1. Call to Order
Chair, Benjamin Domask-Ruh, called the meeting to order at: 5:00pm Central
2. Roll:
Present: Afton Benson, Jonathan, Perry, Mike Sullivan, Sofia NOethe, Jake Darrow, Niels Duinker, Noel Yee, Martin Frost, LUther Bangert, Aslynne
Absent:
Recorder: Afton
I’m
3. Approval of Agenda
Motion: Aslynne
Second by: Sofia
Discussion:
Vote: Passes unanimously
4. Approval of Minutes:
Business Board Meeting (LINK)
Motion: Aslynne
Second: Niels
Discussion:
Vote: Passes unanimously
5. Reports
Please keep verbal reports to 5 min or less except for festival discussion.
2024 Festival Report (Afton Benson and Noel Yee)
Discussion:
Alex Larson joins the Meeting at 5:05pm CT
Dennis is working hard to get the prelim numbers, we’ve basically taken care of all expenses at this point. Some info:
We had around 525 people attend for the week, we booked fully the festival hotel and booked 234 room nights at the overflow hotel.
Working on getting a survey out for the festival shortly.
Sending Cathedral Juggling 500 of the pre-printed Save the Dates for 2025, they’ll include them in every order they have, and they have been putting IJA flyers in their orders since early 2024.
Soft numbers are showing a profit in the $70k range; which is HUGE (final numbers obv still pending), the highest profit festival we’ve had since 2007 was 2018 at $36k. This was for a few key reasons;
- We increased prices while keeping youth pricing where it’s been
- We got 2 grants, Seed fund the flow arts for $6k and a WI state tourism grant fo 10,250 which covered nearly the entire Hyatt bill; the seed fund ensured the flow show, covered performers, covered part of Andréanne and the 2 nights of glow jams
- We had a lot of day passes, this was another year where folks came Fri & Sat, we raised the pricing there to $75 per day; so nearly half a festival pass from 2 days
- The hotel booked fully which got us full room nights
- Equipment: Craig Lewis and Afton/Benjamin/CLIMB theatre, Jesse and Bernardo for fire night, and Casey Rentmeester saved us probably 5-8k in equipment rental fees. Please note, this will not be the case for 2025 and beyond; Craig moved and won’t be able to drive to 2025 additionally I have 1 sound system, which Craig made everything else happen. Future festival budgets will be increased in the equipment rental fees. Casey made sure to return our rented lighting which only cost $700 (and UnnaMed provided support for) if we had rented form the hotel it would have been about 3k for them to do the lights for just the open stage.
Discussion:
Mike – How did we get 525 attendance?
Afton – Counted Waivers
Mike – Theater was close to 700?
Afton – Lots of locals!
Noel – Had a lot of news coverage all week (6 different moments?) (Thanks Jake for insider knowledge!)
Afton – We even turned down opportunities! (Shout out to Bailey for giving media clips and copy)
Question from Chat – JOhnathon Perry – Do we have a designated Media contact?
- Afton: No, because we are in different places all the time. But we have a 100% dedicated team for marketing. And with Bailey being here for the second year, as a News Media person in real life…
- Jonathan – Could designate a volunteer to triage requests for future sites.
Financial Report (Afton Benson)
Discussion:
Dennis is focusing on finishing up Festival items and then will get updated overall org numbers as well.
IJA Credit Cards We have 3 cards, myself, Dennis, and Erin have them. I wanted to check in to see if folks feel anyone shouldn’t have one, or anyone else should have one.
Future Festival Site Report (Mike and Jake)
We were about 400 room/nights short for next year’s festival in Evansville, for reasons I explained by email.
Now that we know we can take 1,300+ room/nights, Jake and I worked with the new team at the Doubletree in Evansville to add 280 more room/nights across our week.
We now have 1,160 contracted room/nights, which should be enough for us with no risk to IJA if we fall a bit short. We also have cut-rate offers from another hotel to handle some overflow demand if needed, and can seek more closer to our week.
Ben signed the contract addendum and I’ve uploaded it and the new room block worksheet to the GDrive for next year.
