Board meeting Minutes/11 Jan 2016

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Prior:
14 Dec 2015 		Board meeting Minutes Next:
25 Jan 2016


Minutes approved: 25 Jan 2016

  • NOTICE to those on the line: All present agree to a temporary recording of this call to be be deleted no later than when the minutes are approved. Please speak up if you disagree with this and we will discuss it after roll call.
Unspecified
Move your name to Present or Apologies prior to the meeting!,
Present
(Subject to verification) John Boris, Ski Kacoroski (chair), Atom Powers, William Bilancio, Steve VanDevender, Paul English, Thomas Uphill, Matt Disney, George Beech
Apologies
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Guests
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Opened
9:03 PM Eastern Time
Closed
9:35 PM Eastern Time

Consent Agenda

Action Items

Board members are asked to review RT for Tickets and Action items.

Standing Reports

Treasurer's report (Disney, Kacoroski)

  • Balance info
    • BoA Account: $41,644.37
    • PayPal Account: $7,184.90
    • TDBank: $2,001.21
    • Total: $50,830.48
      • +/- from last report: -$987.61
      • LOPSA Balance: $44,912.09
      • CasITConf Balance: $5,918.39
  • Summary of expenditures since last report:
    • Budgeted operations
    • Final 2015 F2F settlements
  • Summary of income since last report:
    • Membership dues
    • Jennine Townsend, Platinum Sponsor


  • Top priorities
    • Invoice for Paessler
    • EIN for LOPSA East
    • Cascadia: accounts receivable
    • New budget framework
    • Scott Koch refund
    • Transition bank accounts
    • 2014 990
    • Assuming HootSuite charges
    • Finances committee charter

Membership report (VanDevender, Bilancio)

Total active members: 665 (previous report: 634, change: +31)

Paying: 457 (3 new in last 30 days)

Non-paying: 208 (19 new in last 30 days)

Paying members include Individual, Charter, Founding, and Lifetime memberships. Non-paying members include Student and Complimentary memberships.

We should make sure our existing policy to request proof of student status is reflected on the Wild Apricot membership page, and checked for student applications. For the time being I am just accepting the new student applications. We previously have requested a scan of student ID for proof, so this should be indicated on the membership page. Should we have them send this to board@lopsa.org, or some other address?

Steve is recommending that Student applicants send proof of Student status be sent to membership@lopsa.org. Ski will update the website to reflect this.

Atom asked about the membership numbers and their accuracy. Steve explained the new numbers are based on the numbers from the last report.

Committee reports

Conferences/Events/Chapters activities report (Bilancio, Powers)

CasITConf

The venue has something "important" to discuss with me. I suspect a scheduling conflict but as of Sunday evening I don't know the details. Need to get this figured out before publishing the schedule.

The schedule is selected. Pending venue confirmation and confirmation from presenters. We have as full a schedule as we did in 2014, with one room reserved and unscheduled on Friday. We can keep this room available for sponsored tutorials or as a quite study room.

Logo on the web page is updated. Logo images and font files are in the shared Google-drive.

Talks/Tutorials selection committee met, agreed on content.

LOPSA East

The CFP is out there and closes ends January 18th. January 27th the schedule is due. Registration should be open February 15th. William will send out the request again. Ski asked about Cumulo sponsoring LOPSA-East and William is waiting to hear back.

SCale

We are all set with a table and volunteers to man the table. Ski will get gifts for the volunteers.

Education (Kacoroski, Boris)

  • Nothing to report

Speakers Bureau (Powers, English)

No Activity. I, apowers, still believe that this can provide value and it is a lower priority than CasITConf.

Marketing/Communications (LOPSAgram, #lopsa-live, etc) (English, Uphill)

  • Still putting together LOPSAgram - expect to send it out tonight. We have very little content - no Chapter news, nothing to say about conferences. Paul will do write ups for LOPSA East and CasIT for sponsors. William will send Paul something for LOPSA-East.

Hootsuite is status quo.

Technical Services Report (Beech, VanDevender)

Nothing to report

Mentorship Report (Boris, Beech)

no report

Paul reminded the Board that most of the people he has spoke to at Segull (sp?) was about mentorship.

George recommended that some type of blurb about mentorship be each LOPSAGram. The consensus was that we don;t want the blurb to be come background noise and if we do it each edition it should be changed up a bit. 58% of the recipients opened the LOPSAGram and 5% clicked on a link in the LOPSAGram which is a good number.

