October 2017

In attendance: Mai, Amanda, Forrest, Eddie, Will

Absent: Tom, Noel, Ben

Fundraising:

Mai has drafted some donation letters. They look good, but are still drafts. Mai would like to get some information out of Commit Change in order to be able to tie donations to purposes and time.

It would be best if this is ready for giving Tuesday, November 28 (the tuesday after Thanksgiving). Last year, we raised $3,090, and didn’t have a plan. Amanda would like the target to be $5,000.

Year to date, we’ve made $5,669.33 from commit change donations. We just did nightlife and got paid extra because our DJs dressed up like sharks, so we were paid $800 for that event.

If we go in with a target of $5,000, we should have met our goal for 2017 of $15,000 for the year.

End of year fundraising has been good for us, possibly for tax reasons, but also most stations do their fundraising in the spring.

Action Item: Amanda to import Kickstarter donators into Commit Change

Amanda doesn’t know much about fundraising other than what she’s learned from experimentation for BFF. Amanda would like to tell a story to set a theme around this campaign. From that theme, build some messaging for the campaign. Set some goals - an obvious one is X amount of dollars, but others may be get X new contributors or X number of new donations. Perhaps get a certain percentage to give again, if they’ve given before. Some other things to think about are: who is the campaign for? What are they interested in? We probably want to give them one other action to take other than donating, such as follow us social media, or passing out our newsletter to a friend who may be interested.

One thing we should consider is who is the campaign for. 70% of the listeners are between 28 and 42, they care about community radio, but we should consider what other things may get them excited so we can decide what we want to say.

Mai drafted her letters assuming they have given before, or somehow knows about us but haven’t given yet. Some nonprofits target strangers, but we probably aren’t there yet. We can probably assume that our listeners are probably well educated, or west coast residents. We will be targeting people who are ‘warm’. We won’t have to explain what a community radio station is, they should already know.

Will thinks the general direction is that there are so many reasons to feel divided, but the community around the radio station may be an antidote to that.

Mai says this on her show, but she’s coming at it as a place for diverse voices.

Eddie says it literally amplifies female voices and POC voices.

Amanda routinely inspects the schedule to ensure that there is diversity in viewpoints and voices.

Will was wondering if one of the fundraising letters could come directly from DJs, Amanda noted that the Kickstarter letters were filled with quotes on why BFF.fm is important to them.

Maybe we should do that again, or make a video showing how diverse the station is.

Mai doesn’t know that videos are worth the trouble of effort, since letters are so much simpler to put together, and DJs could write quotes and sign their section, or board members, or even Jane Whelan,

We may want to expand our artist IDs to show that we support the community.

Amanda thinks it may be a good idea to put together a list of bands who have appeared on the station. We generally have a positive remembrance for most artists.

Speaking of messaging, would it be worthwhile to draft some language for our DJs to use, like donation request scripts. During the kickstarter, some people just shared the links, and some people wrote a little blurb on why it was important. If a DJ wrote something good, the other DJs would either share or repurpose those to get the word out.

Action: Mai would like to draft some messages while she travels.

Amanda: would it be worth drafting some messages to give to family members, like dear mom, this is why I like BFF

Mai: It’s a little tricky, but that should be possible to do as well.

Will: did people do that last year?

Amanda: it varies from person to person, but Caryn’s sister asked her mom to donate to the station as a nice way to say she understands her daughter. That happened pretty organically, but it may be good to suggest that or something similar.

We have 79 shows, and roughly 1.5 times that many DJs.

Eddie: we should do a big airwaves event, maybe do a live broadcast

Mai: we already did that, Amanda did the broadcasts.

Amanda: I’d like to get the city involved so that we may be able to get them to fund it, like seattle does for KEXP.

Will: what do you mean by a campaign?

Amanda: we will want to set up a calendar, and tease giving tuesday, and then do one or more on giving tuesday to announce it and explain the progress over the course of the day.

Mai: I know we don’t get much money from this, but smile.amazon.com told me I gave about $14 to the station. We should announce this as well.

Action: Mai to send the information to Will

Will: we can prime giving Tuesday in the november email. Amanda and Mai think this is a good idea.

Mai: maybe we could set it up as why I support and then give some actions, like forward the newsletter, set up amazon smile, and support us on giving tuesday. Would the newsletter go out on November 20?

Will: I want to get the november email out before the first rite spot event, so it would be the first week of November.

Amanda: one per week would be fine, we could do a DJ profile, a board member profile, and

Action: mai to write something for people’s families, and a script

Amanda: another thing we can do during the fundraising campaign is an email to list our current supporters, so list some names or give someone who donates but isn’t related to someone.

For the total amount, I mentioned $5,000 because it should be super easy, but should we try to raise $10,000?

Will: if we could get 50 DJs to raise $100 each, that would be $5,000. That seems achievable.

Mai: you’d think so, but that can be difficult.

Amanda: I think we have a pretty good idea of mechanically what the campaign would entail. Should we throw around some theme ideas.

‘Making the Best even Better” - we call ourselves best frequencies, and win all these awards, but we can always do better with support

Playing off the idea of BFFs to support the messaging around community. Will: that’s what friends are for is a great song

“We’re Amplifying Voices - Literally” and making the theme that we are a platform for diverse voices. KEXP’s supporters are called the amplifiers giving club. Will: would our supporters just be called BFFs? Is that too obvious?

“We’re Here for You” or Hear for you, it could tie into listeners who are doing science in their labs, which is very solitary, or artists who work alone, and bands, because we provide a platform for bands. Will, Eddie like it. If the theme is we’re here for you, the ask is for them to be here for us, and give us money. Will: Lili’s show is literally therapy. Could we tie it to diversity.

Will: It seems like so often, all roads lead to trump. I don’t know how many female DJs we have, but if it’s over 40, that’s pretty impressive.

