WFHB FireHouse Broadcasting

BOARD OF DIRECTORS MEETINGBLOOMINGTON COMMUNITY RADIO, INC.SEPTEMBER 28, 2009Hooker Room, City Hall, 201 N. Morton St., Bloomington, INI. CALL TO ORDER / ATTENDANCE OF BOARD MEMBERSIn the absence of President Mark Need, the Meeting was called to order by the Board Secretary, Carolyn VandeWiele at 7:10pmPresent: Carolyn VandeWiele, Kirby Thompson, Pam Raider, and Will MurphyAbsent: Mark Need, Duane Schau, Suzette Weakley, Mike McAfeeGuests:  Cathi Norton & Joe EstivillII. APPROVAL OF MINUTES In the absence of a quorum approval of the minutes of the August board meeting was tabled until the October Meeting.III. STANDING COMMITTEE REPORTS, UPDATES:a.) Executive Committee: Did not meetb.) Personnel Committee: Did not meetc.) Development Committee:  Pam RaiderMet on September 9th just before Fund Drive: with Pam Raider, Jeffrey Morris and Cathi NortonOverview:  Discussed the digital conversion grant and some options for raising the $26,000 match.The group briefly discussed committee structures and Cathi Norton talked about some of the problems encountered by the PUMP Committee as well as communication issues at the station as a whole.The next meeting will be on October 7, 2009 in the Station Library at 6:00pmd.) Legal Affairs Committee: Mark Need sent the following statement to be read into the minutes:After some delay, the Legal Affairs Committee Committee is populated with drafters, including two law students.  Our plate is full, and we are attempting to prioritize.  That said, please feel free to forward any items that we may have forgotten in queue.  We have a busy couple of months ahead of us on this committee.  I also would welcome the assistance of other attorneys, as always.e.) Nominating Committee: did not meet, there have been no further nominations. The Board plannedto put out a notice that we were interested in finding a nominee with a financial and accounting background who could fill our treasurer and budgeting needs but this has not been done to date.See also Board Vacancies below.f.) Pump Committee: on hiatusg.) NPAC Committee: Carolyn VandeWieleThe News and Public Affairs Committee met on September 21.  They looked at some of the lessons to be learned from the "Public Domain" episode and looked at how Fund Drive went from a News and Public Affairs perspective. They discussed a second reading on a new podcast proposed by Helen Harrell and received updates on progress of the new Brown County Hour show (mission statement is finished)and on the Hound Pound Happy Hour.Will Murphy asked if there had been any discussion of how to handle the International News/8am/NoonNews slots - the committee did not discuss this at the September meeting.Joe Estivll asked if the station was still planning to put together a "Public Domain" type show on WFHB- the station is still interested in pursuing the concept but that is somewhat down the road. Some volunteershave expressed interest in developing such a show but that is subject to time and training; it is importantthat we don't pull manpower away from producing the Daily Local News. Daryll Neher has agreed to moderate the upcoming "Atheist Forum" h.) Music Committee: No representatives were presenti.) Tech Committee: Will MurphyWill Murphy has given Jeffrey Morris the ok to purchase a UPS backup for PONGO and this is currently waiting to be installed. He has also authorized some tower repairs at the station and the purchase ofa new wireless router to solve our wireless coverage problems at the station; this should be installedin the next few days.The committee is scheduled to meet on October 5th. Will is hoping to reinvigorate the committee butsuspects that there will be some turnover in membership.Jeffrey Morris reported that the repairs to the tower on top of the station are in process.  Several crossbraces have broken loose and will be repaired with reinforcing clamps. It will cost about $500 tocomplete the process and this should happen on the next good weather day. This tower carries theSTL dish that transmits our 91.3fm signal to radio ridge and the 98.1fm translator antenna; failure ofthis tower would involve considerable off air time and expense and might create some liability issues.A new tower would involve a complete rebuild and would cost about $10-12,000. The existingmicrowave antennas will be used by the digital conversion so this repair really constitutes a first stepin that process.The Digital Conversion Grant from the CPB specifically prevents us from using any of these moniesfor tower repair and the part of the original application that budgeted for tower construction was removed from the final grant.j.) Fund Drive Committee:  Will MurphyThe Fund Drive Committee met after Fund Drive to do a recap analysis and to make suggestions about ways we could improve for future drives.One suggestion was to change the pledge forms to include a question to collect data on whichfrequencies listeners were tuning into and to look at our donor base in different communities.The committee also suggested that we put more of an emphasis on developing the Bedford market.Increased off-air promotion of fund drive and fund drive events was also recommended; somethingwe would have done more of this year if we had had the funding.The Fund drive Committee plans to meet throughout the year, not just in the month or so before agiven drive, to map out strategy and to put together a working calendar. They plan to collect promos and to develop talking points for music and news programing on an incremental basisinstead of right before the drive in order to refresh our data bases and put less stress on the staffat the last moment. Achieving these goals early will allow us to do more out front work to promotethe fund drive, develop business memberships and challenge grants and so forth.Jim Manion has proposed a 4-hour Marathon Show