December 2020

December 17th 2020, San Francisco

Agenda

Opening Items

• Review Agenda & Vote [Ben]

• Vote to approve previous minutes [Ben]

Discussion Topics

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

1. Committee Updates

   1. Events

   2. Tech

   3. Board Development Committee

2. Ferry Building Update

3. Fundraising Update

4. Executive Performance Review [Caryn/Tom]

Closing Items

• Open for public comment

• Any other business?

Minutes

Scribe: Ben Ward

Present:

• Amanda Guest, Chair, Executive Director

• Caryn Kesler, Creative Director

• Tom Tierney, Vice Chair

• Ben Ward, Secretary, Technical Director

• Erika Delgado, Events Director

18:09 – Convene, Vote on Agenda & Previous Minutes

Vote YES to approve the November minutes.

Vote YES to adopt the proposed agenda.

18:11 – Committee Reports

• Events

  • In a fresh round of outreach to bands for future Bestie Bashes.

  • Amanda will be submitting a grant application specifically to fund Bestie Bashes on February 1st. As such, we want to get as many bands provisionally committed to take part in 2021 as we can before then, as that will strengthen that application.

• Tech

  • We’ve been able to get some more people involved in the tech side, BenGG and Natalie are exploring data projects.

  • We had some downtime last week for the first time in a very long time — unfortunately Digital Ocean had an outage at the same time as we were having some other leadership issues.

• Marketing

  • Meeting with Paul next week to discuss marketing matters, review analytics and Google Ads that ran in 2020.

• Fundraising

  • Two new members! Very exciting. Going to distribute grant writing between the three of us.

  • Hoping to get free access to a new grant research platform in January.

18:36 – Ferry Building Studio Update

• We have a date for an extension at the Ferry Building. We’ll have a month-to-month agreement through December 2021.

• We’re waiting on the final paperwork to lock it in.

• Updating the insurance to cover the full year 2021.

• Working on some relationships with people at the Ferry Building for on-air opportunities.

• We have a rental agreement at the Alley which is sufficiently advantageous that we think we’d keep the space as-is for the time being. That will be revisited in March. If it continues, we’ll likely stick with it.

• We need to give some thought as to how to try and bring the Alley Studios back online for broadcast alongside Studio F.

18:54 – Fundraiser Update

• We’re just under 50% to the goal. Doesn’t feel great. Last year where we made all the money in one day was much better!

• Confident we’ll hit $15K, but 25K goal feels unlikely, which is the difference we’d hoped to return to our savings.

• Met with Josef to talk about tactics for the remainder of the fundraising period. Also talking about how we can shift our model to be less dependent on these two big event fundraisers every year, and would like to more intentionally shift to an ongoing fundraising strategy — e.g. “bring in an extra $1000/month, every month”.

• A small thing once a month, rather than getting overwhelmed by two months a year being total fundraising.

• All things considered, we’re doing well under the circumstances. We just wish it was easier!

• Wish we had more people volunteering to help with running it.

19:06 – Executive Performance Review

• Tom has drafted cover letter and questionnaire form to send to project leads for feedback. Shared today and need review from others. Asking for feedback from those by the end of the month.

• We are running behind — had originally intended to have Amanda’s input collected by the 15th.

• Caryn and Tom will meet with Amanda after Christmas to gather her input.

• Board will meet to review and complete the process in early Jan.

19:31 — Meeting adjourned.

The next meeting of the BFF.fm board is scheduled for 6pm on January 21st 2021. See https://board.bff.fm for more information