition rate
  • To communicate our value proposition to a wider audience

To address the first point, our attrition rate is clearly improving. Although we continue to improve our communication with our members, we have also experienced technical hurdles that have clearly made membership renewal difficult. As a result, we have revamped our membership system, introduced a simplified dues schedule, installed a new software platform, and made it easier to pay by credit card.

Many of these improvements were first carried out late in the year, so we expect to first see improvements in attrition rates during early 2008. Moreover, we appear to have successfully weeded out members who had falsely registered as students or from hardship areas. Even though we will continue to strive for membership growth, we are particularly interested in achieving membership stability.

To the second point, we have worked closely with two consultants during 2007. Laurie Durnell from The Grove Consultants International helped us focus our message and improve our communications through our business plan. Perry Hewitt of Colechurch Consulting assisted with several key PR efforts.

Partnerships and Sponsorships

As our organization gains momentum, it's natural that we seek to formalize partnerships with allied institutions and professional groups. Moreover, in 2007 the first corporate sponsors have approached us, which served to highlight the need for policy and procedure in this area.

In Q4 of 2006 Board member Sarah Rice had set out to map our current relationships and propose a structure for dealing with new types of partnerships. These were put into effect in early 2007. Our partners fall into three distinct categories:

  • Professional organizations
  • Event organizers
  • Corporate sponsors

Professional Partners include organizations that help the Institute advance its mission. Partnerships may include agreements to exchange resources, interoperate technically, and act together to form a community of people and ideas. Current partners include:

  • American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T)
  • Boxes and Arrows
  • CMSWatch
  • UXnet
  • IA Wiki
  • Interaction Design Association (IxDA)
  • University of Baltimore
  • Web Indexing Special Interest Group of the American Society of Indexers

Event Partners include groups who arrange conferences and events focused on IA or closely related to IA interests. To this type of partner the IA Institute provides two kinds of support:

  • Online promotion in which the Institute lends its logo to the event organizers and promotes the event on the IAI website and newsletter. In return, IAI members receive a registration discount and other benefits.
  • Financial support for an event, either by paying for a specific activity (e.g. a speaker's fee) or an unrestricted donation. In return, IAI members are entitled to a registration discount and other benefits.

Corporate Sponsors are commercial entities who provide economic or technical support to the Institute in exchange for promotion on our website and in our newsletter.

In early 2007 Intuitect engaged in a two-year arrangement as a corporate sponsor. We evaluated their product and support them in developing a tool that squarely serves IAs in creating site maps and wireframes. Their website can be found at www.intuitect.com. Our sincere thanks to Jason T. Williams and Fred Leise for making this happen.

The Institute would also like to thank Avenue A | Razorfish for its sponsorship at IDEA2007 in NYC. They threw an awesome bash that created a fun and low-key environment for conference attendees and other locals to meet and converse. It was a great party and we appreciate the time that Mary-Lynne Williams and Avenue A | Razorfish put into this fine event.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Business plan

The Institute has worked for over two years on creating a viable business plan. Initially under the supervision of Advisor Harry Max, in February 2007, Sarah A. Rice recruited a facilitator to help us coordinate our efforts and set meaningful performance goals.

This work was continued throughout the summer of 2007 and is indeed, our business plan represents an ongoing effort by all of the Board members. In brief terms, though, we have identified eight key focus areas for the next two years:

  1. Provide a stellar web presence that is influential and represents our expertise in this arena
  2. Build a strong, stable "back office" that enables a consistent handoff from each Board to the next, supports excellent member communication and volunteer coordination, and allows the Board to be more strategic and less tactical and operational
  3. Increase the membership base and improve member retention
  4. Increase activity on all continents
  5. Achieve more frequent, accurate, and influential media coverage of IA and the IA Institute
  6. Provide services and products that enable members to acquire outstanding IA skills, validate their practices and knowledge, and achieve a high level of confidence that they're doing good work
  7. Support IAs becoming leaders within organizations (e.g. as CTO, CIO, or CEO); clarify and promote career paths to leadership 8. Gain the ear of the business community, and be viewed by business leaders as thought leaders in the User Experience domain

IT

After several years in the architecture, design, and development process, the Institute unveiled a revamped website at the IA Summit in Las Vegas in March of 2007. The members in attendance at our annual meeting gave the new design a standing ovation.

The site redesign process continues as the Institute's volunteers roll the new design out across multiple language versions of the site and continue to squash bugs and revise some of the deeper pages and sections of the site. An ongoing review process now anticipates incremental upgrades to the site rather than boil-the-ocean redesign initiatives.

