We don’t expect our leaders to be big experts on PN. We share our feelings and our hurts and the excitement of being with and helping others. Leaders learn along with everyone else.

Sure, the moderator might stay on top of this. But it can be very helpful if someone can keep track of the order of who wants to speak, especially when the conversation gets interesting. And encourage the quiet “wall flowers” or newcomers who may be hesitant to speak up.

A Zoom meeting can get pretty busy, especially when the number of people must go to a second screen. You can help by watching the participant list for “hand raise” and watching the images to see who is raising their hand and notifying other team members using chat.

A tiny bit technical, you can do a few simple tasks by being a co-host, including letting people in from ‘the waiting room’, starting or stopping recordings, helping to correct audio problems (especially background noise from a participant that needs to be muted) and muting the participants during a presentation and helping participants learn to use the Zoom controls and features. By spending a few minutes coordinating before the meeting you can help operate the ‘share screen’ function.

We spend about 6 hours a month on this, supporting three groups and 6 meetings (DCPN, Social Hour and weekly Network meetings).  Anyone that uses Zoom can easily learn what is needed. Currently we use one license using a single shared email account. In the long run, to allow each group to set its own schedule without interfering with other groups, every group needs its own paid Zoom license. (Zoom offers discount pricing for non-profits.) Because a service is being provided to others, where should be at least two people with access to the account in case the prime operator is unavailable; initially, the central staff can be that “backup”. In order for the central staff to access the group’s account to directly provide assistance, that group’s license needs to be “added” to our “master” account. Several DCPN members have their own paid accounts and those could be linked to allow this kind of support. We will be working on that in the next few months.

Operating a meeting involves these tasks: logging on to Zoom, changing the meeting password to use in the invitations, starting the meeting (and sometimes restarting it if there are problems), participating in the meeting (or being available) in case of  a problem, bouncing out trouble makers (we have never done that). Engaging closed captioning using Otter has proved to be more difficult; we are considering other options, but meanwhile we are relying on our technical supporters to set this up for our meetings.

While a person supporting a single group can do this, this will normally be done only by the central network staff, rather than a person only interested in a single group. Settings can be quite complex. Recordings, especially Cloud recordings, need to be managed, saved to some location where they can be edited and turned into YouTube videos for distribution. However, recordings are done primarily to generate media for use by other groups (“the PN Support Network”) so the central network staff should normally be involved.

Support group operations are not free. The costs are paid for by donations from members. Purchases are made by organization members and then those members submit requests to be reimbursed.

It is anticipated that new groups will probably get some initial help, perhaps even some financial help, but then their members will go on to pay for their group’s own specific costs while contributing money to help pay for the central services (as DCPN members are now) and then, eventually, help pay for advocacy activity (as we did in 2019 at the Expo).

Our current budget is a mix of costs to run two small online groups (DCPN and Social Hour) and the central services (the PN Support Network). Most of the costs relate to the central services (especially the website and email).  Plus we are incurring start up costs this year to obtain a formal Non-Profit status. Besides making donations tax deductible, such a status opens the door to many other services. We will be implementing a mechanism in our donation page to allow donors to indicate how they want their donations to be used, such as use for central operations or for a particular group or purpose.

Support groups can vary a lot.  For everyone to “be heard and feel understood” a group meeting needs to be limited in size. Such a group would have average attendance of 10 to 20 with a mix of some regulars and others who come for a while, learn something and then drop out. Just to operate, such a group  has little need for formal financial structure.

When meeting in-person, all that is needed is a place. To share content, perhaps use a large laptop or small TV. Or use a facility with AV support (church, community center, restaurant meeting room). When meeting online, the costs can be minimal. A small group with 15 members would average about a dollar a month per participant to use a single Zoom account. A small group can gather funds in various ways, including pass-the-hat and a membership  fee.

We have a single checking account. All donations on our donation page show up as deposits on that account. The “Cheddar Up” donation software prepares a report that indicates who sent the money and any other information that the donor filled in about that donation. We do not get credit card data.

The treasurer manually deposits any checks sent to her.

At the current time funds for group operations and PNSN are not kept separate nor are any funds “earmarked” for any specific purpose. Eventually, as the number of groups PNSN aids expands and PNSN costs become larger, it may be necessary to adopt some mechanism to enable us to track and honor requests by donors that specific funds be used for specific purposes (such as advocacy or group startup). 

Until now, we were not a 501c3 charity so we did not send official donation acknowledgment emails. Once we get that status (real soon now) we will need to find a way to do that.  

All checks are written by the treasurer.  All expenses are documented base on receipts submitted by those requesting reimbursement. Eventually, invoices for regular expenses (such as Zoom renewals) will be sent directly to the treasurer, but that is not set up yet. Her job is made more difficult by PNSN team members who sometimes forget to promptly forward invoices for reimbursement. 

The treasurer has been reporting on our financial status at our monthly meetings. It is anticipated that the treasurer will submit information about financial status (cash balance and accounts payable) to the website developers and they will arrange to have that information displayed on the website.  We need more website programming help to get that setup.

All budget analysis done so far is based on Mike’s budget and the notes therein. It would be very helpful to have someone volunteer to give that budget a good scrub and carefully examine our ideas about how we can cope with future expansion. Truthfully, we are hopeful that our cheery optimism about the desperate need for more support groups and the future of PN awareness will carry us over our current sloppy thinking on this. At least, we have not spent money we did not have.