IBD SUPPORT AUSTRALIA INCORPORATED 2012 ANNUAL REPORT

Transcription

1 IBD SUPPORT AUSTRALIA INCORPORATED 2012 ANNUAL REPORT 1

2 NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN THAT THE FIRST ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING OF IBD SUPPORT AUSTRALIA INC WILL BE HELD AT 8 PM ON WEDNESDAY 28TH NOVEMBER 2012 ONLINE VIA MUMBLE 1 As part of the AGM, a new Committee will be appointed. Please complete a nomination form prior to the meeting taking place via to nominate your preferred position on the committee (if any). Nominees will need someone to second their nomination. If you are unsure of who to ask as a 'second', please contact a current committee member. The agenda for the meeting is as follows:- Opening and Welcome Attendance Apologies Receive and adopt the Annual Report. Receive and adopt the financial statements Election of office bearers for 2013 To deal with any Notices of Motion received by Secretary. Correspondence & Accounts for payment General business (immediate and urgent only) Any Notices of Motion are to reach the Secretary by 12 noon, 14th November 2012 By order of the Committee 1 Connection information available at 2

3 Presidents Report I take pleasure in providing our first Annual Report for IBD Support Australia Inc. It has been a demanding year, with much to accomplish once we had decided to become an incorporated association, which occurred on 28th June The decision to incorporate was not one that was made lightly, and involved not only the administrators and moderators, but also those who had volunteered to help the community in other ways through our development group Committee Members The following people were elected as our inaugural committee, which has been responsible for the management of the Association and also the website at President - Katherine Stewart (Kate59) Vice-President - Peter S (cyclenut) Secretary - Joanne N (Jo1980) Deputy Secretary - Debra S (Debra) Treasurer - Claudine D (Claudine) Deputy Treasurer - Peter S (cyclenut) General Committee Members - Stefan N (stefan), Carly C (charliegirl b), and Pearl J (Pearl) Also, Kylie D (SmileyKylie) resigned from the committee for personal reasons earlier in the year. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their efforts in helping to get us incorporated and for continuing to work towards this, our First Annual Report and Inaugural Annual General Meeting. A Brief History The forum community was started in October 2003, and has so far attracted over 1000 users to register, and over 67,000 posts have been made. The website was initiated by a young lady with Crohns disease when she realised there was very little information freely available about Crohns and colitis specific to Australia. Since 2003, the website has undergone several developments and enhancements, both of administrative and technical natures. Now with the forum community forming as a non-profit, incorporated association to ensure the long term viability of this community, we are ensuring it can continue to support those with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), whilst remaining free to users. 3

4 Objectives Our first full year as an association has been a challenge for the committee, given we are all volunteers and have an IBD, however we have still achieved the following towards meeting our objectives. To provide a support network for patients with inflammatory bowel disease and their families; through an online forum and other online resources. We had 14,998 individuals visit our website, in the last financial year. These people made 53,794 visits between them and viewed a total of 303,325 pages and a total of 5011 new posts to the community forum. To exchange experiences and knowledge of how others cope with their disease in everyday life. The above usage demonstrates the ability for us to be a conduit for the exchange of experiences and knowledge with others with IBD involved in their lives. To advocate or better access to treatment options for those with inflammatory bowel disease. At this early stage in the association s development our main focus in this area has been the development of a process to allow the promotion of research projects available into IBD related issues being available on the site To be a not for profit association and be able to obtain funds or in kind sponsorship to help us provide free and valuable support to users and members. Our funds to run the website, their hosting servers and backups are all funded by membership fees and the donations we receive to the website either directly or through Give Now 2. Abbvie has sponsored projects involving different areas of the association, including the major redevelopment of our website, including the development of a new logo, videos and stories about members, addition of other pages and the ability for us to build further on to the website. To work alongside other like-minded persons and organisations to achieve these goals. We have commenced talks with Crohn s & Colitis Australia 3 (CCA) and multiple sections of Gastroenterology Society of Australia 4 (GESA) and hope to work with them and others more closely in the future