Jake and I visited Little Rock earlier this month and have a visit report and recommendation to discuss on tonight’s call.
We have a good preliminary offer in hand from South Bend for 2028, and are standing by for an improved offer for more rooms at a lower rate for the bulk of our needs. The offers we have in hand for the Center and theater are good, with an exceptionally good grant commitment in hand to make this an easy decision for 2028.
Discussion:
Jake: Little Rock it was super hot; everything was very big, it was a site where we’d just need to “make it work”
Mike: We’re going to see if Green Bay is interested. South Bend is interested and a really good grant.
Afton: Stressed that we need to look outside of the midwest for safety of our membership
Erin Stepehens Joined at 5:37pm CT
Alex L: Fayetteville AR, could be a good location
eJuggle Report (Scott Seltzer)
Discussion:
Benjamin: Needs to follow up with Scott about updated responsibilities and roles
Afton: There has been no report for ages.
Aslynne: Some folks need individualized follow ups.
Membership (Marilyn Sullivan)
Membership Data
Discussion:
Marketing Report (Matan Presberg)
Discussion:
Afton: Emailing Kenzy and Lisa to see about having them help move forward too.
Benjamin: Love to look for moving things forward
Noel: Want to ensure the festival marketing is also focused
IRC Report (Erin Stephens)
Discussion:
Afton: Were there more details about the number of people who attended, applied, competed in the last 2 IRCs. The only report was the AGM report but there was little detail, except that the events were held. It’d be continually helpful in the realm of grants and shifting the IJA messaging to see how many people attend these festivals, are exposed to the IRCs, who sign up to compete but didn’t get selected, and how many people were selected to compete. Additionally, it’d be great to have diversity information if we have it, please don’t make up any of this information.
Erin: Thanks for this note Afton, and good to have specific stats that we should start collecting. I have been working on my IRC report which gives much more detail about the 2 IRC of 2024 (now linked above). It’s long! That is part of why I didn’t include all of the information in the Annual Report – but is good information for the board to be aware of. It includes the number of preliminary entries as well as the number of finalists, and the total number of competitors present. In regards to diversity information – I imagine you mean race, gender, perhaps age? Let me know specifics on that, as it is something we could perhaps add to the entry forms to ensure we get accurate stats.
Benjamin: Can you put together a list of folks who are trained to run events.
YJA Report (Benjamin Domask-Ruh)
Discussion:
Still sending out Badge Books!
Inquiries incoming about bulk orders for teachers and their students (Afton talk. Something similar to Kayla and REACH?)
Starting to move onto our next project: Juggling Education in the 21st Century.
- Would like to discuss a budget to make this happen to pay authors/Publisher
Similarly: Looking to start a resource guide for ‘How to start a juggling club’
- And also provide some sort of ‘grant’ for new (or existing clubs) for a startup/supply fund
- Perhaps this could be coupled in the ‘Affiliates’ Program as we start to discuss the future
Grant: for start up juggling club or an existing club who is looking to advance etc.
Jonathan: Maybe also a how to run a festival
OpsO Report (Ross Berenson)
Discussion:
Ross: Not much to report,
– The biggest thing is the motion below for the next Festival Director.
– Festival Survey
6. Motions for Consideration
- Motion to Appoint Jess Mardini as 2025 Evansville Festival Director
Motion: Noel
Second:Aslynne
Discussion:
Benjamin: Folks were pretty on team Jess.
Martin: How many others? Benjamin: One other, MIchael from Louisville
Afton: Have they attended a festival? Noel: Jess has before
Noel: Jess is from indianapolis
Aslynne: Various board members interviewed them with Ross.
Martin: Has Jess led festivals? Noel: Yes she has, Michael coordinates the Louisville flow jam and flow events.
Vote:
Jonathan: Abstain
Remaining votes are in favor: Passes
- Motion to approve the IRC South America 2024 – Chile to be held at the CIMAC convention in Valparaíso, Chile on October 24, 2024.
