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The meeting began at 12 p.m. with the approval of the Sept. 27, 2019 meeting minutes. It was agreed to go ahead and post the minutes after second, more high level version is created..
The budget that was presented was dated to Oct. 31, 2019. Revenue decreased by $24,292 from the same point last year, and this was mainly due to the increase in opt-outs due to the student's choice initiative. Expenses decreased by $48,242 due largely to the decrease in IT and Administrative support. Other savings came from the transition to the Microsoft suite for all of Prism's file administration and messaging needs as these services do not cost Prism anything due to the school’s agreement with Microsoft. In order to continue reducing costs, Prism will be looking into reducing the number of Bloomberg terminals. Potential new costs could come from purchasing Adobe, SAP and Nielsen licenses.
Prism’s marginal revenue is based on an average student base of 9272 annual members. Prism’s executive team was divided on if the fee should be raised and what it would be raised to. The Prism fee is being reevaluated for two reasons. The first is that the Prism fee has not been adjusted for inflation since it was created. The second reason for raising the fee is to enhance Prism’s services. Potential uses of this revenue would be to fund a new ERP, purchase CapIQ and develop courses for it, add Adobe courses and software, and add other training software and courses. The exact breakdown of the cost has yet to be determined. No conclusive decision was made and it was decided that further research is needed before decision is made whether or not the fee should be raised. As of now the budget has been balanced.
There were no significant changes to the End of Term Survey Report. Amir, the Data Analyst analyzed the opt-in and opt-out reports and discovered that zero automatically opt-ed in students who opted out using the student choice initiative, opted back in at the desk during the semester. Moving onto the breakdown of opt-ins of non-automatically opt-ed in students,, this semester there was a significant increase in Master and PhD student opt ins. Data Analyst will now be undertaking projects to bring more marketing and training analytics.
The idea of the Stata discount is to offer 6-month licenses of Stata 16 SE at a discount of $45 to our members. We would purchase 50 licenses from Stata and sell it to our students at cost. The students this would benefit would be the Master of Arts in Business Economics and students taking EC395 and EC495. Michael suggested that we gain more student feedback from the Economics club. Helena suggested that we get insight from 1st and 2nd year Economics students. Martin also suggested that we investigate what would happen if Stata 17 came out.