The following email was forwarded to ICANN Community Leaders by Robert Hoggarth and Janice Douma Lange on 14 April 2016.
Dear Community Leaders:
For your information, the purpose of this communication is threefold:
- Transmit the Community Regional Outreach Pilot Program (CROPP) Administrator’s Summary Report (attached PDF) highlighting the processes and outcomes for Fiscal Year 2015;
- Provide interim results for CROPP-FY16; and
- Advise you of the status of efforts to continue the program in FY17.
CROPP-FY15 Administrator’s Report
Attached you will find a report of ICANN’s experience after completion of CROPP’s second full pilot cycle. We wanted to make sure that all you program veterans as well as some of the new members of the group had this background resource. It is a good summary of the efforts your communities made last year to improve the program’s capabilities. The report contains five chapters including: 1-Executive Summary, 2-Pilot Program Background and Overview, 3-Results and Outcomes-FY15, and 4-Program Review. [Note: This Report is also readable and downloadable via the ICANN Community Wiki on the CROPP-FY15 Communications page: https://community.icann.org/x/pIdlAw].
The report is intended to be an exhaustive analysis of the program and, we believe, is largely self-explanatory. As a result, we will not take time in this transmittal to replicate the findings except to highlight the following key results:
The program achieved 76% of its original plan meaning that, of the 50 budgeted travel allocations, there were 38 completed trips - representing a 211% increase over FY14’s results -
- The At-Large RALOs confirmed 24 travelers (96%); the GNSO Constituencies approved 14 travelers (56%).
- Of the eight (8) operational ICANN regions identified for CROPP, trip events (29) occurred in 6 of those regions.
As reflected in the Administrator’s Report, CROPP-FY15 is considered to have been a highly successful year in terms of quantitative and qualitative accomplishments. We would welcome any insights or feedback you have about the program’s results or about the report's format and substance.
CROPP-FY16 Progress To-Date
As of 17 April 2016, we will have completed 9.5 months of CROPP-FY16, which commenced officially on 1 July 2015. The following table shows results at this milestone:
CROPP-FY16 Activities | At-Large | GNSO | Total | |||
Outreach Strategic Plans Approved | 5 | 100% | 4 | 80% | 9 | 90% |
Trip Proposals (Events) Approved | 10 | -- | 4 | -- | 14 | -- |
Travelers Approved | 13 | 52% | 8 (*) | 32% | 21 | 42% |
Travelers Pending Approval | 3 | -- | 0 | -- | 3 | -- |
(*) The BC opted for the single outreach engagement event in lieu of 5 individual trips. That event was completed in September 2015; therefore, the BC is credited with having utilized its 5 trip authorizations for the purposes of reporting overall CROPP statistics.
With nearly 80% of the CROPP-FY16 cycle elapsed, the number of approved travelers has reached about half that level (42%). Part of the explanation for the lower utilization rate so far this fiscal year may be attributable to the added prerequisite in FY16 that each ICANN structure complete an Outreach Strategic Plan. Those documents took somewhat longer to be drafted and approved by individual communities than was initially envisioned. Hopefully, now that most of them are completed, there will be new momentum in identifying outreach events during the final stages of the FY16 program cycle.
Please note that the end of the fiscal year is approaching fast and remaining available FY16 CROPP trips must be taken during the FY16 fiscal year. With the 6-week operational deadline (before the date of a trip activity) for formal submission and approval of all trip proposals, please make sure any end-of-year activities are in the pipeline for submission as soon as possible.
Prospects for the Program in FY17
From our objective observations, the Program Administrators continue to be bullish about the value of CROPP in helping to further ICANN’s global outreach goals. We greatly appreciate the effort your communities have undertaken to document specific plans and objectives in collaboration with the appropriate regional engagement leaders.
As a result, we have recommended to ICANN senior leadership that the program be continued in FY17. As with past years we anticipate some evolution of the program – offering more flexibility where it seems warranted from experience. Assuming that the program will be renewed (and that is not guaranteed), one key factor of the FY16 program will continue – the submission of a community outreach and engagement strategic plans. To be ready for early FY17 trips – those plans must be updated for FY17. If you have not started that process yet, we encourage you to do so as soon as possible. The regional engagement teams found such documents invaluable in connecting individual trip proposals with a longer arc of proposed work. We hope that your individual communities have also benefited from these planning exercises and will become more comfortable with them over time.
We welcome additional dialogue, input, and ideas from all of you as to how we can continue to improve and maximize CROPP’s utilization for your community outreach and engagement efforts.
Warm regards,
Rob Hoggarth and Janice Douma Lange
CROPP Program Administrators
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Robert Hoggarth | Senior Director Policy and Community Engagement
ICANN | Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
801 17th Street NW, Suite 400 | Washington, DC 20006
