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At their October 2016 meeting, the AUPHA Board approved a 5% dues increase for all organizational members for FY2017. The Board considered this action carefully and debated at length. Ultimately, because we have held dues constant for a full four years, the Board felt that an increase was in the best interest of the long term financial health of the AUPHA. While never good news, three items are worth considering.

1. Since the last dues increase (2013), inflation was about 6% in the US indicating that AUPHA received 6% less in terms of what the dues could purchase in 2016 than in 2013. The increase proposed does not quite bring AUPHA dues up to the purchasing power provided by dues in 2013.
2. The increase raises dues by less than $18.50 per month for full graduate program members, less than $12.20 per month for full undergraduate program members, less than $16.10 per month for associate graduate program members, and less than $10.70 per month for associate undergraduate program members.
3. If the Board does not act, the ability of AUPHA to fund existing programs, prepare for potential financial disruptions, and invest in future opportunities that could benefit members will be in jeopardy.

Before a dues increase was considered, we had engaged in a concerted set of actions to make AUPHA stronger and provide greater value to our members. The Board directed staff to examine ways to control costs, to expand revenue opportunities, and to enhance benefits for members. Despite these efforts, financial pressure on AUPHA has increased over the years. The ability to generate small net revenue each year to maintain adequate reserves and endowment balances are at risk without the increase.

To provide examples of what we have done in the last four years, we have made AUPHA operations as efficient as possible in an effort to control costs. From 2012 to 2016, overall expenses decreased from $1.72M to $1.66M despite increases in the prices of most of what we purchase. Some examples of controlling costs include:

• Salary costs have decreased from $670K to $639K despite wage inflation. We have outsourced some functions to help control these costs and increase efficiency. We found, however, that to keep our loyal staff, our salary structure has had to remain competitive.
• Use of consultants decreased from $82K to $48K by placing tighter controls on these expenses and utilizing expertise of staff more fully.
• Conference and hotel costs decreased from $159K to $141K despite increases in the unit costs of these services. This was helped by outsourcing meeting management to obtain better negotiated contracts with conference hotels.
• Audio Visual costs also decreased from $40K to $32K because of the outsourcing.
• Equipment repair costs fell from $16K to $12K by reducing reliance on internal equipment.

Despite these efforts, many necessary expenses have become more costly and are beyond our control.

• Health insurance expense increased from $37K to $52K during this period as we struggle to provide decent insurance coverage in a “small organization” insurance market.
• Business insurance similarly increased from $9.7K to $14.4K.
• Our annual audit cost increased from $16K to $20K during the period.

On the revenue side, we have worked to grow overall revenue:

• Membership growth has been a major initiative as we have worked to identify and recruit programs in the health management education arena to become members. While this effort has generated a continual flow of new members, it has not proved to be sufficient to fully address revenue needs.
• Royalty partnerships have become a focus as we worked closely with ACHE/HAP to expand the number of textbooks published by our members. This too has had only small impacts as the textbook market has become less profitable.
• Finally, development has become a priority and major efforts are underway to expand the sources of this support to outside organizations with a stake in the quality of students that we train.

While these mostly internal expense and revenue efforts have been underway, AUPHA has also initiated many program designed to enhance member value. A partial list includes:

• Annual Meeting upgrades were implemented by outsourcing and enabling staff to work more intensively with members to assure content is more meaningful. Satisfaction results indicated a positive response by those attending.
• Eventsential was implemented this year to provide members with a sophisticated mobile app that enabled creation of activity timeline, session downloads, social profiles, and attendee-to-attendee messaging among others services. The response to this was highly positive as well
• Certification reports have been transferred to an online system to reduce the quantity of paperwork required for the certification process and for the reviewer process.
• Web enhancements have been continuously implemented to improve network performance, management of forums, and other online communities. These largely behind the scenes efforts have greatly developed our collective online engagement.
• Technology improvements aimed to benefit select segments of our membership including such things as the purchase and adoption of a better Association Management System (MemberSuite) that will make your data access and update experiences more robust and the support for HAMPCAS to ease the paper burden of the graduate admissions process.
• Coming soon will be the graduate program data collection done jointly with CAHME to reduce the burden and redundancy of those joint efforts.

The bottom line is that the dues increase comes with enhanced benefits and significant efforts to control costs and expand revenue. Our goal is to continue each of these efforts to make AUPHA services the best deal possible for all of our members. You will be receiving your dues invoice shortly. Please share any comments so we can continue to enhance AUPHA member value.