The SIGCHI budget for dummies

Abstract

As SIGCHI's new vice chair for finance, I'd like to use this opportunity to share what I've learned about how our budget works and what's happening with it this year. We are currently planning our fiscal year 2003 budget, which begins on July 1, 2003, and it is shown here. SIGCHI (the organization) has a variety of functions, one of which is to run our annual CHI conference. Our organization budget, excluding the conference, is about $300K per year. Your dues are about $200K, and income from other subscriptions, sales, and interest add another $100K. But, while our annual operational budget is about $300K, we sponsor a $2500K event every year (the CHI conference). So even a small, 10 or 20% perturbation in the CHI conference finances could wipe out its parent organization (SIGCHI). Because of this, we maintain a substantial insurance fund. ACM requires us to maintain about $700K in it, but we have reached about twice that amount recently. Until the last year or so, this fund had been growing steadily, as each year's CHI conference added part of its surplus to the fund. This year, however, attendance was down considerably and it looks like the conference will lose a significant amount of money. Without our insurance fund, a loss like that could have bankrupted us, but we can draw on the fund to cover it. In the past, maintaining this fund sometimes seemed unnecessarily conservative, but now it suddenly seems like a very good idea! Why did the conference lose money? Attendance was down considerably from recent years, most likely due to the recession in the technology world. Why couldn't we do anything about it? Conference planning is very asymmetrical with respect to income and expenses. You must commit to most of your expenses years in advance, but you don't know your income (attendance) until a few weeks before the conference. For example, convention centers are typically booked 5 years in advance; contracts for professional services must be signed before the work begins, often a year or two ahead for CHI. For CHI 2002, at the time we were planning these things a couple of years ago, the prospects looked very bright; by the time we saw the downturn, many of our expenses were already contracted. Food is one of the only expense items that can be altered at the last minute, once you know the actual …