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Michael,
I can answer some but not all of your questions.
1) Honorary means free paper subscription. Hard copies of the Journal and Handbook posted to the Honorary member.
2) This year we have added a page to the website about donations and legacies. We decided to keep it simple as we did not want to offer legal advice.
https://britastro.org/donations
We have also added some wording to encourage legacies to the renewal emails. Trying to be very delicate in how we approach this. The legacies do make a major contribution to the Association, basically meaning the subscription rate can be about half of what it takes to run the Association. We would either need to do a lot less, or otherwise have much higher subscriptions, without these generous donations.
I don’t have any hard figures as to the actual legacies received, though I think there is a small number each year, with a large legacy every few years.
I agree a debate like this is an excellent sign of a healthy Association. As indicated by David these are proposals. They have been through lots of internal discussions and by no means just the Trustees. They are not decisions until voted in, out or changed at the SGM. So Honorary membership at 50 years may continue indefinitely, or maybe leave it open for another 5 or 10 years, rather than a year and a half form now.
Best wishes,
AndyA little off topic.
If you look at the published accounts from 2018 to 2023, then the cost of running the BAA has gone from £201,790 in 2018 to £259,468 in 2023, a 28.5% increase. This compares to very roughly 22-25% inflation from a calculator I found on the Bank of England website.
I do think the cost of running the BAA is slowly rising due to the difficulty in finding volunteers. There are tasks that were done by volunteers a decade or more ago, which we now pay people to do as volunteers could not be found.I wanted to reply to the following suggestion from Lars Lindhard on the Honary membership forum thread. Here is what Lars said.
“Instead of deleting the associations from the membership list, perhaps BAA should create advantageous membership offers for club members, so that we could get more younger people into the organization that way.”
A discount on the membership fee for members of Affiliated Societies is an interesting idea. Noting that Affiliated Societies are not being removed. The proposal is to change the meaning of being Affiliated. So it might be something to consider in more detail, especially with regard to increasing the number of younger members, where younger only means below 50 years old!
Lars makes very good points. The reasons behind the age demographic are likely complex and any change to membership structure won’t fix it, but it could be one small factor.
Lars makes an interesting suggestion on Affiliated Societies. I hope Lars won’t mind if I copy his wording and reply in the forum thread on Affiliated Societies.Someone did actually make this suggestion before the proposals were put together. The problem is a gradually changing membership fee would be complex to implement.
Another factor behind this and other changes is the complexity of the existing BAA membership structure. There are currently 16 categories of membership, that split into 26 categories for administration purposes with the overseas rates. The configurations of these different membership types leads to a lot of behind the scenes complexity, both for staff and the IT systems. We get them working, but it has led to a variety of mistakes and complaints, as well as expense to get things fixed. This is not the primary reason behind this and other proposed changes, but the complexity of running the BAA is a consideration.
The proposed change to how Affiliated Societies work would potentially open this up to more Societies. The ‘free’ items will be things like being able to include an affiliated to the BAA logo, articles about the Societies in the Journal, and possibly a discount on events and the shop.
In the year to 31st March 2023, the BAA spent £259,467, with an income of £132,632. The net reduction to the BAA cash and investments was £140,976, while I expect other years will see increases as long as we continue to receive legacies.
I see every indication the BAA takes great care of its finances. The reason the BAA spends so much is because it is a very busy Association. There are the Journal and Handbook, meetings and events of various kinds, the website, archives and a lot of smaller items on the accounts.
I should emphasize, the ending of new Honorary members is part of a proposal to rebalance how the subscription income is paid over time, not to change the total subscription revenue, which is reviewed by the Treasurer each year.
This is intended as a discussion, so maybe retaining Honorary members is the right thing. However, my opinion is it is a good idea to rebalance the membership structure. Related to this, only around 5% of BAA members are under 50.
These are from the total figures in the accounts available on the website.
https://britastro.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/BAA-2023-Financial-Statements.pdf
My point was we cannot entirely rely on the reserves. Some years they will go up and other years they go down.