on Wednesday evening to highlight local music.The committee will probably meet Wednesdays at noon every other week but the next meeting isnot scheduled at this time.The committee recommended including membership information at the beginning of all podcasts,drawing in and working with other groups such as groups that we do PSAs for to help us out withpromotion, testimonials, catching services, etc.The committee also discussed possible alternatives to and working away from premiums... onesuggestion was to act as a broker for "acts of kindness" - i.e. a supporter offers to provide a serviceto a donor in exchange for a donation of "x" dollars. This would require keeping track of the donatedservices, providing tax information to both the provider and the donee, and ensuring that donor anddonee can get in contact with each other. Kirby Thompson said that one of the issues he saw wasthat such a process doesn't get the station logo out into the community.... whereas a WFHB t-shirtor mug provides a form of advertising, he didn't see how an "act of kindness" would get our brandout in a visible way to more than one person. He felt that is was important that we get our logo outthere one way or another - as premiums, or selling them at events, etc. The Board asked about total number of pledges in this fund drive... Will reported that there weresomewhere around 310-320 pledges for this fall which was an increase over the previous autumn.Jeffrey Morris said he thought this was down by at least half from the number of pledges we hadduring the early years of WFHB and that this reflected a drop in listenership... Carolyn VandeWiele said that to her recollection the drop was not that much. In any event we are pulling in the sameor increased funding with fewer numbers but this also reflects our need to find ways of expandingour outreach to bring in new members while retaining the ones we already have through donorcultivation, off air promotion, expanding into new markets and developing new materials for fundraising.Pam Raider asked if we had any figures to compare ourselves to similar stations around the country.Will said that Kelly Walker compared us to KGNU in Boulder Colorado where they raised $120,000.Pam suggested that we might contact some other stations who were similar in size and find outwhat worked for them. Jeffrey Morris also pointed out that many of these stations also do a lot moreup front work that WFHB has been able to do in the past and that working to develop more businessrelationships and so forth could add considerably to our fund drive totals. Carolyn VandeWielesaid that she had been listening to the new community station out of Zionsville, WITT, and that theywere running on air promotions for Good Search and Good Shop which was something that wemight consider doing.Will Murphy reported that he has engaged some students from SPEA to reverse engineer a new approach to fund drive - they are charged with developing a spreadsheet that should allow us to do more targeted searches for station development - we will look at the time of information we want to be able to collect and build our search engine backwards from thisFall Fund Drive billing has not yet gone out to all pledgers but this is in process.Will Murphy said that he once again plans to send out premiums even if pledges are not paid off;he stated that our failure to collect rate is extremely low and that he didn't feel that this made asignificant difference in the number of uncollected pledges. Most of the pledges in the last funddrive have already been paid via credit card, automatic check withdrawal and check paymentsand there are relatively few pledges that will require billing.Jeffrey Morris related a story of someone who called to give the station money during one of hisshows and because the person at the desk didn't fully understand the phone system got hung upon... this shows the importance of making sure that everyone who handles calls for the station isfully trained.Joe Estivill said that he thought it was important to identify the source of challenges for fund drive...that it made it more personable and more credible and might make people more likely to pledgeto meet a given challenge. Kirby Thompson suggested that we approach some of the members who make regular large donations to the station and ask them if their pledges could be used as challenge money duringan upcoming pledge drive.The Board also discussed whether we should change the ACH policy to create and "opt out"rather than "opt in" donation... ie. we would continue to make withdrawals until the donor asked usto stop. Will Murphy said that he was inclined to leave it as it is currently but that he would changeit if the Board chose to modify the policy. Currently we also don't notify such donors when their commitments are about to expire and to ask them if they want to continue for another year. Many of these donors don't actually remember when they started their "year" and aren't sure when it's timeto make a new pledge. Will said that our current system makes it difficult to distinguish our ACH pledges  from other donation options but that it might be possible to do so. The Board felt it was important that we either change the policy to an "opt out" system with a notification prior to expiration that we will continue withdrawals unless they decline, or to ensure that we are contacting these donors, who are often major donors, to provide them with the option of renewing their commitment before the end of their donation term so that they don't drop off the membership rolls.Will said that we also need to consider whether we should change to an alternative web option,for example to Public Interactive, that has a membership module that we can incorporate into oursystem and that will allow us to manage our donor lists more efficiently. The Board asked aboutpurchasing