The Institute migrated its membership database and registration system from a slimfeatured application called aMember to a more full-featured service called Memberclicks in May of 2007. This enabled us to automate a number of processes that membership coordinator Melissa Weaver had been handling manually up to that point (including welcoming new members, verifying their paid status, and sending out renewal notices).

Memberclicks provides partial integration with the look and feel of the primary site, but its interface is, frankly, awkward, its feature set not fully adequate to our ongoing needs, and its level of customer service insufficient. Thus we expect to seek a further upgrade to a new solution in the coming year. We migrated to Memberclicks aware that it wasn't perfect because the need for the improvements it does offer was so acute.

Another consequence of the Memberclicks migration is that we made our hand-rolled job board visible to the public. This is a decision we are now revisiting as we explore more robust, members-only job board solutions.

The Institute began a process of upgrading IA Slash to a newer version of Drupal and relaunching it with an updated mission, but this effort has currently been moved to the backburner while a thorough review of IA Tools (the site's library and other resources) is pending.

EVENTS

Sponsorships

The IA Institutes sponsorship policy covers two types of activities:

  • Event Promotion includes online promotion in which the Institute lends its logo to the event organizers and promotes the event on the IAI website. In return, IAI members receive a registration discount.
  • Sponsorship includes a budget request to sponsor an event, either by paying for a specific activity (e.g. a speaker's fee) or a general economic donation. Again, IAI members are entitled to a registration discount.

In early 2007, Intuitect engaged in a two-year arrangement as a corporate sponsor. We evaluated their product and support them in developing a tool that squarely supports IAs in creating site maps and wireframes. Their website can be found at www.intuitect.com. Our sincere thanks to Jason T. Williams and Fred Leise for making this happen.

The Institute would also like to thank Avenue A | Razorfish for its sponsorship at IDEA2007 in NYC. They threw an awesome bash that created a fun and low-key environment for conference attendees and other locals to meet and converse. It was a great party and we appreciate all the time that Mary-Lynne Williams and Avenue A | Razorfish put into this fine event.

Sponsored Events

The IA Summit As always, the Institute was highly visible at the IA Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada in March, 2007, the premier gathering place for information architects. Once again, the Institute had a permanent table set up in the foyer, but as opposed to previous years, our staffers Noreen Whysel and Melissa Weaver manned the table throughout the conference, Here, conference attendees could learn about the IAI and our related activities. For example, postcards, created by out Progress Grant Award recipient, Jason Hobbs, from his studies of internet cafes in South Africa, were popular takeaways.

Regional IA Events

During 2007, the IAI sponsored or partnered with a variety of regional IA-related events including:

  • 1o Encontro Brasileiro de AI, the first Brazilian IA conference, held in São Paolo from 19-20 October 2007.
  • InfoCamp, Pacific Northwest Conference, held in Seattle from 13-14 October 2007.
  • Euro IA the third European IA Conference, held in Barcelona from 21-22 September 2007. 9
  • IA Konferenz, the second German IA Conference, held in Stuttgart from 9-10 November 2007.
  • Italian IA Summit, the second Italian IA gathering, held in Trento from 16-17 November 2007.

Once again, the IAI also contributed a mentoring booth, which is well on its way to becoming a permanent fixture at these events.

The IAI provides financial sponsorship of these events, as well as strategic and marketing assistance. However, they would not be possible without the leadership and hard work of local IA professionals and students. We thank them all, and look forward to helping them develop their local communities and other IA-related initiatives during 2008.

IAI Events

IA Summit Precon We were pleased with the turnout and popularity of this years Summit Pre-Conference Workshop. We received positive feedback from many attendees regarding both our topic, Designing with Structured Data, and our workshop leaders: Karen Loasby, Margaret Hanley, John Allsopp, and Thomas Vander Wal. We would also like to thank those who worked hard to make sure this was a quality event, including Ray Baldwin, Donna Maurer, Melissa Weaver, and others.

The workshop continued after the conference as a discussion list in User Experience (UX) Management moderated by Margaret Hanley. Ms. Hanley also held several "listen and learn" conference calls on Skype on the topic of peer coaching for UX managers.

The IDEA Conference
The second annual IDEA conference was held in New York City on October 4-5, chaired by former IAI president and board member Peter Merholz. With over 100 attendees, IDEA2007 was a smashing success. This year, we met at Parson's School of Design. Our outstanding line-up of speakers challenged us to think beyond the web and beyond the page, to see how we can practice information architecture in a variety of complex information spaces, from yellow taxi cabs and 311 service in NYC to wayfinding in urban hospitals.

