April 2024 - 9

A MESSAGE
FROM THE
PRESIDENT
O
PRESIDENT
Margot Hennings
VICE PRESIDENT
Cindy Shoemaker
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Bronia Jenkins
CHAIR, ADVISORY COUNCIL
Doug Couchman
Board of Directors
Region 1 * Jonathan Steinberg
Region 2 * Mark Aquino
Region 3 * Joann Glasson
Region 4 * Margot Hennings
Region 5 * Dennis Carman
Region 6 * Barbara Heller
Region 7 * Larry Sealy
Region 8 * Jeff Overby
Region 9 * Paul Cuneo
Region 10 * Cindy Shoemaker
Region 11 * David Lodge
Region 12 * Jacqueline Zayac
Region 13 * Tim White
To contact a district director,
visit acbl.org/boardofdirectors.
ver the past couple of months, you have been hearing from your executive
director about all the new initiatives she is implementing to encourage
more people to play bridge -whether they are already ACBL members or
are just now finding out what a great game this is! Your
ACBL Board is working hard to help her achieve her
goals and to have real progress to show by the end of
the year.
Upon becoming president, I wanted to make sure
our smaller board of 13 was well positioned to take on
the task of providing strategic direction and financial
oversight. To help accomplish this, I wanted all 13 to
be actively engaged in planning for our organization -
through the end of this year and into the years beyond.
At the highest level, we will be looking at membership,
financial stability and what the ACBL could look like
as we benefit from the initiatives management is implementing.
To
this end, I created several task forces to focus subMARGOT
HENNINGS
groups of the Board and management, with additional folks from the Advisory
Council sitting in, on specific strategic elements:
* Clubs, for both F2F and online, to understand best practices for providing
them information - both the content - what they want - and the medium - how
they get it, e.g., through email, the ACBL website or social media.
* Member Recruitment and Retention, to help identify metrics to measure
the success of management initiatives and conduct outreach to new and current
members so that we can provide members with what they want and need to
become involved.
* NABC Business Model, to delve into what our NABCs of the future can and
should look like. As part of the work of this task force, you will soon receive a survey
asking you what you value most about NABCs and what you would consider
indispensable if tradeoffs have to be made between function and cost, e.g., how
ACBL can provide the best value for you.
* Online Provider, to review how current services are provided for online
play, what services our players want most and the type of relationship we want
to have with our provider so that the strategic priorities of membership growth,
financial stability and the opportunity for future initiatives are easily accommodated.
The
Board is aiming for maximum flexibility for management to implement
new ideas while retaining the integrity of the rules and regulations that we need
to have in place to ensure consistency across our policies and events. So many
things have changed in the past few years; we need to take a hard look at our
existing rules and regulations to ensure they are still applicable to our current
state and future direction. We need to keep what we need and adapt others to
embrace the changed environment in which we find ourselves, including the
ways in which we as a Board operate, in order to increase our productivity and
efficiency.
Stand by for an update on all of this in June! It is intense yet exciting work, and
I look forward to keeping you informed.
April 2024 | Bridge Bulletin |
9
http://www.acbl.org/boardofdirectors
April 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of April 2024