the Allegiance Membership Module... Will said that he was a bit leery about Allegiancebecause while he felt he had received really good service with the Traffic module, he was less happy with the company's assistance in regards to the volunteer module; the Allegiance Membershipmodule is also quite pricey.IV. GENERAL MANAGER'S REPORT:A. Fund Drive ResultsAt the last tally the Fund Drive total was $40,200; there were 309 recorded pledges with aboutanother 10 pledges coming in since fund drive ended. The average pledge was $98 which wasconsiderably higher than last year's average.254 pledges have been entered into the system so far for about $25,000. Of these, 50 pledgesfor about $4500 are "Bill Mes" and 193 are paid in full for about $18,000. Renewal cards did well in terms of bringing in pledges but we don't have hard figures on this...in some cases renewals and on-air pledges overlap so it is difficult to get definitive numbers.One issue this year was that some of the membership data was lost during the PONGO meltdownbut Markus had done a back up several months prior to that so we did have some names, evenif the list was inaccurate. In addition, the letters were sent out somewhat later than they should have;next year we plan to get them more in advance.The cards and envelopes were done as a trade out with Twisted Limb Paperworks so there was nocost for the outlay; bulk mailing of about 600 renewal notices ran about $70.We've already begun packaging premiums in hand and ordering premiums that are not.For premiums the big sellers were the Lotus Package, the "Playing For Change" CD and theBasic Membership package. Many people who went for the larger premiums also paid bycredit card or ACH agreements which helps to provide us with a regular income over the year.Lotus Premiums - we got two Lotus Packages for free plus 1 weekend pass for which we purchasedan accompanying ticket. After that we paid $116 for each package and $54 for each weekend passfor a total of $3200 and three weeks of Lotus on air promotion. We took in $7500 in donations forthose 25 packages.We don't pay for our T-shirts, they are obtained through an underwriting trade. We did purchase a couple of Democracy Now T-shirts for people who requested them even though they weren't actually on the premium list.We also paid about $800 to the Shalom Center because we paid the full $20 CD price for thesepremiums (for a $120+ donation).It was suggested that we might approach Lotus to offer a Back Stage Pass Premium which would be quite unique and might go for a high premium level. We have started processing Acoustic Harvest CD premiums, The "Playing For Change" Cds will bein this week and we will order T-Shirts as soon as the students have finished that inventory.Will expects it will be another couple of weeks before all the bills go out. We tried to be much morediligent this year about getting valid emails and this will help us save on postage costs.In addition to pledge donations we took in about $800 from the Variety Show; there was also about$300 in pledges made during the show. We also took in $104 from events at the Video Solutionand Russian Recording Studio. The Hoosier Dylan show did not make a profit.  These figures areincluded in the Fund Drive totals.Mark Need tried to set up some restaurant fundraisers for fund drive but was unsuccessful; we probably started this process too late this year and that is something that can be revisited for the Spring Drive.The Board asked if we'd be able to go through the names and follow up with people who didn'trenew their pledges in this drive. Will said that would probably be difficult this year because of theinaccuracy of the data base.Joe Estivll asked why we didn't let listeners know where we were in terms of the total goal. Willsaid that the fund drive planners felt that an incremental approach, show by show, kept listenersmore focused on the immediate goal for the show that they support and kept the process simpler.We used to do a poster of a dog that was posted outside the station that was filled in as we took in money to show where we were in terms of the goal - this might be a visual that we couldgo back to for future drives to help increase visibility.Cathi Norton pointed out the importance of having the fund drive committee develop a calendar of the things that need to be done and to assign project directors who make sure that each one is done in a timely fashion. This can be refined and added to with each additional drive. As long asthere is adequate supervision, the more people we can get involved to do a simple portion of each project, the more likely we are to get it done. We have to have specific goals, specific timelines and accountability.For this Fund Drive Will wanted to especially point out the efforts of Jim, Chad and Jeffrey; the Local Live Efforts this year were phenomenal and he also gave credit to Shane Young for his hard work in doing the engineering for these shows. Also big kudos to Cindy Levindofske (Beaulé)for keeping us all fed in such a spectacular way.B. State of the Station:As a result of Fund Drive we are financially stable for the moment, many pressing debts have beentaken care of. We have a current bank balance of $13,000 and will deposit another $3400 thisFriday. We have outstanding current debt of $3600. We hope to resolve our long term debt obligations by the end of this year; however, this is a discussion the Board needs to make in termsof authorizing final payments. The Board needs to set priorities for spending in the next budget that will help us in finalizing our debt repayments and will help us in developing goals for station projects, in building an on-hand surplus that will provide us with a short term financial cushion and in building our endowment to help us with long term financial stability.The major immediate need is to raise $26,000 as our match for the digital conversion grant. This istechnically not due until March but we would like to aim to raise the funds by the end of January toprovide us with some wiggle room. We have two grant applications in process to help raise these  funds - a request through the Community Foundation of Bloomington and Monroe County for$12,000 and at Telecommunications Council grant application for $5000. Results of our applications should be known in a few weeks. The Development Committee is also researching some othergrants sources such as the Monroe County Bank. It was also suggested that we should approachother groups who have made major contributions to local arts projects such as Mallor ClendeningGrodner and Bohrer.  