May 2021
May 20th 2021, San Francisco (Remote)
Agenda
Opening Items
Review Agenda & Vote [Secretary]
Vote to approve previous minutes [Secretary]
Discussion Topics
Committee Updates
Review Action Items
[Amanda] Get Tom a gift
[Amanda] Prepare updates to strategic plan
[Everyone] Plan a tiny fundraising activity
Returning to studios
Partnerships
Scavenger Hunt
Closing Items
Open for public comment
Any other business?
Minutes
Scribe: Caryn Kesler
Present:
Erika Delgado, Events Director
Amanda Guest, Chair, Executive Director
Caryn Kesler, Vice Chair, Creative Director
Jenn Lemon, Treasurer
Brandon Paski
Absent:
Ben Ward, Secretary, Technical Director
18:05 — Convene, Vote on Agenda & Previous Minutes
Voted YES to approve the April minutes.
Voted YES to adopt the proposed agenda.
18:11 — Committee Updates
Events
Eddie: had besties bash on wednesday with Trash Vampire. It was a good show. Great job to Amanda for helping out with the show.
Amanda: attendance was down a little bit from the last one, but attendance tends to fluctuate anyway. It was still higher attendance than the event 2 months ago, though, so no reason to be alarmed.
Amanda: I talked to a new DJ who’s joining the station from KXSF, he’s interested in joining the events committee and helping with live streaming. Has a lot of band connects who are reaching out to him. He wants to talk to Light Rail studio and maybe partnering with a venue. Has some camera equipment, whereas we don’t. I talked to Noel to try to figure out what we’d need.
Amanda: I have a camera that looks like multiple camera angles, might get that out to do some experimenting.
Eddie: Which venues do we have strong connections with?
Amanda: Lost Church could be cool.
Eddie: We’re thinking of other ways to have live events outdoors now, if anyone has some ideas.
Jen is emailing a connect about doing things outside, there’s a discount for not-for-profits. Not sure what the pricing is yet.
Marketing
Brandon: working on getting sponsors for the scavenger hunt, chatting with Live Nation. They’re interested in working with us. Also talked to Another Planet for prizes and ticket giveaways. This is my priority for the next month.
Reached out to Paul for google ad stuff, but he’s on vacation. Working on some other partnerships.
Fundraising
Clair and Amanda are working on developing a more robust and automated communication strategy. Thinking about moving our existing email list from mailchimp to emma, hopefully going to convert more email contacts into donors.
Working on triggering an email drip to get people to sign up for our newsletter.
Working with Allison and Ben on updating the Besties page.
Creating personal fundraising pages, challenged to help raise funds for the station. Keeping the initial fundraising goals relatively low to encourage participation. This is the evolution of our previous attempts to give people individual fundraising links...might be more user friendly.
Either going to do a regular fundraiser in June or might wait until Ben is back to implement Allison’s page design.
Tech
Notes from Ben in absentia:
Lots of Creek updates landed: Bi-weekly scheduling, dark mode in Creek, pronouns in profiles.
Creek updated to run on new server software; 50% improvement in resource utilisation, visibly faster page loads. Also, the stack is now supported with future security updates.
8 hours of site downtime caused by an automated server upgrade gone wrong. Short term is fixed and new mitigation deployed to ensure the database should restart in the event this happens again. Exploring ways to improve downloader scheduling for extra robustness.
Starting to work with Allison on Besties Page concept.
Board Development
No updates
Music
Action item for Amanda to reach to Devin
Finance
Amanda: we’re no longer in financial peril! $15k grant from the state of California, which is more than we asked for. Ben made the maximum contribution to get corporate matching from Google, so we’re in a good position. Moved a large chunk of that back into savings.
Jenn is working on reconciling our past books and getting us back into Quickbooks properly.
Jenn: I think we might need to start over from 2019 and onward...might provide more opportunities for grants if those books are more accurate.
Amanda: Jenn created documentation that showed we had a 25% decrease in receipts between now and 2019, so now we’re eligible for PPP money and have applied for that.
Forrest wants to know if, moving forward, we need to establish a threshold for checking in with Jenn for expenditures.
Jenn: will check in with Forrest and Amanda to better understand equipment needs
Action Item: Tom’s Gift
Purchased and hung out with Tom
Action Item: Strategic Plan
Going to remain an action item
Action Item: Tinytivities
Going to remain an action item. We could maybe start planning small events outdoors in the park now that it’s more safe to do so.
Returning to Studio
More people are vaccinated, now trying to determine how the schedule will work if we return to more live shows.
Conundrum...we have people doing shows from home for medical or other reasons, but also the live aspect is integral to BFF. How do we reconcile moving back to a live schedule without displacing some DJs.
Jenn: Seems like we should prioritize people who can be in-studio
Eddie: yeah, if people have moved away, that’s a different story. We ARE a local radio show and rent is expensive.
Caryn: After midnight should be BFF.fm international!
Jenn: being in-studio is aligned with our mission
Amanda: some of the new DJs who have never been to the Secret Alley don’t have as much connection to the alley and would prefer to use the ferry building. We need to start considering what our strategy is going to be there, especially if our ferry building contract is renewed.
Amanda: should we maybe just use the ferry building for events?
Caryn: could we consider a Stream A and a Stream B?
Amanda: We’d be doubling our operational fees, but it would be an interesting opportunity.
Jenn: we should consider that in regards to the strategic plan
[And then we chatted for a while.]
Partnerships
CUESA reached out because they’re doing a summer picnic at the ferry building, want BFF involved to supply the music. Amanda will be DJing, there will be a BFF tent.
We’re going to be doing a giveaway of 2 picnic baskets, Amanda is going to start announcing that. Sounds like they’re interested in other partnership opportunities. They need 450 items of whatever we put in the baskets — Amanda is thinking about repurposing one of Allison’s old fliers from Pop’s.
Amanda reached out to Lara for a copy/tagline.
Jenn: could we make it a raffle rather than a giveaway situation to offset the cost
[Amanda and Jenn are talking logistics]
Scavenger hunt
Clair is putting together a list of more businesses. We’re currently at $9,150 pledged, $650 received. Amanda will reach out to those who haven’t paid yet in June.
Amanda wants to hire a publicist to help spread the word.
We’re not close on sponsors yet…we still have time, but also not close to completion yet in terms of prizes or clues.
Amanda needs help researching and finding contacts for places in the Bay Area specifically related to music or community focus.
Amanda wants to wrap up as many sponsors as we can by July. We have people who are interested in play-testing once the app is up and running. We need a group to help with writing challenges/clues.
[And then we chatted for a bit]
Action item: Amanda to have a meeting/gather taskforce for planning the scavenger hunt
19:34 — Public Comments
No public comments this month.
19:35 — Any other business?
No other business
19:40 — Meeting adjourned.
The next meeting of the BFF.fm board is scheduled for 6pm on June 17th 2021. See https://board.bff.fm for more information.
Action Items
All:
Help with outdoor event ideas
Amanda to follow up with Devin, inviting him to become the local music director
Action item: have a meeting/gather taskforce for planning the Scavenger Hunt
Amanda working on the strategic plan
Caryn: window graphic for ferry building, will meet up with Amanda
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