Innovation: Funding SPE Programs and Services

Abstract

President's column In the next two months, I am going to deviate from the theme of my previous columns on innovation. As indicated above, this month I will share with you how SPE funds its programs and services and next month I will write about the work on strategy that your board has been working on. I am happy to report that our membership continues to grow. Total SPE membership (professional and student) exceeded 110,000 at the end of 2012. These members continually look to SPE for good programs and services, and our mission to disseminate technical information to all of them and to do so quickly, affordably, and in new ways, is increasingly challenged. SPE accomplishes this primarily through meetings, lectures, training courses, and publications. So, how does SPE fund all of these things? All of SPE’s major business segments (meetings, publications, membership, re-tail sales, SPE.org) contribute to the overall success of SPE, but as Fig. 1 illustrates, meetings are SPE’s largest source of revenue. Although SPE now conducts around 140 events worldwide each year, most of the revenues from meetings come from the financial success of a small number of conferences with large exhibitions, like the Offshore Technology Conference and Offshore Europe. Most other events are budgeted to break even or generate a small surplus. Your board recently considered and approved SPE’s budget for Fiscal Year 2014 (1 April 2013 through 31 March 2014). It has total operating revenues of USD 92.4 mil-lion and expenses of USD 84.4 million, resulting in a net income of USD 8 million. Here is the important thing to remember when you are considering these numbers. Unlike commercial organizations, our income goes back into benefits for our members. This helps us keep dues, meetings registrations, and publications prices reasonable, and helps us support programs that produce little or no revenue on their own, like scholarships, the very popular Distinguished Lecturer visits, and our peer-reviewed journals.