MINUTES OF A MEETING

OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF

RANDONNEURS USA, INC.

Held: August 22, 2022

A meeting of the RUSA Board of Directors was convened by Zoom / telephone conference and called to order by the President at 17:06 PDT.

The Directors in attendance were:

• Dan Driscoll
• Rob Hawks
• Charlie Martin
• Vincent (Vinny) Muoneke
• Dawn Piech
• Tim Sullivan
• Dave Thompson

A motion was made and passed to approve the meeting minutes for July 13, 2022.

A motion was made and passed to approve Burnley Willis as the returning RBA of AK: Anchorage.

A motion was made and passed to approve the TX: Austin 1200 application.

The Board discussed the FL: Northeast 1200 application and more generally what's achieved through these applications and what's required in applications for miscellaneous circumstances. Applications ask less of more experienced organizers, particularly when running a route in a familiar area or when rerunning a past route. The Board agreed that even for experienced organizers it's important for applications to include at least a high level draft route, even if it's likely to change. Rob or Dave will follow up with Hamid to receive a draft route before proceeding with the application. Dave will follow up with John Lee to update the 1200 application to describe the expectations for various scenarios.

Dan, as Treasurer, provided the Board with monthly Statement of Activity Year to Date Comparison Reports and Financial Position Comparison Reports for June and July.

Rob had shared written reports on his activities as RBA liaison and brevet coordinator. Pat Horchoff has stepped down as RBA of LA: New Orleans and the region will go dark. Greg Smith will step down as RBA of IL: Quad Cities with a potential successor of Doug McLerran. Rob has identified and updated existing events to use gravel timing where appropriate. Rob is working on identifying regions/RBAs that need either the ACP or LRM labels.

The Board discussed the anticipated grand randonnées for 2023. Vinny will follow up with Rose Cox on a potential Seattle 1200.

Charlie had shared a written report on the activities of the Web Team. All pending changes for the gravel program have been fully launched, and coincided with an announcement on the RUSA site. There are still some minor features to add, and issues should be reported to the Web Team. Some questions and minor feature requests have already trickled in. Rob noted that the back office would benefit from functionality to allow searching for events running under gravel rules. Charlie will follow up with the Web Team. There have been occasional disruptions with permanent ride registrations the past month due to sporadic SmartWaiver outages. The Web Team is exploring options for making the permanents system more robust to such outages going forward. The Board discussed these options, and Charlie will follow up with a detailed design of how a proposed solution would work and what the reporting would look like. Audax functionality is still largely unimplemented and there has been confusion amongst RBAs about how to properly run UAF events. The Web Team is looking into beefing up the UAF documentation on the website and making it more discoverable. Dan is interested in providing medals for UAF events to help get the Audax program rolling.

Dawn had provided a report on the July issue of Between Controls. The issue was sent to 3,641 members with a 68% open rate and a 13.5% click rate. The top 3 areas that received clicks were the heat management article (46.8% with 285 clicks), the SFR Adventure Sports Journal article (22.7% with 138 clicks), and the RUSA store (14.1% with 86 clicks). The Board 2022 Strategic Goals received 8 clicks and the Board meeting minutes received 6 clicks. For upcoming editions, Dawn has been discussing "coffeeneuring" with Mary Gersema and has been discussing Board nominations and calls for voting with Dave. Dawn is reaching out to Wei Sun to do a small section in Between Controls about how he approaches connecting people to randonneuring and to our organization. Tim will follow up with Wei on that. Dawn received the yearly report and went through the year end summary data with the team. She explained she would be making some small changes to Between Controls based on feedback/input received from Constant Contact. Specifically, they shared how we can increase our total clickthrough data each month and Dawn will be working on making these changes to improve Between Controls' performance and engagement of the membership. The August edition will be sent on August 23, 2022.

Dawn also reported on her activities as Incident Liaison. There are 2 pending incident reports to complete, and these are on track. There were 14 for 2022, 8 for 2021, 2 for 2020, and 11 for 2019. Dawn is working with Dave and Pete to update the form for submitting incident reports. Rob and Dawn had discussed sending an update for RBAs on the process for submitting incident reports, to be completed after revising the Incident Report document and updating the process on the RUSA website. Dawn will talk with John Lee Ellis about the updates to the RUSA website when ready to proceed with the changes. She is working with both Dave and Pete Dusel on this process. Dawn will send the Board criteria for when to submit an incident report. Dan would be interested in a yearly summary in case there's a way to learn from the data.

Dan led a discussion about awards. The Board needs to clean up the P-12 Explorer and R-12 Explorer awards that were approved in July, since these may put too much of a strain on the volunteers who approve permanent routes. The Board discussed the "ultra" awards that are earned by achieving awards 10 times. Rather than adding these piecemeal over time, it may reduce long-term overhead and further motivate riders by performing a sweep of existing awards for all the ones that would make sense to have ultra variants. Additionally a consideration of ultra viability could be part of the application review process. The Board considered a proposal for the Ultra Flèche. It would be a repeatable award that recognizes riders who have ridden ten 24-hour team events (i.e. flèche and arrow formats) across any number of years, domestic or internationally. Initially it would be recognition-only, i.e. no trinket. A motion was made and passed to approve the Ultra Flèche.

The next scheduled meeting is on September 14, 2022. The meeting concluded at 19:00 PDT.