Regular Board Meeting April 18, 2012
@ 8:30pm Eastern Time…
1. CALL TO ORDER: Chair Kim Laird called the meeting to order at 8:41 p.m. EST.
2. ROLL:
Present: Kim Laird (Chair), Kevin Axtell, Matt Hall, Richard Kennison, Dave Pawson, Thom Wall, Erin Stephens, Mike Sullivan (Future fest director, 2011 fest director), Martin Frost (communications director), Sandy Brown (recording secretary)
Absent: Kevin Axtell, Matt Hall, Richard Kennison, Dave Pawson
3. APPROVAL OF AGENDA: Thom Wall moved to approve the agenda for April 18, 2012. Second by Erin Stephens.
APPROVAL OF MINUTES: ________ moved to table the minutes from March 21, 2012. Second by _________. (skipped since we do not yet have the minutes of that meeting)
4. REPORTS:
2012 Fest (Matt Hall)…
On tape.
Future Festivals (Mike Sullivan)…
2011 Festival Registrations
===========================
Registration opened on March 23
We have sold the following registrations as of today:
25 Adult packages
4 Youth/Senior packages
4 Special Workshops
1 Comp package (Jay Ko, videographer)
4 CoS tickets ala carte
Martin’s online real-time tracker for Web reggies is here. His figures and mine in perfect or near-perfect agreement. For some reason the CoS ala carte ticket sales did not ring up on his tracker from eStore order #1637.
We are planning to go to standard pricing on May 15, before the next BoD meeting, so I think someone needs to do some registration promotion to get some regs in at early bird pricing. The home page of juggle.org still says that fest info is “Coming Soon” and nothing on the home page says that registration is now open.
2013 – BGSU Contract
===========================
Revised contract attached. I think this resolves all concerns and is ready for signature.
2014 – 2015 Future Festival
===========================
We have excellent offers in-hand already from Lexington, KY, Rochester, MN, Knoxville, TN and Springfield, MO (2014). I have started discussions with Purdue University in West Layfayette, IN (2015), Cedar Rapids, IA (2014), and Portland State University.
Cedar Rapids (home of IJA Gold Medalist Doug Sayers) has a proposal on the way to us which will feature FREE FACILITY RENTAL for the theater and convention space for 2014…details coming in the next few days.
I spend a LOT of time on future fest work, and would like to know what the board wants me to find. Is it a specific geographic region, or perhaps a specific budget figure for the rentals and hotel rates? Right now, I feel that I am doing a lot of work and talking to a lot of people and I don’t really have any idea what the Board will be most interested in hearing about.
Financial (John Nikkel & Holly Greeley)…
Website Team (David Landowne, Martin Frost, Mike Sullivan, Erin Stevens)…
AMS – Package walk-throughs
===========================
In the past two days, I have done hour-long Webinar walk-throughs on two of the three packages recommended by our consultant: Your Membership and Timberlake Software. I have a walk-thru Webinar for the third package, Wild Apricot, scheduled for Wednesday, a few hours before our BoD meeting.
From the first two Webinars, I can say quite confidently that either package would wildly exceed our requirements, and give us flexibility, capability and efficiency we can only imagine right now.
Both of these packages are HIGHLY developed, highly refined and have more bells and whistles than we could ask for. Flipping a coin to choose either one wouldn’t result in a poor outcome: either one is so far ahead of where we are now that it’s like the difference between an ox cart on a dirt road and the Starship Enterprise running in Warp Drive.
Unsurprisingly, both vendors know that they have excellent offerings, and so they are priced within a single penny of each other over the short- and long-term (see attached costs summary).
The Wild Apricot package is priced a lot lower and so I expect it to be less mature, less fully-featured and less sophisticated. I’ll report back when I have gone through the demo.
For anyone concerned about our new site having a “cookie-cutter” look, either package will allow a great deal of flexibility in layout, colors, design and presentation. Timberlake made it a point to stress that their system automatically builds mobile- and tablet-friendly versions of every page automatically, with no mini-sites or separate mobile sites needed.