5 Website Usage Statistics The following statistics from the website are predominantly for the financial year ending (FYE) 30th June 2012, and in some cases are compared with the previous financial years. All data was collected by Google Analytics, and in accordance with our Privacy Policy, none of the data used within this report identifies any individuals. We hope that this information will be helpful to members, in providing a basic understanding of how the website performs. The 2012 financial year saw 13,062 unique visitors to the site, compared to 10,034 in the financial year ending 2011, demonstrating a 30% increase. This is the number of unduplicated visitors, where the intent is to count each user once. Our website attracts interested people from around the world, especially with our CDAI calculator which is referenced on many external sites, including Wikipedia 5. While the vast majority of our traffic is Australian at 87.6%, there are a total of 96 countries represented, with only the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand contributing more than 1% of visits each. Visits by Country July June 2012 Australia 87.6% 12.4% 0.7% 0.4% 2.6% 1.7% 1.0% 0.5% United States United Kingdom New Zealand Poland 5.5% Italy Canada Other Figure 1 Visits by Country Most of our traffic is direct from repeat visitors having links saved in their browser or by typing in the web address manually, however our new visitors can come through normal searches with a search engine such as Google, as referral from a third party site that links to us, or from our free advertising with Google Adwords, thanks to a Google Grant. We are also investigating further Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and advertising opportunities to take place during Accessed 26th Nov :39pm ACST 5

6 Devices by Unique Visitors Desktop Mobile Tablet Device Proportion 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Jul-10 Jan-11 Jul-11 Jan-12 Date Figure 2 Devices by Unique Visitors As demonstrated in figure 2, the increase of mobile and tablet devices has been significant over the past couple of years, and this continues to be a priority for the committee to keep ahead of. During 2011 we also adopted Tapatalk 6 as a phone app to access the community forum, which is not included in any of these statistics. Our website users are in two basic categories, those who are visiting our website for the first time, and those who are returning to view the website. Figure 3 demonstrates that although our numbers for returning visits was down slightly in 2012, our new visits have been steadily increasing. 6 Tapatalk 6

7 Visitors by Year New Visitors Returning Visitors 60 Visitor Count (thousands) Date (Financial Year Ending) Figure 3 Visitors by Year This year use of the CDAI calculator increased from 3% to 6% of page views. Any pages not relating directly to the forums or CDAI calculator have been categorised as other, which includes all the front content pages of the website. Figure 4 shows the breakdown over the 2 financial years for the main Page Views. Content by Page Views July June % 11% 10% 3% July June 2011 Forum CDAI Other 87% 83% Figure 4 Content by Page Views 7

8 It has been a busy and exciting 18 months in starting the incorporation of the association and the launch of our updated website, thanks to sponsorship by Abbott Australasia, now known as Abbvie. The main focus of the association is our website, which features a much brighter and user friendly design, and has the ability to engage and present much more information to visitors. We are currently managing the design, printing and distribution of new print material for advertising, in both business card and brochure form. We hope to have these available to health professionals direct or our users at no charge, thanks to an additional grant from Abbvie. Attendance at Australian Gastroenterology Week in Adelaide For the first time, our association was able to represent the forum community at Australian Gastroenterology Week (AGW 2012) in Adelaide, free of charge as a community organisation. The committee chose to send Stefan, a local committee member, on behalf of the association. Stefan mixed with many of the health professionals working in the area of IBD research, treatment and management. There was also the opportunity for him to meet with the pharmaceutical & nutrition company representatives that provide several medications and nutritional supplements for IBD. This has already provided opportunities for us to be able to work with them to improve the level of information that we can provide to our users. As well as the industry representatives, we were also able to introduce many health professionals to our website, and through these discussions have created many new contacts, and developed some future projects. Figure 5 Our stand in amongst the other community association stands at AGW 2012 The committee is investigating having multiple attendees representing the association for AGW 2013 in Melbourne. 8

