A year ago at the festival, and throughout this past year, we have asked you for your input on some particular issues confronting the IJA. Here is what we have done in the last year on those issues:
Life Membership - We acknowledged the commitment we made to Life Members and welcomed them back. We are working on opening the program to new Life members.
Family Membership - We redefined Family Membership in a way that we feel honors IJA families and promotes juggling.
Web Site - We have redone our web site, packed it with information, and made it a better place to trade opinions and suggestions, to talk to other jugglers, and to get up-to-date information on juggling events and on the IJA.
Increasing Membership - We have stopped the membership decline and have begun to take on new members, especially through our new Youth Membership and our new Introductory Offer. A new membership brochure is here with a contest to kick off the membership drive.
Fundraising - The Fundraising Committee has developed several new ways to raise money, and is now determining how best to introduce and operate a system for tracking donations and donors accurately. Our donation program has started with a request for donations from our Life Members. All members will receive a donation request letter in the mail soon.
Magazine - We are now in negotiations to renew our contract for JUGGLE magazine. The cost of JUGGLE is a large portion of our expenses. At this time the present number of members with our present membership fees are not covering the cost. As we have been saying, we need to raise membership and/or raise fees, or find other ways to pay for the publication, if we want to keep the number of issues we have at the quality we have. We have been looking at various options, including requesting outside bids to compare prices, considering moving the Insider into JUGGLE magazine to save cost, going to less issues per year, or going to less pages.
Festival - We have made it a long-term goal to make the festival accessible to all of our members and to anyone interested in juggling. To get help in finding sites, we created and published on our web site a list of what we look for in picking sites. We have also taken a closer look at our costs, have reevaluated much of the festival budget, and have started to examine how our current system evolved. We continue to look for new ways to accomplish our goals.
World Juggling Day - WJD is back in full swing, with a great web site and more prizes.
Sponsorship - We've had many discussions about this topic, including the hazards and benefits and where we have had problems before. We are still open to sponsorship, but have established no program or guidelines other than for World Juggling Day.
Financial Health - Our Finance Committee is very busy creating budgets, clarifying financial statements and getting them to the membership, and looking at ways to cut costs and to bring in money from new sources. (See financial statement.)
Going forward, we continue to welcome your input.