Pam and Will are scheduling a meeting with Brian Kearney to discuss starting the individual campaign process.Cathi Norton asked about applying for a Community Block Development Grant; the major catch here is that money from federal programs cannot be used to match for the purposes of this grant.Jeffrey Morris spoke about the financing process for the new digital equipment. The vast majorityof the equipment comes through Jeff Welton and the Nautel Ltd. They are very familiar with thegrant process and how to go about when equipment should be purchased and when the grantmoney will come into pay for it; this should make the process easier. C. Other Business:Our next Live Variety Show is coming up on November 21 at the Buskirk Chumley Theatre.Richard Fish is producing with assistance from Mike Kelsey. Busman's Holiday is on boardas the headline act with the possibility of having a full Busman's Holiday Reunion.We need to do a really good job of marketing this project; Will would like the Board to take some responsibility in getting ticket sales going and with publicity. Publicity needs to start now...even though we don't know everyone who is going to be involved.  We can promote the concept and excitement of the live show itself along with the main headline acts and then fill in otherpieces as we go along. Overall we need to do a better job of marketing - On-Air promotions in the log; Spot Firehouse on Facebook needs to promote all station events, we need a better presence on the Website. Consider developing a station Twitter for promotional purposes. V. OLD BUSINESSA. COMMITTEE RESTRUCTURING:Will Murphy presented a proposal for restructuring the WFHB CommitteesHe proposed that all committees with the exception of the News and Public Affairs Committee,the Music Committee and the Fund Drive Committee be chaired by a Board Member.The Executive Committee committee would be chaired by the Board President, the NominatingCommittee would be chaired by the Board Secretary.  Other committees would be chaired byBoard Members with the expertise and interest in that particular area. The PUMP Committee would be reinstated as a Marketing Committee. At one point it was suggested that we create a Finance Committee but Will proposed that the BoardTreasurer work with the General Manager on budgetary and financial issues and serve as a liaison to the Development Committee where they could offer insight on the day to day and month to month big picture aspects of station financial needs and coordinate with Development on fund raising. Will suggested that he remain as chair of the Fund Drive Committee. Duane Schau is listed as the current chair of the Technology Committee but there hasn't been anymovement on this front lately. It was asked why if Chad chaired NPAC and Jim chaired the Music Committee why Jeffrey Morris wasn't chair of the Tech Committee. One reason is that there is moreto the Tech Committee than engineering... and Jeffrey didn't feel that he was necessarily the person to handle all the IT aspects. One solution would be to have Engineering and IT co-chairs; it wasalso suggested that most of the duties of the Technology Committee fell within station managementconcerns and that perhaps what was needed was a Board liaison between the Tech Committee andthe Development Committee to deal with the financing aspects.A final proposal was to establish a Volunteer Committee, possibly chaired by a volunteer, to workon volunteer issues and inform the Board of things that need to be done. The Board also discussed the fact that anyone who acts as a representative for the station needs to have the training so that they can do so adequately and that they have the marketing tools theyneed to assist them in that endeavor... this would be best be achieved as a joint operation between the volunteer and marketing groups. Communication is essential for all these endeavors... both in house between volunteers, betweenvolunteers and management and between WFHB and the listeners.In all cases each committee needs to have established goals, management responsibilities andaccountability.B. SPOT AT THE MARKETSPOT has gone to the market the last few weeks. Again this is a situation where we need tofurther develop marketing materials - for example for this crowd information on Saturday's Child and Youth Radio would be beneficial. We might also develop a poster that says "ask me about...various WFHB programs and groups and, for this market, there should be a sign highlightingthe market report and when that airs.We are also developing a protocol for live reports/interviews/spots from the market through thenews committee; hopefully this will be in place before C. REPLACEMENT BOARD MEMBERS:The Board continues to solicit new members, in particular for a member with financial andaccounting experience. Names can be submitted to the Nominating Committee.D. UPDATE ON DIGITAL CONVERSION GRANT:See aboveVI. NEW BUSINESS:There was no new business presented.VII. ADJOURNMENT:The meeting was adjourned  by unanimous vote at 9:15pm The next meeting of the Board of Directors will be on October 26th in the Hooker Room at City Hall.