SEE PROPOSAL
Budget:
Motion: Sofia
Second: Aslynne
Discussion:
Erin’s Notes:
The current goal is to hold an IRC annually at CIMAC. Two CIMAC organizers have been fully trained in running the IRC on site and the convention hosted IRC the past 2 years with great success. They already have medals, though depending on if there are team entries, we may need to send more prior to the event (only 1 silver medal remains after the IRC in Colombia).
The IRC budget will cover the expenses of this IRC. Not covering a flight and travel experience significantly reduces the budget. It is our hope that this can become more and more the norm as more host festival teams get trained to organize IRC.
We are already a bit late with launching promotion, so the goal will be to launch the website and promotional graphics directly following approval by the board.
Afton:
- What work is involved with the Director Stipend (I’m assuming it’s going to Erin)? Since the overall goal is to have people organize the events themselves going forward, I didn’t expect there to be as much of a Director Stipend.
Erin:
- Yes, the goal is to move to a model of having the live finals of the IRC be run by locals – thus reducing the costs of flights and travel costs. At this time all the other work involved in the organizing prior to that final day and the follow-up still stays with the IRC Director (myself Erin, at this time). This work is what has historically been factored into the director payment. The actual in person organizing has not been factored in as that flight, housing, food and travel expenses being covered were generally the budget allotted for this piece – but no additional payment.
Here is a list of the work done from preparation to follow-up of the IRC:
Set-Up
- Coordinate the creation of promotional graphics with the host festival
- Edit and update the IRC announcement and information web page and entry form page
- Create and implement the marketing plan of the IRC on the IJA social media
- Training / support calls with onsite organizers to ensure they feel confident in the process and procedures (especially this time as this is their first time running the event on their own at CIMAC)
Prelims:
- Receive, review and organize all competitor entry forms
- Watch all entry videos to ensure they are within the rules
- Communicate and troubleshoot with prelim entries that are not within the rules
- Recruit and communicate judging process with prelim judges
- Coordinate with NeilFred for the prelim voting process
- Coordinate the creation of finalist promo graphics
- Edit the finalist announcement webpage
- Email all competitors to inform them whether or not they’ve made it to the finals
- Promotion of finalist on IJA social media channels
Leading Up To and During:
- Send medals as needed to hosting festivals
- Coordinate transfer of prize money and and videographer payment
- Create and implement the marketing plan for the LIVE video of the IRC on the IJA social media
- Coordinate additional online coverage of the hosting festival and IRC by the organizers – ie. Insta Stories Takeover
- Be the moderator for the online Live stream of the IRC
- Be available throughout the day of the IRC and during the event for any questions or concerns that arise.
Follow-up
- Make stories / posts announcing the winners and highlighting the IRC final
- Coordinate with the videographer for the creation of the 3 medalist highlights videos and the overall IRC highlights video
- Post these videos to IJA social media / YouTube
General
- Budget management
- Communication (answering questions from potential competitors and finalists, communicating with the host marketing director, etc)
- Troubleshooting miscellaneous situations that arrive and problems that need to be addressed
Fact is – most of the work happens before the final event takes place, and it is quite time intensive. It is my hope that more and more of these tasks can also be passed on to the local organizers and potentially other IJA volunteers – but for the time being we have started with the organization of the live events.
Thank you for asking this question as it’s never been asked and it is good for both the board and myself to have a solid outline of the backend work involved.
Vote: Passes unanimously
7. Varia:
Benjamin: Niels has decided not to step down from Board position
Afton: Update on Copyright Higbee
Synopsis: Higbee has not proven they own the copyrights to photos. Additionally, I contacted MMCC to see if they had the rights to use the photo that was on the Props 2 U page and they did, and they gave us permission to use the photo as well. Our attorney is inquiring if the IJA would like to bring a suit against Higbee for the numerous misrepresented items.
8. Confirm Next Meeting
Next meetings will take place on…
September 2nd for the next vision meeting 6PM ET
September 16th for the next business meeting 6PM ET
9. Adjournment
Meeting adjourned at 7:25 pm Eastern.