Randonneurs USA Board of Director Minutes

February 18, 2026

1. Call to order: The meeting on February 18th, 2026 was called to order at 8:00 p.m. Eastern over Zoom. The following members were present:
   1. Dawn Piech
   2. Charlie Martin
   3. Dave Thompson
   4. Emily O’Brien
   5. Noah Swartz
   6. [absent] John Lee Ellis
   7. [absent] Chris Argo
2. The minutes of the January Board meeting were approved
3. Dave presented the January financial report
   1. Chris Argo has joined the Financial Audit Committee (FAC)
   2. The January financial report has passed scrutiny from the FAC, but Dave recommends the board still review and familiarize themselves with RUSA financials
   3. Tax season is approaching Mike Misner, of the FAC, will review the form 990
4. RUSA & Partisan politics
   1. The board recently received some inquiries about the extent to which RUSA or RUSA Regions should allow such conversations to take place on RUSA and RUSA Region-moderated social media. The concern extends to event naming and identifying with causes. Any such identification runs the risk of making RUSA less welcoming.
   2. RUSA is also bound by the rules of 501(c)(3) which set restrictions on political involvement
   3. The board will discuss guidelines for how much or little RUSA will moderate such activity within its sphere of control and influence.
5. Charlie presented the Web team report
   1. Earlier in the year the Web Team sent out a survey for feedback on the website, this resulted in a number of responses centering on usability and navigation of the website. The Web Team reached out to those respondents to see if they would like to join a task force to create more concrete guidance that the Web Team could act on.
   2. This task force met earlier in the week and compiled a list of concrete suggestions that could be prioritized and acted upon. Examples include simplifying the site navigation and collecting and keeping current the linked media.
   3. This task force will continue to recruit volunteers and meet again next month.
   4. Membership workflows have received a lot of updates to ensure ease of membership renewal and a reduction of duplicate or erroneous membership signups, which should reduce the burden on volunteers managing these requests
   5. The Web Team continues to work with Ted Fey to manage the parts of the site indexed by Google. The Web Team will also work to manage how the RUSA site appears on the Google Search Results Page.
   6. A number of usability suggestions were shared after last year’s Philadelphia Bike Expo, the Web Team will work to integrate some of these before the upcoming Philadelphia Bike Expo.
   7. It was also discussed whether American Randonneur should be posted as a PDF to the website sooner after the print edition is published, this topic will be discussed over email and presented at the next board meeting.
6. Dave shared an update on the progress of reconfiguring permissions for the RUSA shared google drive to ensure access is retained.
7. Dawn presented an update from the Marketing Team
   1. Dawn is planning to record zoom interviews for ‘rando radio’ which will include interviews with influential women starting with a Women in RUSA in March, followed by quarterly multi-member panel to highlight different topics, regions and membership.
   2. The marketing team has a plan to create more content to be shared on social media
   3. There will be a meeting with various marketing team volunteers to discuss management of the RUSA Instagram after the Philadelphia Bike Expo
8. Dawn presented a status update on Between Controls (BC)
   1. The current issue of BC was sent out to board members before the meeting, and no objections were raised to the content during the meeting
   2. Dawn continues to collect regional spotlight reports from different RUSA regions to share in future issues
   3. Dave brought up a suggestion for website indexing that might allow members to better find information contained in past issues of BC and AR. It was noted that this was mostly already indexed by Google and could be found via Google search.
9. Dave presented the 2025 and 2026 RUSA Board Goals
   1. The 2025 goals were finalized and will be published on the website
   2. The 2026 goals were reviewed during the meeting and will be published soon
   3. The board discussed the possibility of creating a more high level vision document for 2026 and will take this to email and discuss at the next board meeting
10. Philadelphia Bike Expo (PBE) & Fall Expo
    1. The board reached out to MADE in Portland about tabling this fall. Unfortunately MADE wants to limit exhibiting to only framebuilders, so the board will work to find another suitable expo to attend.
    2. Preparations for PBE are underway, including new table decorations.
    3. Dawn has had success collecting post cards from various RUSA regions as promotional material for handing out at PBE
11. Dave presented on Climbing and team ride requirements
    1. Dave has had a long discussion with Ride with GPS about their elevation calculations that needs to be collated and shared with the board
    2. Dave has received a number of responses from RBAs about how they collect routes from team events. Based on these responses he recommends that no changes be made to the Team event rules. In most cases this should result in all teams receiving accurate climbing credit, though potentially some more information about this could be added to the rules or messaged to RBAs.
12. Dawn presented on the difficulty of moderating Facebook
    1. Many posts to the RUSA Facebook have been stuck in moderation for seemingly no reason. This has caused frustration from a number of active members who don’t understand why their posts are not appearing.
    2. The board is not aware of any automated way to fix this or a Facebook setting that would ease this issue and will instead pursue finding more moderating volunteers for the Facebook Club page to better unblock posts.
    3. Dawn is working on adding a few members to both Instagram and Facebook to mitigate this and increase monitoring the Facebook group on a more consistent basis.
13. Noah presented on the new membership of the Awards Review Committee
14. Dave has nominated Emily to be in charge of managing all Paris-Brest-Paris related tasks over the coming year and a half.
15. RUSA has been given the option to share information about domestic grand randonnées in the Audax UK magazine
    1. Dave will confirm the deadline for this material and Emily will work to produce a 1-page advert.
16. The next meetings will occur on March 11th and April 8th
17. The board meeting was adjourned at 10:05 p.m. Eastern time