Amanda: We usually stay pretty balanced, but right now, it’s more male, about 50 male, 30 female, and then like 50-60% white, and then everyone else.

That’s why I was thinking a video was cool, it could be disingenuous to just say we’re so diverse without showing it. The kickstarter video really impressed some people because they didn’t realize there were so many people involved.

Will: I guess I’m just biased because it’s hard to get me to watch any video.

Amanda: it doesn’t need to be very long, maybe just a minute or actual ad length.

“BFF Djs are like vegans - they can’t wait to tell you”

Amanda: If we went with we’re here for you, amplifying voices could still work. We could actually use it in the messaging

Will: We’re here for you is a direct appeal to you

Amanda: Maybe we could change the here for and make it we <blank> you, like we’re making radio for you, or we’re going to shows with you.

Will: that’s the other point, do we want to say what it will be used for?

Mai: if we say it’s for a specific thing, we have to actually use it for a specific thing. If you say to keep the lights on, that’s good because it’s a general support fund.

Amanda: I think we’ll go with we’re here for you, but try to spin it out other ways. We need to get the stories we will share.

Will: I like we’re here for you as a recurring phrase.

Amanda: Yeah, it could be ‘We’re here for you, meet Mai’ and then Mai explains why she supports the organization and is impacted by it.

Let’s make ‘We’re Here for You’ the working theme, but if you have ideas on how to dress it up, let me know. I did also write down some of the things that came out of this. Also the other thing that I thought about was sometimes people, even if it’s not part of a specific thing, it would be nice to explain what their money does, like every $50 keeps a show on the air for one month.

Eddie: Is that appealing to the feed the children angle?

Amanda: yeah it’s like “I need money” and then the obvious question is “how much do you need” and then you can say $50 per show and then look at every show and see it costs $50,000.

Will: and also if you listen to three shows, then you could draw value that way

Amanda: the other thing on the list is that one of the recommendations is to create a sense of urgency so the person is compelled to give in that moment. Is the end of the year enough?

Mai: I think it is; you don’t want to try to compete with real emergencies. You could just say could you help us with this, if we have 5 more people, we could get to 10 today.

Amanda: Other thoughts?

Mai: we have the calendar, do we know when emails will be going out? There was a mention of what people can give to their family members. We need to get the export out of paypal and kickstarter, what are we thinking in terms of when the letters can go out. Are we going to start the first week of november?

Will: I think we could, although it is several weeks.

Mai: I’m going to also ask people to setup their amazon smile link, since they will be shopping for black friday

Action: Mai to write smile blurb, giving tuesday blurb

Amanda: We can do a quick blurb in the newsletter, but the week before thanksgiving, we could send something that explains giving tuesday, black friday and cyber monday. That was, on giving tuesday, you’d send out an email that says ‘it’s giving tuesday now’ and on cyber monday, send out the amazon smile blurb.

Action: Amanda will work to give Will information on DJ profiles, band profiles, etc. Each week in december

Will: Is mai going to send this, or should I help you format them?

Mai: I’m just writing the content, but I don’t have the capability to send the email.

Amanda: if will wants to format and send them out, we can just schedule them in mailchimp. You can also see the templates we used for kickstarter, if you want.

Mai: I’m just writing the content and I’ll write the additional content. I’ll send the blurbs before I leave, and the email format while I’m in iceland.

I can write more; I have a million ways to say please give me money. Just let me know what you’re looking for.

Amanda: when you make the letter, the letters will be sent as mai, right?

Mai: One of them is you (Amanda): why we’re awesome. The others could come from the board members. You’d have more of the insight into the past four years. The other could be me, or anyone else as a board member.

Amanda: can I change the wording? While I like the word, I wouldn’t use largess in normal conversation.

Mai: The actual words don’t matter as long as the general structure is the same, like constantly thanking or asking.

Is there a calendar made?

Action: Amanda to set up an editorial calendar, with mailings scheduled.

Mai: that would help me a lot, I use calendars all the time.

Eddie, what are you going to do? Can you promise to send it out to 50 of your friends?

Amanda: would you be able to help with a video?

Eddie: yeah, sure!

Amanda: just let me know when you’re here, and I’ll reach out to the DJs and see who wants to be part of something like this. Here’s my idea, and you can suggest other things, which is to just have DJs putting their headphones on, or do something silly like have them talking into cans on strings.

Eddie: I’d love to help, but I’d need someone to collaborate with, because I don’t think I can handle directing and everything.

Amanda: it can be short, like 2-3 minutes. Radiotopia did one last year, and they did one that had a bunch of mix tapes and someone saying ‘I used to exhcange mix tapes as a kid’

Action: Eddie to film a video showing DJs

Action: Amanda to get DJs to appear in a video and assist with direction.

Eddie: I’m happy to help, but I will be busy until the 16th.

Amanda: I was thinking between the 16th and the 22nd.

Eddie: it shouldn’t be too hard if we know what we need.

Will: it sounds like we aren’t planning on doing a giveaway, which is fine.

Amanda: yeah, we have the standard stuff we do for a giveaway, but we don’t have the time or resources to do anything new.

Will: like a tote bag?

Amanda: last year, my friend made tote bags, which we she sold and gave the money to BFF. I was thinking it would be nice to do something similar. If they gave like $50, I sent them a note and asked if they wanted a T shirt.

Forrest: we aren’t making anything special, right? And if you do give things away, it will come out of back stock, and you aren’t going to have new things made, right?

Amanda: yeah, maybe it’s a way to reduce the stock on hand of the enamel pins.

As an aside, Tom asked what he could do for giving tuesday, and I tasked him with finding a corporate sponsor to match donations. He had a couple people in mind that he could ask.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:45 PM.