CASL’s (Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation) three-year transition period ends on July 1st, 2017. Before you celebrate our sesquicentennial, you might want to call your insurance broker, lawyer, and IT professional—plus, educate yourself and all your employees. What is CASL? On Canada Day 2014, CASL came into effect. It applies to “commercial electronic messages” (CEMs), which are […]
Is your association management company doing what they are contracted to do in their scope of work? Are they doing it in the right way? How important are surveys? “What gets measured gets improved,” is management guru Peter Drucker’s answer. An annual survey of board members is a useful way to help your association management […]
“It’s no longer if you are going to have a cybersecurity event, it is when.” This grim prediction comes from the co-author of the Guide for Cybersecurity Event Recovery published by the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. What is Cyber Risk “Cyber risk means any risk of financial loss, disruption […]
The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) publishes two guides for not-for-profit organizations (NFP): GST/HST Information for Non-Profit Organizations and GST/HST Information for Charities. CRA’s rules about GST/HST registration are at best complex for NFP organizations who are exempt from income tax—and even more so for registered charities. The goal of this article is to highlight some […]
This purpose of this article is to suggest tactics to obtain the best price, for the correct product, from the right supplier. Determining the best price involves much more that just finding the lowest price. Do You Always Ask Your Suppliers If They Have Special Pricing for Associations or Registered Charities? Many suppliers of goods […]
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers accountants.” These words were not spoken by the butcher in Shakespeare’s Henry The Sixth Part 2, rather they are from the mouth of a new treasurer of a not-for-profit association or registered charity who mistakenly thought that taxes and not-for-profit are mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, “exempt […]
The cancellation of the 2012 New York City Marathon, due to Superstorm Sandy, was disappointing to the approximately 47,000 runners who dedicated months to train for the race, many of whom had already spent a significant amount of time and money to register and travel to New York for its cancellation. “For the New York […]
A standardized file folder naming system, for both electronic and hard copy/paper documents, has many benefits that go beyond making it easier to find things, such as efficiency in training new staff, and reduced misfiling. Below is an overview of the system used by Strauss for association record keeping that you might find valuable as […]
Sponsorships The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has a published a guide GST/HST Information for Non-Profit Organizations; however, its section on sponsorships does not offer clear-cut information about sales tax on sponsorships. As an association management company, we add GST/HST to all sponsorships sold by our association clients, except under very special circumstances. We urge you […]
Your organization or association needs the protection insurance offers, for all of its events, even if you believe “there is no way that we could be at fault.” There are several varieties of insurance – read on to find out which (and possibly all) are right for your event. Commercial General Liability (CGL) Insurance “A […]