August 2020

August 20th 2020, San Francisco

Agenda

Prior to the meeting, please add items for discussion here:

Scribe: Ben Ward

Present:

Absent:

Board unanimously votes YES to proceed.

Virtual Bestie Bash last night. +10 viewers over last time, +12 stayed for the entire time over last time. (30 attendees for the whole event, 40 at peak.)
We like the Twitch chat, definitely good community activity.
Erika: We should definitely write a script for next time
We have bands lined up for future events; so we’d hope to run another event in September.
Caryn complements Erika’s sweater — it’s an old shirt with a patch attached.
Ben: Would still like us to run one of these on YouTube, given that we use YouTube for our static video; it’s great that we’re having a good time with Twitch, but it would be valuable to understand how YouTube behaves given that we’re committed to putting content on there too.
It was long — we might want to pay more attention to the length of sets in future.
Maybe have Ash come to the next board meeting to present how we might make better use of YouTube.

Work in progress on the podcast network continues; lots of general website improvements are getting wrapped up in it — so that’s good. Hoping to deploy and start seeing visible changes very soon.
We want to focus to have something visible appear in time for September 1st.
Caryn and Amanda will have a meeting about marketing assets for it.

We discussed doing a $7000 fundraising event for the 7th birthday; however, our target list doesn’t add up to that, and we’re struggling to make that add up given our past experience also probably won’t bring in the full potential amount.
New listener acquisition — most people don’t listen. So we could consider trying to pull in new donors; but, that seems really hard in the present circumstances.
We’re strategizing on other things we could do.
The budget is running behind; it’s not a danger but we could find ourselves falling short of the budget growth plan, close to break-even for the year.
We’ll continue doing the marketing and promotion around the birthday event. But setting lower expectations for the result.
We haven’t made the leap yet of having a reserve of high-impact donors who would be able to help reach these goals.

Amanda: That discussion wound up influencing my thinking about the longer-term strategy for the Podcast network; how do we make it reflective of our values and ambitions; encompassing everything we do. We want to see a collaborative model develop to help the network grow, and try to ensure that we get a more diverse group of people involved in the running of it as early as we can.
We want to set up a process for people to apply to have their podcast on the network — similar to how people apply to become DJs. Then set up new podcasters with a mentor from the existing community of podcasters, to help people grow as podcasters and grow in the community.
If this proves effective, would love to see this influence our DJ onboarding process too, since right now Amanda ends up doing all the training.
Create opportunity to have people help onboard people into the station/network from people in their own communities, make the process more equitable. With Podcasts, try to build that culture from the outset.

Amanda had an action item last month to restate her goals based on the station initiatives, from feedback from last month. Defer follow for next month.

Ferry Building has given us the go ahead for setting up an installation in the booth at the Ferry Building.
We’d pitched doing it for a month, we have it for the rest of 2020, we re-evaluation in January. It’s free for this period, due to COVID. It’s official though; we’re signing a tenancy agreement.
We’re still trying to figure out the actual programming ideas for the space — people doing their regular shows in the space? Can we broadcast the music out into the space? Can we collaborate with nearby tenants?
We don’t have much budget for this, which is the other constraint we’re working with. We need to purchase insurance (details forthcoming.) We do have all the radio equipment we’d need though, leftover from the ATA installation.
Optimistic that getting in before San Francisco is reopened sets us up to grow into live events and take advantage of increased Ferry Building visitor numbers if/when that happens.

We’ll have a sense in about 10 days if this is definitely happening (legal docs to review, insurance cost still needs to be quoted.)

Could be part of our birthday announcement.

The next meeting of the BFF.fm board is scheduled for 6pm on September 17th. See https://board.bff.fm for more information.

Last updated 4 years ago