Action Items for September

• Member recognition project.
• Officer candidate petition updated.
• Constitution Review board formed.
• Work on membership survey continues.
• National Convention vendor follow-up complete.
• Looking into automatic membership renewals via credit card.
• Nationals presence at Modelpalooza.
• The board voted to pay our CMS consultant an additional $250 bonus and will see if he is willing to serve on an hourly basis as needed for tech support.
• Ron has okayed increasing our website hosting plan as suggested by Webmaster Eric.

Officer/Staff Reports

Ron Bell, President

• I continued work on the membership recognition project. I've figured out how to identify years of continuous membership from our database. I've asked a graphic artist friend of mine if he could come up with a design for a pin to be awarded. He's the guy that did the last two logos for the Columbus, Ohio shows, so his work is pretty well known and received. I've also asked Marie to check with our new swag vendor to see if he does pins.
• Marie and I updated the petition officer candidates have to fill out to be a candidate for national office. It will be made available via the web site and through the national office soon.
• The Constitution Review Board has been formed (Chuck Davenport, Mike Brickman, Dick Christ, Dick Montgomery, Fred Horky) and given the constitutional amendment to review. They will report back sometime early next year.
• We're batting around the idea of multi-year renewal of chapter charters. Nothing definite yet, we're in the discussion phase.
• We continue to work on the membership survey. The Eboard suggested some additional questions and I looked over the initial draft. Don Schmitz from our marketing committee will join the next Eboard conference call in November to discuss this further.

David Morrissette, 1st VP

• Following up with all National Convention vendors is complete.
• Planning to change the name of the manufacturers dinner to Reviewer Corps Appreciation Dinner or something like that to eliminate some confusion.
• Following up with 64 late reviews and reviewers.

Mike Van Schoonhoven, 2nd Vice President

• Nothing to report.

Mike Oberholtzer, Treasurer

• We have the 2017 account set up thanks to Dave M. but we are having some trouble with Huntington Bank getting the online services working. I have done a bit more research on alternate nationwide banks that might make things easier, but not enough to make a recommendation yet.
• I have received some additional expenses from the 2016 convention and the convention center rebate check ($10,000 because the hotel minimum was met). I have requested convention revenue transaction details from Peter Maher so I can reconcile the 2016 account.
• My to do list includes:
  1. Work with Webmaster Eric to find a way to offer automatic membership renewals from the web store.
  2. Find an alternate national bank.
  3. Get the ledger account tables set up to work with the accountant's tax approach.
  4. Keep bills current.

Dennis Tennant, Secretary

• The British modeling magazine, Airfix Model World, has informed us that they covered our Nationals in Columbia and are planning to use several photos of member models in their November issue. We have contacted the members in question and have put them in touch with the folks at Airfix so that they can get the correct spelling of names, etc. We look forward to seeing their coverage

John Noack, DLC

• Rechartering process starting in early October. All chapters are encouraged to use the online store option for charter fee payment.
• The contest season is in full swing and we're getting a lot of requests for insurance certificates.

Jim Pearsal, Historian/Publication Dir.

• The Journal will be using selected articles from local newsletters.
  If Chapter newsletter editors would please send a copy of their newsletters to Fred Horky (white64vette@gmail.com), Journal Editor Chris Bucholtz would greatly appreciate it.

Marie Van Schoonhoven, National Office Manager

• I was at the Modelpalooza show in Orlando, FL showing off our new sign and selling what merchandise I had on hand along with accepting new memberships and renewals. Here's a photo of the new banner and our display table:
  

Eric Aitala, Webmaster

• Web Server
  • We're still having occasional issues with the reviews/calendar/voting/forum/gallery web server becoming non-responsive to web requests. A fix applied by the hosting company
    appears to have helped but not fully solved the issue.
  • I believe the cause is the server running near or at its memory limit as shown below.
    
  • I checked with the hosting company and the cost to upgrade to the next level plan are $215.98 per quarter - the current plan is $143.98 per quarter.
• Fix to IPMS Calendar
  • I will be applying a fix to the Calendar system to correctly account for timezones. When depends on when I find a window of time to do so. The site will be offline for a few hours.
• Recurring Membership Billing
  • Recurring / yearly billing for IPMS/USA membership appears to be possible on the new online store. It would be best to create a new membership 'product' that has the yearly billing set up. We need to determine of there are any changes in cost, do we create on for Junior or International memberships, etc.
• IPMS Nationals Site
  • The topic of a Nationals web site managed by the National Office has been a topic of discussion. Looking into solutions that would allow the existence of multiple web sites (the past National, the current National, and the development site for the future National) it appears that running a multisite Wordpress installation may be the best option in terms of set up, creating a site template that could be cloned into the new sites, ease of use by the host chapter(s), etc.
  • Setting up this type of system will require someone familiar with developing sites and building themes in Wordpress which is outside my current skill set.

Submitted by Dennis Tennant, Secretary