USLUA Fundraising & Finance Subcommittee

Monday 11 Sept 2023, 15:00 → 16:05 America/Chicago

We discussed options for future fundraising efforts, and identified 4 options that seem like fairly low-hanging fruit:

• Meetings/conferences (inreach)
  • In the past, we’ve had a booth with buttons, handouts, etc to spread the word about USLUA and our activities at various meetings and conferences.  Harvey will order some swag to distribute.  We should recruit the entire EC to help get the word out, when they attend meetings
• Get a donate button/link in the monthly digest that Jannicke distributes
  • In addition, we should regularly include some basic info on our work (where to get help, what we’re doing, etc) in this mail
• Private foundations
  • David assembled a list of foundations, with some info on their mission, which align with our work to varying degrees.  We should decide on a couple to target, and tune our messaging to fit their mission
  • https://docs.google.com/document/d/18_w6fZ6ROJTwLJCgh2U90XjOhPIfSenAS-GG27S3rtk/edit
• Corporations
  • We should request support from some friendly corporations that we have done business with (David pointed us to a list of industry awards given by CMS, which could be a good starting point: https://cms.cern/content/industry-awards).  It is important that we have some high-level contacts within these companies that can put our ask in front of the right people.  It would be good to identify a couple test cases, before we reach out more broadly

We also discussed some sort of social event.  But this is a substantial lift, so is likely a more long-term option.

Lastly, we also discussed the funding available to support participants on the DC trip.  We probably have about $15k that could be used for support, but this depends somewhat on how the annual meeting shakes out and what arrangement we come to with FNAL on the registration funds.  We may want to have a dedicated funding drive to support the DC trip.

15:00 → 15:15 Advocacy Discussion

15:15 → 16:00 Fundraising Discussion

Speakers: Anyes Taffard (University of California Irvine (US)), Caterina Vernieri (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US)), David Saltzberg (University of California Los Angeles (US)), Harvey Newman (California Institute of Technology (US)), Indara Suarez (Boston University (US)), John Stupak (University of Oklahoma (US)), Kiley Elizabeth Kennedy (Princeton University (US))