Medium Term Planning Session, 11th August 2007

Venue: The Boat House, Aberdour
Present: Alan Russell (AR), Graeme Condie (GC), George Howie (GW), John Mainland (JM), James Proctor (JP), Tam Cunningham (TC) and Tom Phillips (TP)
Apologies: Blair White (BW) and Mike Melville (MM)

After taking “a year off” there was a lot of interest in re-energising the activity of the Trust, so we shifted our focus from the short-term issues which tend to dominate our regular board meetings, and spent a couple of hours developing a timeline for the next year or so.

After a lengthy period without a Trust AGM (due in part to the complexity of the accounts during the Reclaim The Rovers campaign, and in part to the transfer of treasurer duties from Chris to Graeme) the 2005 accounts are ready, and the 2006 accounts are almost complete. So we can expect to have 3 AGMS in the next 12 months! This should get us back on track. We also now have a robust management accounting system, so at our monthly board meetings we can look through the key pieces of information together, rather than just getting a summary of the bank balances – this is a huge step forward for us.

We felt that we need to engage our membership more often. Whenever we’ve held events in the past they’ve been a great success – so let’s have another one. The idea of an open night was suggested, with a more interactive format than we have at our AGMs, so instead of structuring it around a presentation and Q&A session we’ll pick 3 or 4 topics and have an exhibition stand for each one. Each stand will be manned by a couple of Trust board members, and people will be prompted to move around to another stand every 30 minutes or so.

The topics for this event might be things like “Fundraising”, “Community”, “RRFC Governance”, but we should give our members the opportunity to tell us in advance what they would like to come and talk about. The purpose of this event will be to encourage our members to help set the direction of the Trust, and to agree actions that will move us in this direction. We will report our progress back to them regularly.

We also talked about running another survey of the wider fanbase. We have a good baseline from the work Ken Foster did a few years ago, we should consider repeating this to see how far we’ve progressed since then. This is a major undertaking, both in terms of cost and effort, so we should think carefully about it first. If we do go ahead, January may be a good time to do it – this may be a quiet time for us, and we would also have time to analyse the results before the March AGM.

Dates for the diary:

• October 4th – Trust AGM (2005 accounts, launch of membership renewals)
  Action: AR to arrange venue
  Action: BW/JP to manage the renewals process
• October 7th – RRFC Open Day (date confirmed post-meeting)
• November 27th – Trust open night
  Action: JM to arrange venue
• January ‘08 – fans survey?
• March ‘08 – Trust AGM (2006 accounts, progress report on topics discussed at the open night)
• May / June ‘08 – election of representative on RRFC board
• September ‘08 – Trust AGM (2007 accounts)