On October 3, Maya Design arranged an informative pre-conference workshop on gathering, organizing, and diagramming domain knowledge for IA's and design practitioners. The workshop was sold out and there was a lot of healthy exchange of experience during the interactive time together. We want to thank Maya for this inspiring session.

We also send a hearty thank-you to everyone who helped to make the IDEA2007 conference itself the success that it was - speakers, attendees, and especially Peter and our volunteers for the many hours of work that went into this event. Stay tuned for details regarding IDEA2008, October 6-8 in Chicago, IL. We hope to see you there!

In addition, IAI also held several Summit reduxes in SecondLife following the IA Summit highlighting workshops and presentations for those unable to attend conference.

IAI Event Promotions

IAI partnered with these events to offer discounts to IAI members:

  • Information Architecture & Search Master Class led by Peter Morville held in Sydney from 8-9 March 2007.
  • Enterprise Search Summit held in New York City from 15-16 May 2007.
  • Enterprise Information Architecture & Usability Workshops led by Lou Rosenfeld & Steve Krug's Usability Workshop 31 May - 1 June 2007.
  • Enterprise Content Management Masterclass led by Dr. Rod Dilnutt held in Bangkok, Thailand 21-22 June 2007.
  • OZ-IA, the second Australian IA Conference, held in Sydney from 22-23 September 2007.
  • DocTrain East 2007 held in Lowell, MA, USA from 16-20 October 2007.
  • CanUX 2007 held in Banff, Alberta, Canada from 25-27 November 2007.
  • Online Information Conference held in London from 4-6 December 2007.

INITIATIVES

Mentoring

Mentoring is one of our key offerings and one of the main ways in which the Institute can differentiate itself in the UX arena. In 2007, we received 70 mentoring applications from prospective protégés and increased our mentor roster to 40.

Nevertheless, we continue to receive more public complaints than praise for this service. We have addressed this issue by changing some of the procedures by which we register and match participants, and by adding more programs for various levels of mentoring. We developed a new, online registration survey which provides data fields that allow us to more carefully review interests and needs. Initially, the registration change made it much easier for participants to learn about and register for the program, resulting in a significant backlog of protégé applicants. We have edited our literature to highlight the self-selecting nature of the program, encouraging protégés to contact prospective mentors on their own, while assisting with introductions where needed. Additional volunteers are needed to ensure timely response to all applicants; however, many protégés have expressed to us their continued gratitude and patience.

In 2007, we recruited Chris Chandler to lead the Mentoring program, resulting in new additions to the programs offerings for mid- to senior level professionals. This includes the UX-Management list, an email discussion list for management level IAs, which has grown to more than 250 members and includes a regular peer-to-peer mentoring call. Piloted by Mags Hanley, the UX-Management list has held three successful and wellattended Skype meetings during the summer. We hope to continue these programs into 2008.

Through aggressive recruiting of new mentors and a more responsive mechanism for pairing mentors with protégés, we will ensure that our mentoring program becomes everything it should be.

Translations

The Translation of Information Architecture initiative (TIA) represents our effort to promote IA internationally by translating key IA documents and our website to several major languages. In 2007 Board members identified information architecture articles in the Persian language, Farsi, providing an example of the global reach already attained by the field. In addition, volunteers stepped forward to oversee translations in Arabic, Bulgarian, Hebrew, and Hungarian.

Wolf Nöding, who headed the German web-concept team, led our Translations initiative through 2007. Currently, we have active translations projects in six languages: Danish, Dutch, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Spanish. We have passive projects in three languages: French, Japanese, and Polish, plus two new articles in Bulgarian. The French effort is currently in need of a leader. Bruce Esrig offered to build teams for Hebrew and Arabic translations as well.

Much of the infrastructure for this work is provided by the website. Operations Manager, Noreen Whysel, prepared the old language sites with language and links updated to the new formats and began creating test sites and news and calendar scripts. These test sites are located in the website "Sandbox" site. Volunteers have been recruited and are utilizing Basecamp for project management. We have mobilized teams of translators in eight languages and technical volunteers to prepare the language sites for migration to the updated design.

At year's end, the Spanish and Italian sites were near completion, and work had begun on the Danish and Dutch sites. Our goal is to have most of our current language sites migrated in time for the IA Summit in April 2008.

Local Groups
The redesigned IAI website now features our Global Initiatives front and center, under "Practicing IA." The Local Groups content plays a significant role in that section. The Geolocate IAs tool, featured on the IA Network page, clearly identifies all 77 Local Group contacts.

