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October 21st 2021, San Francisco |
- Review Agenda & Vote [Secretary]
- Vote to approve previous minutes [Secretary]
- Committee Updates
- Review Previous Action Items
- Potential 2022 project: BFF.fm Educational Workshops (guest: Lydia)
- Selecting 2022 projects
- Financial controls
- Vote to give Jenn access to bank accounts, checkbook, removing Forrest
- End of year fundraising (cont’d)
- Review donor roll
- Open for public comment [Chair]
- Any other business? [Chair]
Scribe: Caryn Kesler
Present:
- Erika Delgado, Events Director
- Amanda Guest, Chair, Executive Director
- Caryn Kesler, Vice Chair, Creative Director
- Jenn Lemon, Treasurer
- Clair McDevitt, Chair of Fundraising Committee
Guests:
- Lydia Chong
Absent:
- Ben Ward, Secretary, Technical Director
- Brandon Paski, Chair of Marketing Committee
{% hint style="success" %} Vote YES to approve the September minutes. {% endhint %}
{% hint style="success" %} Vote YES to adopt the proposed agenda. {% endhint %}
Bestie Bash: First show live from the Complex
Next month booked: Diners
The Complex is looking for more streaming content, Amanda reaching out to DJs to see if they would be interested in creating content, also if someone is interested in editing the show
Brandon talking to Bottom of the Hill
Giveaway form is a google doc now
- Grants for the Arts update
- Board suggestions for people to invite to the fundraising committee.
- Have applied for 12 grants, waiting to hear back on 3, received 5
- $10k from Grants for the Arts
- Potentially 1-2 more to submit before end of year
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Engagement with Public Media Apps for app development has started. For updates see under “Action Items” below.
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Tech Committee held our first meeting tentatively in the new Committee format. The fundamentals of the format make sense and were fairly well received.
Would recommend that future committees plan a special meeting to intro the structure (or maybe do it as a station-wide/cross-committee presentation) since the attempt to present the format while also following a regular agenda simply didn’t fit into an hour and caused the whole thing to be rushed.
Not clear if we have any candidates to be the chair and secretary positions at this time. Will speak to Lydia about whether she’d be interested in continuing the shared role we discussed before the new model was proposed in order to keep things operating if can’t fill the positions. (Personally, I am still considering whether to stand for committee chair myself given previous time commitments have been a challenge and this is an opportunity to get other people involved.)
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Revived and launched the “Winnertron 4000” — a Google Sheet–powered backend for running our Ticket Giveaways and contests. This should make it more reliable for people to enter contests (rather than the flakey email hook we used before), and provides a way for people to consent to joining our mailing list.
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There are still some automation reliability issues. Trying to prioritise some time for improvements to that.
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Lydia implemented day part configuration in our Empire stats, allowing schedule window stats to be viewed. We also enabled Chartable stats for podcasts/archives for all shows by default. Not totally clear what the next steps are for that, but we can look to adopt it into the Project/Activity structure for the committee at the next meeting.
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We’ve been able to use the Broadcast Server to improve our metadata integration with TuneIn and Last.FM (https://last.fm/user/bffdotfm to check out some listening stats.)
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Forrest has requested $1200 to replace the PC in Studio A. It’s 5 years old, so on schedule for replacement. Could also be cited as a need in grant proposals.
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Considering pitching that we subscribe to Trello — a project management app. Probably about $25-50/month.
We’ve used the free tier within tech projects for a while, but there are onboarding limitations and user limits that make it harder to deploy more widely. It could be a valuable tool for all station activities, which is what I’d like to determine. If anyone has thoughts on that, and would like to give feedback to help with that assessment, please ping me in Slack.
Consider checking in on board tenure and positions at the beginning of next year as a part of the conversation about about expanding the board in 2022
Nothing this month
- Renewal of our license as a California registered charity needs to be resubmitted
- Jen working on reconciling transactions in Quickbooks, Stripe is syncing more succinctly
- Completed
- Rolling over
- Rolling over
- Rolling over
Ben: Caryn provided some feedback in our meeting and was included in an exchange with Pete Baker prior to us signing the contract with Public Media Apps.
- Rolling over Apple Pay
Kindful does support “Express Payments” (one-tap payment via Apple Pay, Google Pay, Microsoft Pay, etc.), but only when using their “Bloomerang” payment gateway. We currently use the Stripe gateway, and therefore the function isn’t available.
They do not currently have a timetable to extend this support to third party Payment Gateways, and would not clarify for me whether it was an intentional product incentive on their part that they hadn’t already done so.
A comparison for Bloomerang vs. Stripe is here: https://support.kindful.com/hc/en-us/articles/360060467153-Bloomerang-Payments-vs-Stripe. The rates are the same, it offers card number change handling for free, and Bloomerang is in fact powered by Stripe in the background, so ought to be equally reliable.
The operational cost of switching gateways is slightly complicated:
- Switching gateways seems highly costly and undesirable, as it would require us to re-register existing backers credit card details.
- However, Kindful say that it is also possible to use both gateways simultaneously, for different payment methods and therefore to use Bloomerang for future transactions while keeping Stripe for existing ones. We’d need to understand if doing that would add material complexity to our accounting processes — Jenn?
If switching is manageable, it could be a quick win. Given our listeners are mostly based in tech-nerd–central, I’d wager adoption of this technology is going to be disproportionately high. Furthermore, we might want to prioritise it in order to have less-friction in collecting donations via the forthcoming mobile app.
- Completed
We’ve signed the paperwork with Public Media Apps and are proceeding to be introduced to their team in order to get things moving. PMA have been given access to our developer accounts on Apple and Google platforms.
I have a call with our contact there (Wyatt) tomorrow, and will aim to provide them with the first wave of assets and colour references. They’ll then make a first pass at the app skeleton, and we’ll set up a milestone schedule to review as a wider group as we iterate toward a beta test in November/December.
Looking to determine what new data feeds and web design changes we’ll need to power it. Also still waiting on an invoice from Vllg (our typeface maker) to get a font license — the person on the other end of the support request there has gone silent.
Discussion of committee process and how to help committees prioritize which projects to focus on
App project considered as a good blueprint for how committee projects should be rolled out
Proposal: Lydia here to talk about a separate committee around educational programming
Should we create an educational committee? Who on the board or community would want to take that up? How do we structure it and what process do we put in place? How would it further our mission?
Lydia to synthesize feedback for next steps of a committee proposal for the board to consider.
The Board might be better served by focusing on already existing committees. Do Lydia’s ideas need a committee? We’ll invite her back to talk about ideas for workshops and skillsharing.
Would Lydia be interested in a proposal for a trial run series of workshops or skillshares in Spring/Summer 2022?
The Board to vote to give Jen financial control instead of Forrest
{% hint style="success" %} Vote YES to give Jen access to the bank account and checkbook. {% endhint %}
We should discuss appropriate flow for approvals in the future
Vote to remove Forrest for financial controls?
{% hint style="warning" %} NO, not voting {% endhint %}
Looking at timeline from previous year
Time for the Board to consider their end of year gifts and who they can reach out to
Jen: is there a script/template for fundraising emails?
Clair to the rescue, Amanda has some old templates as well
Reaching out to previous Besties or Besties with a different email via email
Deadline: Mid-November, emails should have gone out
Eddie: Shirt idea
Devolved into conversation about Gen Z and pants.
- No public comments this month.
- No
The next meeting of the BFF.fm board is scheduled for 6pm on November 18th 2021. See https://board.bff.fm for more information.
- Eddie: shirt idea
- Board: fundraising email
- Lydia: new proposal
- New turntable cabinet, lol