Recognition (Uphill, Disney)

No update here.

Leadership Committee (Warner, Kacoroski)

  • Nothing to report

Re-Branding of LOPSA (Boris)

I spoke to a Branding/Marketing Consultant who assisted in the re-branding of my work. Emma O'Brien , emmaobrien.allyou.net. This was an initial talk to see if she is the correct person to speak to. This came about from the last meeting where the SASAG group spoke about Recognition and Certification which boiled down to what weight does any of that have with LOPSA's name on it. I took on the task to seek out a professional in that area.

  • in my conversation with her I explained who we are and what we do. I explained a few ventures we have made and how are big issue is getting people to recognize who we are and get our Brand out there.
  • Emma is a Branding specialist and secondly a marketing specialist. Here are her comments:
  • She stated that Branding comes first and then marketing. We can’t drive people to our web site and then not have enough information on the web site to make them say “Yes I will pay my money.”
  • She reviewed the site and in her mind it just needs some tweaking and word smithing.
  • She is a consultant and would charge by the hour. $200/hr
  • The process would be a discovery session to make sure we are all on the same page.
  • We need to decide what we want to budget for this process and she would see what she can do for that.
  • She would use surveys and emails to get a sense of what our members and ex members think of the organization and want from the organization instead of the more expensive focus groups and face to face meetings.
  • She said we are making good decisions by the new web site and even reaching out to a professional to help move to the next level.
  • She said our efforts in the LOPSAGram, Facebook, Twitter and other social media is a good step but that brings it back to the Branding issue.
  • She says it is like the chicken and Egg scenario. We want more members so we have to prove to new members we have value but the ones we have we have to continue to show them value. But that is the reason to speak to a professional.

The next step would be for us to look at our budget and decide what we will want to put toward this and then set up a conference call with Emma (or zoom session) to discuss a bit further what we are looking for so she can come back and give us a proposal.


Ski commented on two areas where we may need to spend money. Branding and Back Office.

Atom was more for creating new content.

John stated that form a consultant like this we may find out what new content we need.

Thomas agreed with the idea of Chicken/Egg.

William agreed we meet with her and then come back to the board with the outcome as to what we will be paying for and what we can expect.

John will set up a Doodle for a conference call (Zoom Session)for the Board and Emma to discuss the next step. The board was asked to get anything special they would want in the email to the consultant before he emails her.

2016 Budget... (SKI)

The 2015 budget worksheet is at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pbffWaGGOTKbqP0ETQSdBW2RyXmsSJPWCRVkz67lmo0/edit#gid=0. If you look at this you can see the following:

  • fixed expenses are roughly around $9K plus another $8K for an Admin Assistant that we did not spend
  • $40K in the bank
  • conservative guess of our income in 2016 will be around $30K (memberships is 20K, sponsors are 10K)

This means that we have $75K to spend and $17K in expenses which leaves us with $58K to figure out how to spend. I propose the following guidelines:

  • Reserve 1 years worth of fixed expenses (e.g. $17) as a rainy day fund
  • With the remaining $41K spend it as:
    • 50% for member education and training ($20K)
    • 25% for scholarships ($10K)
    • 25% for marketing ($10K)


A discussion on the budget and amounts followed. The consensus was for this as a start and the board should make sure we have the correct amount put aside for one year to the next.

Ski and Matt will work up some numbers for a preliminary budget. Our fiscal year runs from January 1 to December 31.

Feeding and Care of Community... (Ski)

Just wanted to put this here as a placeholder. I think we already have a full agenda, but wanted to get people to look at her presentation and be ready to talk about it next time.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa15/conference-program/presentation/hilt

Ads On Stack Exchange (Beech)

I've talked to the guys on the Ads team here. Below you'll find the Rate card for 2016, and they can give us a 15% discount. The rate we are concerned with is "Run of Site" This would allow us to build a campaign to run on SF, U&L and DBA. They will work with us to define a campaign to maximize our budget.

If we go ahead with the marketing/branding person I would suggest waiting until after we work with her to run a campaign.


Paul: I request we work in advertising for our conferences if we're going to the effort of putting ads out there.

New Business

No new business

Notes/announcements

none

Adjournment

 John Motioned for Adjournment
 William Seconded
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