Still, there is much to be done. Our support for Local Groups is still growing and we are developing a clear policy on what we want to do for these groups. Board member Peter Boersma, himself a long-time Local Group leader, has become the Institute's Local Groups initiative leader. During 2008 he will present provide the Board with a masterplan that identifies opportunities for programs and initiatives that support Local Groups.

Second Life
Second Life is a popular online, shared 3-D virtual environment. Beyond its appeal as a platform for socializing and game-playing, Second Life is used for collaboration, modeling and simulation, distance learning, service delivery, and e-commerce. In other words, it's a complex information space with important IA challenges.

The IAI's Second Life initiative seeks to explore and model good IA practices in virtual environments. It also provides the IA Institute and its partner organizations with a virtual presence for promotion and membership development. Finally, the IAI is using Second Life as a platform for IA-related workshops, events, and collaboration.

Info Architecture island, an IAI-owned virtual property, was launched in March 2007 (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Info%20Architecture/35/96/23). Promotion of the IAI commenced immediately as Board sponsor Stacy Surla and the original Initiative Lead Andrew Hinton were interviewed on a Rabble Radio program entitled "The New Architects of Information."

In April, the IAI hosted a simultaneous Real Life/Second Life panel at the IA Summit. A series of popular presentations from the 2007 IA Summit were later reprised on Info Architecture island to sizable audiences, featuring speakers Peter Morville, Andrew Hinton, Marianne Sweeny, Sam Ladner, Matthew Milan, and a guest appearance by ASIS&T Executive Director Dick Hill. In May, the IAI was invited by TechSoup.org to join 13 Nonprofits in Second Life, and we subsequently opened a satellite office in the Nonprofit Commons.

Through our virtual presence the IAI has recruited many new members - including current Initiative Leader Naomi Malone and has begun the conversation about IA and serious games. In 2008, the IAI will seek to expand this engagement. One project involves simulcasting several sessions from the 2008 IA Summit. We will also continue to host reduxes of IA conference events from around the world in Second Life.

Annual Salary Survey

Our Salary Survey, started back in 2003, has become an annual event, generating much interest both inside and outside our community. One of the more interesting facts revealed in our 2007 survey was that IAs now rank among the most highly paid web professionals. In fact, the "over USD 150,000" salary range represented over 5% of our 575 respondents with the mean average salary now at approximately USD 86,000. Additionally, this year’s survey also included a question on gender, which shows that our field is almost evenly split between women and men. And there's no glass ceiling here female IAs now appear to earn slightly more than their male counterparts!

You can find the full survey at: http://iainstitute.org/en/learn/research/salary_survey_2007.php

IA Tools and Library

With the launch of the new website design at the IA Summit in March, we began planning improvements to our tools and library databases. Several new resources were added to the library including two documents authored by the IAI. A PDF document by Jason Hobbs entitled "Am I an IA?" and the Institute flyer "What is IA?" seek to answer questions that professionals and others may have about how information architecture fits into the greater world of information services and how an individual may fit that role. We also added Wolf Noeding's "IA Networking Guide," explaining how IAI members can utilize IA Institute resources to make connections and further collaborate within the field of information architecture. New items added to the Tools database included Todd Warfel's Task Analysis Grid.

In addition, we have expanded the internationalization of our library by adding Bulgarian translations of two articles by Peter Morville, submitted by Masha Ioveva. We hope to make 2008 a year for further internationalization as we add Polish, Russian, and, possibly Arabic and Hebrew, to our list of article translations.

On the technical side, our website host upgraded to a new version of PHP, but did not announce the upgrade to our site administrators. We did not anticipate the effect this would have on our library. As a result, several of our library scripts broke down, including resource filters, search and languages filters. We have begun to make corrections to these errors. Operations Manager Noreen Whysel, and volunteer Andrea Resmini, who worked on the original design of the library content management system, cleaned up some of the broken scripts. Another volunteer was tasked with auditing the library for broken links. More work was required as of year end 2007, including fixing the Search function. We have prioritized these corrections and continued improvements for 2008.

Job Board

The Job Board continues to be an important service of the Institute. During the year 818 positions, including 629 full time and 189 contract jobs, were posted. This represents an increase of 12% over 2006 totals.

In 2007 the Board approved opening the job board to the public to address the constraint of an outdated member login system. This was a difficult decision, since the Job Board has always been an exclusive benefit to members and represented a potential reason for joining the IA Institute. The Institute is working on finding alternative solutions, which may well involve a change in the membership system and/or changes to the Job Board engine itself.

In mid-2007 the Job Board experienced difficulties with a PHP upgrade which required significant coding work to correct. With the help of volunteer Austin Govella, these and other improvements to the job board allowed us to provide better service to our members.

