The British Society for Immunology is committed to supporting our immunology community to drive forward scientific discovery and in turn improve health outcomes. As we make progress on our current strategic plan, we will work with and for our membership to deliver for immunology and the wider community. Here, our Director of Finance, Membership and Publishing, Otto Balsiger, outlines some of the changes in the Society’s activities over the last five years, and the impact of these on the BSI’s finances.
Our spending explained
Over the last few years, driven by our strategy for the period 2021 to 2025, we significantly increased and expanded our work to provide support for our community, and to represent immunology to the wider world. A key part of this work has been to keep a tight watch on our finances and ensure the future long-term financial sustainability of the organisation.
Most of our income is used to fund activities under the three main strands of our strategy: connecting communities, championing careers and catalysing change. For example, we generate opportunities for our members to connect with others, establish collaborations and grow their skill sets in a supportive environment. Our flagship event, the BSI Congress, together with the annual comprehensive programme of Regional and Affinity Group meetings, is by far our biggest cost. Following our merger last year with UKPIN, we now also support the activities of our newly formed Clinical Immunology Professional Network (BSI-CIPN) and its annual conference.
Membership services are our next biggest area of spending, and these include the wide range of awards and grants that we offer to members, including our popular Conference Travel Grants which help with the cost of event attendance. During this strategic cycle, and responding to the needs of our membership, we also introduced our popular Career Enhancing Grants, to support our members in positive career development. Additionally, we carry out a variety of activities to influence and improve the external environment so that immunology can thrive and deliver positive outcomes for health. This includes our portfolio of policy and public engagement activities, often in collaboration with sections of our membership and with wider research projects. Finally, the last main area of cost is the publishing of our BSI portfolio of scientific journals, Clinical & Experimental Immunology, Immunotherapy Advances and Discovery Immunology, which facilitate innovation and research dissemination.
How are we funded?
A strong theme from our current strategy is to ensure our long-term financial situation is in good shape and to deliver our income diversification plan to reduce over-reliance on journal income. This will help ensure we are financially secure to support future generations of immunologists. This work has been progressing very successfully, and means we have seen a big shift in our income sources over the past few years. For example, in the 2018–19 financial year (a year in which BSI Congress took place) we received 64% of our income from our established journals. This was followed by our Congress and events income at 22%, with the remaining 14% of our income split between membership, investments and our corporate and partnership work.
However, our budget for 2024–2025 looks very different, as can be seen in Figure 1. With an expected overall income of £2.4 million (almost 10% more than 2018–19), the budget also demonstrates a distinct increase in the diversity of the main income streams.
Most noticeably, there has been a significant planned reduction in our journal income following previously publicised changes in our publishing portfolio. In 2021 we evolved our publishing strategy to focus on developing journals wholly owned by the Society. These changes resulted in the current strong BSI family of journals, all published by Oxford University Press, with three excellent platforms for research dissemination: our hybrid journal Clinical & Experimental Immunology and our two Open Access journals launched in the last four years, Immunotherapy Advances and Discovery Immunology. As a result of these changes, our journal portfolio will contribute 36% of our total income in the 2024–25 budget. These planned changes mean we now have a strong, diverse and modern journal offering for our members, which provides the BSI with a stable income stream, but one on which we are not overly reliant.
As 2024–25 is a non-Congress year, our budget for this comprises more diverse funding. Our second largest income stream reflects the expansion of our activities and the income received for our work supporting external research projects, such as the CARINA Network on the immunology of ageing. Funded projects are an important new source of income for the Society, an area that we expect to develop in the coming years as we build relationships with our project partners and funders.
As part of our income diversification plans, we have also been hard at work developing and delivering a new training function within the BSI. One early result of this has been our hugely successful bioinformatics training run in partnership with the Glasgow Bioinformatics Core. This suite of courses attracted over 360 attendees last year, with excellent feedback from delegates. This year, we have continued to develop our course portfolio, with pilots run in areas including immunotherapy in clinical practice. With a strong growth plan in place, we expect income from all training courses to account for 13% of BSI total income next year.
Another addition to BSI activities is the creation of the BSI Clinical Immunology Professional Network (BSI-CIPN), following our successful merger with UKPIN. The BSI-CIPN forms an integral part of our current strategy to boost oursupport of the clinical immunology community, and also opens up new opportunities to generate income, including through the annual BSI-CIPN conference.
Income from all the activities listed above is crucial in allowing us to deliver on our charity remit and provide the strong support to members that the BSI is renowned for. It might surprise you that, in a typical year, membership fees only constitute a small percentage of our income – generally around 5%. This means that in themselves, they do not cover the cost of the many services we provide to members, such as grants, reduced fees to meetings/events and career support, which are all subsidised through income generated from other activities.
How have we been securing our financial stability?
To deliver our ambitious strategic aims, we need to maintain the BSI as a sector-leading organisation, and financial sustainability is key to this. Like many learned societies, our journals have traditionally provided a high level of stable income and, together with the strong performance of our investments, this allowed us to grow the BSI reserves to almost £5m in 2021. Figure 2 shows our well thought out plans to use some of our reserves to support the income diversification outlined above, and to provide initial financial support to develop the new long-term sources of income for the Society. Some of our reserves have also been used to further support our members in specific areas, such as through new initiatives like our Career Enhancing Grants.
Overall, the BSI has had a great deal of success generating new sources of income over a relatively short period of time. Figure 3 shows the net contribution of these new activities to our funding.
The development of new income streams can take time as there is often a delay between investment and return, requiring the use of reserves. They have been built up for exactly this purpose and their use has been carefully planned to ensure they are used in the most effective way while ensuring the financial sustainability of the BSI.
Overall, our efforts to ensure that the BSI has a range of reliable, long-term income streams that support our overall mission is working. Despite challenging external factors, including the pandemic and changes to the publishing sector, the BSI is leading the way within the learned society sector to act innovatively to successfully develop sustainable and long-term new income streams. Ultimately, this will ensure the future prosperity of our organisation, meaning we can effectively support future generations of immunologists.
Otto Balsiger, Director of Finance, Membership and Publishing