The underlying goal here is to try to reach a fairer subscription level across the age groups.Hi Tony,
The point of the consultation is to ask member opinions before a final decision is made.
While the BAA has good reserves, the annual expenditure is a bit over twice the income received in subscription revenue. The shortfall is made up from legacies and taking money out of the BAA’s investments and bank accounts. The value of the investments and bank reserves fell by just under 10% from 2022 to 2023, a little over the amount that was removed to cover the shortfall in operating costs.
To reach a target revenue from the membership subscriptions, the non-Honorary members have to pay a higher membership price. Around 10% of the membership are Honorary members.
The idea is to send members a certificate to commemorate the achievement of reaching 50 years of membership. Any existing Honorary members will remain as Honorary.
Best wishes,
AndyWe have received another query about how to purchase the calendar on the website. It is available in the BAA online shop:
Publications -> Buy
You can get to it directly from this link:
https://britishastro.square.site/product/baa-2024-astronomical-calendar/23
Andy
Hi Phil,
You are very welcome to them.
I have not used them in several years and that is a waste. I am happy for them to go to anyone who can make use of them.
I will try sending you a personal message via the website.
AndyHi Roy,
Pauline is talking about the physical calendar for sale in the BAA shop, not the online calendar.
https://britishastro.square.site/product/baa-2024-astronomical-calendar/23
I have noted your comment about the online calendar for the website developer to investigate.
AndyHi Ayesha,
As per my above post, anyone with a missing Journal should contact the BAA Office at:
https://britastro.org/home/about-us/contact-us
Best wishes,
AndyHi Maxim,
You should contact the BAA Office.
https://britastro.org/home/about-us/contact-us
I would add that there are ongoing investigations to ensure we fully understand what has gone wrong so that it can be avoided in future.
Best wishes,
AndyHi Kevin,
Another couple of other free options are:
MuniPack – https://c-munipack.sourceforge.net/
MetroPSF – https://github.com/blackhaz/MetroPSFThe advantage of these is they can produce output files of the photometry ready for uploading to the BAA Photometry Database. If you ultimately wish to submit to the BAA database then that is a distinct advantage. You can also do this with AstroImageJ and AIP4Win, though you have to use these in combination with the BAA Photometry Spreadsheet and that requires an Excel license.
Cheers,
AndyI believe there are differing opinions on the entire purpose of the ballot. While ideally there would be multiple candidates for each position, the vote could be considered an affirmation of the candidates to their positions by the membership, even when there are no other candidates.
There are also issues with the BAA being a charity where the Trustees take ultimate responsibility for the governance. There needs to be a formal process for appointing Trustees. A ballot is an excellent and transparent way to accomplish this.
There is the separate question of whether to hold a postal ballot or just digital. The postal ballot accounts for around half the cost but only around 2% of eligible members vote this way.
On a side topic. While the turn out is low, I am not convinced it is shockingly low for a membership organisation. A little over 22% of eligible members voted this year. This compares to 67% in the 2019 UK general election and 36% in the 2021 English local elections.
I have now added the link to Ian Sharp’s talk (PCEB Variables and a Medley of Software Tools). He kindly made a fresh recording of his talk after it did not work on the day.
https://britastro.org/event/variable-star-section-meeting-2
Andy
Hi Patrick,
We don’t have a way to offer gift subscriptions via the online form. However, if you contact the BAA Office at the below link they can probably help you with this.
The problem is the membership is linked to the email address used to join. That means we cannot easily do this as a future dated surprise. As soon as the Office create the membership, the person will receive the welcome email. That is also why they cannot be easily done online, as you create a membership associated with the email address you use to create the account when you join.
https://britastro.org/home/about-us/contact-us
Best wishes,
AndyI am pleased to report that we were able to record most of the presentations. We did not announce this in advance as we were trying something new and we were not sure it would work. There are problems with at least a couple of the recordings but it appears to have worked for the majority.
I will be uploading them to the BAA YouTube channel, but due to other commitments I won’t be able to complete the editing and make them live until the last week in September.
Andy