Progress Grants

In October 2007 the Progress Grants Committee consisted of Samantha Starmer and Eric Reiss (chair) as Board representatives, Don Turnbull as our Advisory Board representative, and Matthew Milan and Jason Hobbs representing previous grant recipients. Lori Baker and Karl Fast rounded out the committee. On October 15 a USD 1000 grant was awarded to Dr. Mark Resnick of Florida International University, who will be studying the effect of scent on user recall.

Previous grant recipients Jason Hobbs and Celeste Lyn Paul both presented at the IA Summit in Las Vegas, NV in March. Their research was extremely well received - we offer our heartfelt congratulations on their fine work.

Educational initiatives

The Board has investigated three new educational initiatives. First, we have enlisted the aid of Don Turnbull of the University of Texas to help us create a peer-reviewed journal. Second, Tom Froehlich of Kent State University has agreed to help the Institute create a map of the current educational opportunities and to compare curricula. Finally, former Board member Samantha Bailey will be helping us create an online forum in which students can showcase their IA portfolios.

Although all three of these ventures were still in the planning stages as of 31 December 2007, it is our fervent hope that 2008 will show marked progress in all these important areas.

COMMUNICATION

Members Discussion List

The Members Discussion List continues to be a key medium for communication, allowing members to ask questions and engage in sober dialog with fellow IAs. Although not as trafficked as several other IA and UX lists, we are pleased with the quality of the content of the IAI Members list. During 2007 there were over 1100 subscribers and almost 1900 posts.

The Institute also continues to operate several meta-lists focused on individual initiatives and interests. These supplement the more administrative communications taking place on Basecamp.

Monthly Newsletter

Our monthly newsletter is edited by Melissa Weaver and reaches over 2700 readers worldwide. The list gains on average 100 subscribers each month.

In November 2006 the Board introduced a new newsletter feature. Each month, a member of the Board writes a short introduction, highlighting the Institute's recent activities. The aim is not to editorialize, but to give members a first-hand view of what the Institute is up to. This feature appeared in every issue throughout 2007 and has proven to be an exceptionally successful communications tool.

Fortune Magazine

In October Eric Reiss, representing the IA Institute, and Jordan Hyman, representing Fortune Special Projects at Time-Warner Inc., signed a contract at Time-Warner corporate headquarters in New York in which we agreed to help put together a special advertising section on information architecture for the January 21, 2008 North American issue of Fortune. Perry Hewitt of Colechurch Consulting, who has also provided business guidance for us this past year, was charged with selling the advertising slots.

The section went to final editing in mid-December, although we were only able to sell a single ad to the IAKUM program at Kent State University. Our sincere thanks to Perry and our friends at Kent State for helping us achieve our goal of a prominent mention of IA in a major business magazine, which we described in last year's Annual Report.

Clearly, IA is not yet a mainstream business term, but the mere fact that we were invited to participate in this project suggests we have come a long way these past few years.

The PDF of the section can be downloaded here: http://iainstitute.org/documents/learn/IA_Insert_Fortune_2008Jan21.pdf

FINANCIAL REPORT

The Institute continues to maintain a strong financial position. As of 31 December 2007 the Institute had cash assets of USD 81,579. This reflects a net annual loss of USD 4,321.

Total income for the year was USD 104,123. Membership fees continue to be our primary source of income, at USD 46,650. Other income came from sponsorships (USD 3,500) and the IA Summit pre-conference seminar and IDEA conference (USD 21,280).

The Institute's primary expense was USD 43,642 for staff, our operations manager and membership coordinator. Other expenses were USD 11,128 for pre-conference seminar and event expenses, USD 7,862 for professional fees (including accounting, legal fees, and facilitation to develop our business plan), USD 16,247 for staff travel (primarily for events), USD 5,216 for conference call fees, and USD 5,613 for IT infrastructure.

A detailed Profit & Loss statement and Balance Sheet are attached in Appendix 1 of this report.

THANK YOU

Many individuals have helped the Institute this year, and this Report cannot adequately recognize all those who contributed to our success. We are grateful to the many volunteers who continue to build the Institute and wish to thank everyone who has contributed to our ongoing success.

Sincerely,

The IAI 2007-08 Board of Directors
March 24, 2008

Eric Reiss, President
Stacy Surla, Secretary
Donna Maurer, Treasurer
Jorge Arango
Peter Boersma
Christian Crumlish
Sarah A. Rice


Download the Report

To view the annual report with financial data, Download a copy of the 2006-2007 Annual Report

This page was last modified on April 11, 2008 03:12 AM.