New LNC Budget is Slow Death for Our Party

by: Forwarder

Fri Dec 04, 2009 at 20:17:49 PM MST

The new LNC draft budget, copies of which have been floating across my transom for some time now, proposes that in the coming year the LNC will
    raise    1.14 million dollars
    spend  $293,000 to raise that 1.14 million dollars
    have   $845,000 left to spend on programs.

And what is in that program budget?
     $334,000 to pay the staff
     $406,000 in administrative costs, of which $36,000 for our attorney's retainer and $104,000 for information technology might involve doing politics, and $26,000 for printing, postage, and telephone could also have that effect.  On the other hand, the $140,400 for a corner office in DC class A space does no politics at all.

Oh, activities:
   $32,000 for printing the once--monthly newsletter on a quarterly basis
    NOTHING for affiliate support
    NOTHING for ballot access
    NOTHING for brand development
    NOTHING for campus outreach
    NOTHING for candidate support
    NOTHING for litigation
    NOTHING for lobbying
    NOTHING for media relations
    NOTHING for outreach
The notion "volunteer activism is an activity" is apparently so alien that volunteer activism is not even mentioned as an expenditure not being funded.

That was the good part.

Now we come to other part.

That 1.14 million dollars in income or next year includes $100,000 in convention income, the convention being budgeted in advance to lose $20,000.  

The $1.14 million also includes $100,000 in fund raising by the national chair and executive director.  This line is specified to be new income, something that has not happened in the current year.  We're in the last quarter of the National Chair's term.  Is this number even vaguely credible as an income stream?  It appears to have been created to match the income gap.

Then there are the membership plans.  

Those of you who have seen the month-by-month membership numbers realize that there's a lot of fluctuation around the mean.  For example, this November membership actually grew by nearly 350.  Nonetheless:

We started the year with 16,349 "donors".  That's actually 15,178 members.

We are predicted to end 2009 with 13,856 "donors".  That's actually something like 13,300 real members.

The extrapolation for the year 2010, out to the end of December 2010, is 12,044 "donors", meaning around 11,500 members, the least in a rather long time.

If you keep extrapolating this way, after not so many years we are left with the life members.  And what is proposed as a solution for this challenge?

"we do very little new donor acquisition by mail..."  "if we merely add new donors through our web presence, we can expect to gain approximately 4,000 new donors through 2010...this is more than offset by attrition...without an investment in growing our donor base, we will continue to lose donors..."

but:

"No amounts are planned here for donor acquisition purposes..."

Let's skip over the complete lack of interest in members and activists.

It's all laid out in black and white.

The Draft LNC budget is a plan for party suicide.  It puts the national Libertarian Party in a death spiral, a spiral that accelerates dramatically once party income falls significantly below fixed costs.

If the LNC has a modicum of good sense, it will reject this budget, and suspend for cause the lead officers responsible for writing it.  That's the Treasurer and the Chair.