March 2020

March 26th 2020, San Francisco

AGENDA

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

1. Review Agenda [Ben]

2. COVID-19

3. Quarterly Board Meetings [Amanda]

4. Committees [Amanda]

5. Board Recruitment [Amanda]

6. Performance evaluation recap [Will]

7. Evaluation process and format [All]

8. General BFF.fm has been doing! [Will]

MINUTES

Scribe: Ben Ward

Present:

• Amanda Guest, General Manager

• Ben Ward, Secretary, Technical Director

• Will Craven, President of the Board

• Tom Tierney

18:09 - COVID-19

• Studio is closed

• No impact as yet on donations or dues. We’re on track with where we were last year.

18:12 - Quarterly Board Meetings & Committees

• Noted in the feedback cycle that we need more people involved to help us scale.

• We’re falling behind on the strategic initiative to establish committees:

  • Important as it creates a pipeline for future board members

  • Important as it gets more people involved.

• If we shift the board schedule to quarterly meetings, but we’d expect the committees to meet monthly and send notes around to the board, and review committee goals/objectives at the board meetings.

• We should put a board member on each committee to kick start the process, reducing board meetings makes time.

• Next steps:

  • With each committee, review goals for the committee chair and Amanda.

  • Board votes to establish quarterly schedule in Q2.

  • Board members to be allocated to committees to chair:

    • Ben: Tech (already serving)

    • Will: Marketing

    • Tom: Fundraising

    • Amanda: Board Oversight

• New job descriptions for each board member have been drafted. Will review and vote to ratify at the next meeting.

  • Proposes to adjust the structure to reflect the reality of our roles: Amanda would assume the new title of “President”, Will would become “Chairperson” to split the conflicting aspects of the old President role.

18:42 - Board Recruitment

• Amanda worked with Josef to create a board matrix, mapping members, roles, and skills.

• Recruitment job description put together.

• Shortlist created of possible candidates, approaches pending.

• Goal to get 2-3 new people on the board by end of 2020

• Will and Tom’s terms expire this year. There are no limits on the number of terms.

• All board members to take an action item to consider people they might nominate to the board.

• Amanda reviewed the current shortlist and outreach status for each.

19:14 - Performance Evaluation Recap

• Will & Amanda met last week to deliver her annual report. Positive review.

• We have an open question on Amanda’s raise and how it fits with annual budgeting.

19:32 - Performance review process

• Noted that this process felt cold/alienating, could have included more personal/less formal contact.

  • Board were concerned at trying to find representative input and prioritised separating this process from personal friendships

  • But, communications with Amanda were confusing, tonally cold.

• The process took too long to execute — especially after kick-off, such that progress was unclear.

• “Possibly the process was overly thorough.”

• Parts of the requests for self-feedback lacked clarity, and weren’t clarified during the process.

• Disappointing level of engagement from those asked to provide feedback.

• Goals of the process weren’t clearly enough laid out to start, nor clarified during the process.

• Need to consider how organizational goals and personal goals are captured for measurement.

  • We lacked objective goals for this first review as none had previously been established.

What will we do next time:

• Have a kick-off conversation with Amanda to review the process.

• Amanda should have 2020 goals set by the end of April, which will then correspond to the review.

• Next review will correspond to setting the 2021 budget in Q4 2020 — so likely planning the process at the end of Q3.

• Salary-review wise: We need to be all educated in the budgeting process to ensure alignment over the method of calculating salary.

• We’ll consider alternative approaches for getting community feedback.

20:23 - Spring Fundraiser

• Going ahead as planned, despite COVID-19: Fundraising will kick off on April 15th, run through May/June. Split the target into two stages, with a second round in August.

Any Other Business

• Calling out how great the community has been under the pandemic situations. Keeping broadcasting, financial support to other DJs, and so on.

ACTION ITEMS

• All

  • Review board job descriptions in advance of next month.

  • Consider people to nominate to the board — suggestions due June 1st; email Amanda as you go.

• Amanda

  • Have meetings with each committee lead to set goals.

  • Set your own goals for review next month.

  • Meet with Paul & Vicky about Google AdWords project

• Ben

  • Share previous minutes with the board for ratification.

  • Fixing shared access to the board drive.

  • Check out KBOO’s minutes for comparison to ours.

  • Meet with Amanda about tech committee goals.

• Tom

  • Meet with Amanda about Fundraising committee goals.

  • Watch for real estate opportunities.

• Will

  • Meet with Amanda about Market & PR committee goals.

20:45 — Meeting adjourned.