Here are some live client sites from each of the two packages to give you an idea of the variety of look-and-feel available from the systems:
Timberlake:
nawrb.com – Site uses the org’s specific color palette and iconography
Info on Timberlake: https://www.membershipsoftware.org/edition_list.asp All three of those sites are new to Timberlake in the last three months, and all started from scratch on a new migration from a legacy site.
For Your Membership:
https://www.southsloganmagpies.com/
https://www.potomacpedalers.org/
Info on YourMembership: https://www.yourmembership.com/resources/
Now that we’ve done the consultant’s needs analysis, consultant’s report, consultant’s recommendation and we’re almost done with the demos, a few questions:
1) Do we have donor support to make this move? Will iiWii fund this effort, or can we not afford it?
2) How do we decide? Who decides? When will we decide? It would be great to have a decision on this at our festival, then spend the fall making the migration and bring up the new site before the end of 2012.
Awaiting instructions…
Membership (Marilyn Sullivan)…
April Numbers…
# mems 1192
# total mems 1420
# families 167
# youths 67
# lifetime 280
March Numbers…
# mems 1207
# total mems 1438
# youths 63
# families 170
# life time 280
Education (Kevin Axtell/Erin Stephens)…
On tape.
Marketing/Promotions (Thom Wall)…
On tape.
5. MOTIONS FOR CONSIDERATION:
A. Motion to approve release of bank information to Scott Slesnik for the purpose of ezine to use Adsense for advertising revenue. (tabled in March pending more detailed plan)
Motion: Erin Stephens
Second: Richard Kennison
Discussion: Erin asked if they know what we want as far as a proposal goes. Kim communicated the discussion from the last meeting with them. They have not had a chance to put together a formal proposal. Drop another line to both again asking for another proposal and that the motion was brought up again. Matt aksed if anyone was hesitating on voting on this because of Scott Slesnik being involved. Board members responded no; that it was due to not enough information and the information we do have is sketchy. Kim also stated the concern with handing out our bank information to anyone. Erin suggested Kim handle setting up the account information and then let Scott and Scott take it from there.
Motion to table.
Motion: Matt Hall
Second: Erin Stephens
Vote to table: passed unanimously
B. Motion to require that in order to serve on an IJA committee one must be a current IJA member.
Motion: Thom Wall
Second: Richard Kennison
Discussion: Discussed item in bylaws that may already address this. Martin was consulted and stated that although he hasn’t read the motion it sounded like you need to be a member to be on a committee. Discussion continued about why a person would not want to be on a committee if they are not a member. This motion came from a present IJA member because they were aware a non-member was on the Fun Fund committee. This all leads to the bigger question of what the IJA needs to be and where are we going.
Vote: For… Richard Kennison, Kim Laird
Opposed… Matt Hall, Erin Stephens, Thom Wall
Motion defeated.
C. Motion to approve 2013 festival contract at Bowling Green State University. (revised contract attached to board email)
Motion: Erin Stephens
Second: Thom Wall
Discussion: Thom brought up the one number that needs to be corrected/omitted. The figure was probably left in by oversight. At bottom of page 4 of the contract which is the computation of the administrative fee which was based on an incorrect number. Correct administrative fee is shown at the top of page 5.
Motion to approve 2013 festival contract at Bowling Green State University pending the correction of administrative fee at the bottom of page 4.
Amended Motion: Erin Stephens
Second to the Amended Motion: Thom Wall
Vote: passed unanimously
6. VARIA:
1. Discuss “budget” items for joggling. Do they need additional board approval? No.
Kim will call Len and discuss ways to trim his budget.
2. Invite those running for the board to the next two meetings.
3. Discussion of awards committee formation and Richard heading the committee.
7. NEXT MEETING: Next regular BOD meeting will be held May 16, 2012 at 8:30 pm eastern time.
8. ADJOURNMENT: Matt Hall moved to adjourn the meeting. Second by Erin Stephens. Meeting adjourned at 10:09 pm eastern time.