9 Research & Clinical Trials on the website The committee has implemented new procedures to streamline handling of advertising requests to allow health professionals to post about research and clinical trials related to IBD directly to the forum community, once their request has been reviewed by the committee. The committee believes advertising these studies not only helps advance understanding of IBD in the medical community, but also provides opportunities for users of the forum to try new treatments they may otherwise have been unaware of. Research projects that have been advertised through our site have included Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Pregnancy: Lack of Knowledge is Associated with Negative Patient Views 7 A Randomised, Double-blind, Placebo-controlled Study to Evaluate the Safety, Tolerability, and Efficacy of AMG 827 in Subjects With Moderate to Severe Crohn's Disease - Amgen A study on the use of Antidepressants in IBD - an ongoing study 8 7 C. P. Selinger et al J Crohns Colitis Oct 2. pii: S (12) doi: /j.crohns Dr Antonina Mikocka-Walus (University of South Australia) and Dr Jane Andrews (Royal Adelaide Hospital) 9

10 Technical Report Since incorporating, we have faced a number of technical challenges to ensure the website and thus the community continue to operate smoothly, all whilst remaining on a very tight budget. We have commissioned two of our own virtual private servers here in Australia to provide a secure and redundant hosting environment for the various sections of the site. We also utilise a number of Amazon AWS services to provide quick solutions for disaster recovery in the case of a major outage. Not all of the technical challenges we have faced have been related to our infrastructure, with a major upgrade and re-theming of the forum software, the addition of several new software packages with the launch of the new site, such as Drupal 9 and CiviCRM 10, as well as several Software as a Service (SaaS) packages for the committee s use, such as the accounting package Xero 11, the collaboration tool Etherpad 12, and Google Apps 13 for , and an online office suite. During the financial year ending 2012, a conservative worst case estimate places our website downtime at approximately 1 hour, or 99.75%, with no major outages detected. We use an offsite monitoring service to track outages, and ensure we are notified promptly in the event of a failure. There are still a number of technical challenges we are facing, not only to maintain our high availability, but to continue to add and integrate new features to the site. 9 Drupal - Open Source CMS 10 CiviCRM Communtiy Suite 11 Xero Accounting Software 12 Etherpad collaborative online editor 13 Google Apps 10

11 Financial Report The following is the Balance Sheet & Cash Summary for the financial year ending June 2012 and the previous financial year ending June The following reports have been generated using Xero. Balance Sheet IBD Support Australia Incorporated As at 30 June Jun Jun 2011 Assets Bank Cash Reserve $51.48 $0.00 CTO Debit Card $77.34 $0.00 Executive Debit Card $7.01 $0.00 PayPal $86.94 $0.00 Transaction Account $ $ Total Bank $ $ Total Assets $ $ Liabilities Current Liabilities GST $ $0.00 Total Current Liabilities $ $0.00 Total Liabilities $ $0.00 Net Assets $ $ Equity Current Year Earnings $9.33 $0.18 Retained Earnings $ $ Total Equity $ $

12 Cash Summary IBD Support Australia Incorporated For the 12 months ended 30 June 2012 Excluding GST Jun 2012 Jun 2011 Income Interest Income $6.39 $0.18 Membership $40.00 $0.00 Other Revenue $ $0.00 Total Income $ $0.18 Less Operating Expenses Bank Fees $3.19 $0.00 General Expenses $ $0.00 Website Expenses $ $0.00 Total Operating Expenses $ $0.00 Operating Surplus (Deficit) $9.33 $0.18 Plus Movements in Equity Retained Earnings $0.00 $ Total Movements in Equity $0.00 $ GST Movements GST Inputs $ $0.00 GST Outputs $0.00 $0.00 Net GST Movements $ $0.00 Net Cash Movement $-5.48 $ Summary Opening Balance $ $0.00 Plus Net Cash Movement $-5.48 $ Closing Balance $ $

13 Looking Forward The committee has been actively discussing and negotiating some future projects with sponsors, including Search engine optimisation (SEO) to gain more exposure for online searches Increase targeted online advertising Enhance CDAI calculator to track history, and add support for paediatrics and ulcerative colitis calculators Negotiating for multiple representatives to attend Australian Gastroenterology Week 2013 In addition to these projects, we must increase our membership base as well as the usage and relevance of our website and forum to ensure the association remains viable and can continue to provide a free service to users with IBD. Next October we will be celebrating 10 years of being an online community and a conduit for sharing experiences with others with IBD. Also during our first 18 months, 2 of our committee members and 2 moderators gave birth to babies - a great accomplishment for these young mothers living with IBD. 13