What good are reports?

Recently I took an opportunity to talk to the Society Minister of Arts and Sciences, Master Etienne Le Mons. I have often been asked as well as been curious as to what the goal of collecting reports was. I understood quite well why a financial accounting is in order but what does the BoD care about the arts and sciences going on. As an officer I see it as part of my job to make award recommendation nd to do such the collection of information is important.

A quick note on award recommendations as an officer. Your words carry weight in your office and while someone may be getting recommended in their local group when a crown sees an outside recommendation it carries a bit more with it. Also in the reports you see what people are doing on a regular basis and can comment, where others who are closer may not be paying attention or think about passing the info to the cron. Really award recommendations will be its own post in the future, as well as my feelings on the role of officers.

Now to the meat of the matter, Why are reports important? Ask and you shall receive.

• Jessica Page What happens to our reports? What use are they on a society level?
• 
• Etienne Le Mons Branch level reports that go to the Kingdom Officers are used by those officers to create their report to me. Basically, they're consolidated and streamlined into a digestible format that I can process for my report to the Board of Directors.
  
  Additionally, should the tax man come calling, MoAS reports would be the first place that we look to prove our 501(c)3 educational non-profit status. Of all the things that the SCA does, A&S is where we do the majority of our research, documentation and teaching of period medieval topics.
  
• TL;DR: A&S reports are how we stay non-profit and they're REALLY important ;-)

I went on to ask some follow on questions and instead of boring you with the blow by blow I will sum up the information.

Do you use a form to consolidate your report?

I use a form for the Kingdom Officers to submit information to me, but the consolidation is done
on my own.

I have several different sections of my report to the BoD which are dictated by the BoD

A. REQUESTED BOARD ACTIONS

B. POLICY INTERPRETATIONS

C. NEW POLICIES

D. COMMENDATIONS

E. GENERAL STATUS REPORT

F. PUBLISHABLE SUMMARY

G. KNOWN WORLD SUMMARY

H. TRAVEL

I. CONFIDENTIAL SECTION

J. ADDENDUMS

the information from the Kingdom reports help me fill out D, E, F & G and of course I & J

a lot of what I get in the reports is simply stored but there are specific questions that I ask that I address every time

first are 4 numbers....each quarter, I ask the Kingdom Officers to do a self-rating from 1-10 on the state of the KMoAS office in their Kingdom and separately the state of A&S in their Kingdom

I also ask how many warranted MoAS's they have and how many Laurels were elevated in that quarter there is no judgement from me on if these numbers are high or low or in-between.... that's really not what I'm looking at what I'm looking at are the trends over time I also ask if they need anything from the Society Office and I address that every time they put anything there
for the "Known World Summary", I have a bullet point for each Kingdom I read through their report and see what jumps out at me, what they're excited about, what they've spent a lot of time and resources on and those things go into their Kingdom's bullet I also note if they've had a major competition with good turn out or a University with particularly good attendance