Community Advisory Board Meeting Thursday, October 3, 2013 – 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Ron and Linda Yanke Family Research Park 220 Parkside Boulevard, Room 510 Board Members in Attendance: Mary Reiman, Chair Erin Duran David Lombardi Kristin Mathews Cornelia Sprung
Michael Zuzel Emily Walton Dave Fotsch Paula Brown Sinclair
Staff in Attendance: John Hess, General Manager Kelly Palmer, Development Director Tara Cooper, Recorder
Paul Stribling, Program Director Scott Graf, Morning Edition Host/Senior Editor
Dede Ryan Shelby Zepeda Camille Oldenburg Shikhar Sarin
***************** Call to Order – Mary Reiman Chair, Mary Reiman, called the Boise State Public Radio Community Advisory Board (CAB) meeting to order at 6:03 p.m. Scott Graf was introduced to members. He is the host for our Morning Edition program and also serves as a senior editor. He just wanted to come to introduce himself and put some faces to names that he has heard from the CAB. Approval of June 2013 Meeting Minutes – Mary Reiman No discussion on the minutes as submitted. Motion: Dave Fotsch made a motion to approve the minutes; seconded by David Lombardi. The motion was passed unanimously. New Community Advisory Board Nominees – Mary Reiman Our bylaws note that we must have between 20 and 30 members on the Board. The Nominations Committee looked at seventeen applications and came up with short list of ten. All ten applications were sent to the group for review. John spoke with each individual and all of them checked out great. Seventeen has been most applications we’ve ever had, and this would be the most to be approved at once. They all have a lot to offer the organization. John will notify all those who are approved. Those that are not selected will get a letter from the station thanking them for their interest, encouraging them to apply again, and will tell them who to contact if they would like to volunteer in other ways. John requested names and contact information for the nominees not chosen, so these letters can be
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sent. John spoke to staff about future applicants and a few names have already been gathered for next year. In choosing these ten, the committee looked at geography, ethnicity, occupation, philanthropic interests, and community connections. They also looked at specific skills that each had. If we add this group of applicants, the average age of the whole group will go down. John was really impressed with engagement of all the folks and felt it would be great to add them. Adding all ten nominees will get us up to 26 members. Nominees include: Andrew Crisp (student member), Kay Alspaugh, April Raine, Kerry Carnahan Ellis, Azam Houle, Vicki Lawson, Christine Collins, Leta Neustaedter, Marilyn Shuler, and Anthony Shallat. Motion: Shikhar Sarin made a motion to approve all ten nominees brought before the board; seconded by Paula Brown Sinclair. The motion was passed unanimously. New member orientation will take place sometime in November, John and Mary will schedule this and let current and new members know when it will take place. 2013-2014 Meeting Time & Date Review – Mary Reiman We have been previously meeting on the first Thursday of every other month – October, December, February, April, and June. This has been a problem for some as it interferes with local events (i.e. First Thursday). The group discussed suggestions for either an alternate day of the week, such as Tuesday, or a different Thursday of the month. Motion: Dave Fotsch made a motion to move all future CAB meetings going forward to the second Thursday of every other month; seconded by Mary Reiman. The motion was passed unanimously. Tara will send out calendar appointments to all CAB members. The rest of the 2013-2014 meetings will take place on the following dates: December 12, 2013, February 13, 2014, April 10, 2014, and June 12, 2014. Sub Committee Reports – Mary Reiman Marketing (Camille Oldenburg): Marketing is mainly being handled by the staff committee. How can the CAB committee still be involved? John updated the CAB as to what the staff marketing committee is doing. We are using a new tool called SmartSheet to track progress on developed goals and objectives. The goals and objectives are based on what the CAB committee helped put together. We do not currently have a marketing director; we work towards these goals via committee that meets every two weeks and reviews the SmartSheet list. The committee is also working on developing a marketing and events position. We are planning on looking at what other stations (that are comparable to us) are doing. Who’s doing well? We aren’t planning to look at hiring until the end of the fiscal year or next fiscal year, but we want to develop the position. The SmartSheet tool is helping us stay on track. John noted that CAB members can still be involved by helping with events, as we have a lot of events with tables. Events are announced via email and via the Weekly Wrap-Up sent out by Brandon Rasmussen.
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Advocacy (Emily Walton): 170 Million Americans has been rebranded to ProtectMyPublicMedia.org. Emily met with John and talked about developing a support letter from the Treasure Valley and Wood River Valley elected leaders indicating their support for public media. We would start this process locally, reaching out to City Councils and then expanding county-wide within our broadcast region. Then go to state and federal representatives to show who is on board. This will get us in front of them and talking them about the issues. Programming (Kristin Mathews): Erin and Kristin met with John and Paul to help define what the Programming Committee will be and can do to help out. They are preparing a job description for committee members to help define their role. The goal is to take a more active role in events and help come up with a strategy for Community Engagement Events. The station was originally hoping to do four, but may not have resources to make that happen. Staff has been discussing alternate options for these events. Cornelia suggested possibly having the CAB help in planning one of these events. Kristin noted that the committee has discussed other activities to help raise awareness. Our next event/open house will take place on October 16. This is going to be a less structured event where folks can talk to the news staff and pitch some ideas. We don’t have a lot of internal resources to do these events, evaluation re: these are we making an impact? Reaching the people we want? Partner with Press Club, City Club, others to help with these to draw more folks. The CAB asked how the open house event is being advertised. It was included in the newsletter, there is information on our website, Emilie has posted it on our social media sites, and there have been some promos; more after the fund drive. Several members were concerned about not getting the newsletter. Tara asked that anyone who doesn’t seem to be getting the newsletter to email her so she can make sure everyone’s email addresses are correct. Mary asked if there was a count as to how many people signed up with PIN. John said that we had an affiliation with EarthFix to connect with PIN; we will have to make a connection with Minnesota Public Radio to use the online sign-up sheet. Anyone who has signed up should have already gotten a response. Our news team does still have access to the list of people. We are giving away two trips to see Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me in Chicago during the October fund drive. If any other CAB members are interested in joining the committee, please talk to Kristin. Sustainability (Kelly Palmer): Cornelia, Mary, Susan, and Emily helped to make a bunch of phone calls to get people to the July 31 Past & Current CAB event. They also helped with past CAB follow up on how attendees liked the event and if they had any additional questions. We’ve received great feedback. Kelly has sent more information out to some folks and will make future contact with others. David is partnering with us for another fundraising event on November 19. This will be our last fundraisingorientated event before going public on January 1 to our entire membership. Kelly could use some assistance making follow up calls to the attendees of our September 12 event that Jim Lyons co-hosted. These calls are not to ask for money. We just want to ask them how they liked the event and if they have any questions that were not answered. Internally, we are working on closing a $200K gift, a $75K gift, and several $5K gifts. We do have a few wildcard gifts out there that we won’t know about until December. David may also have someone 3|Page
interested in contributing. We have ongoing talks with a billionaire in Sun Valley (thanks go to Emily for the connection). Kelly and John have had one meeting and are set to have another in 6 months. This person has a shared value system that aligns with us, and it is very positive that they are taking our calls. It’s important for all members to remember that as you are networking and there are philanthropic people we should be talking to, you let Kelly know. Cornelia and Kelly partnered on a grant through Weyerhaeuser. April 1 is our deadline to meet the goal of $550K for our down payment phase. Kelly believes we’ll make that goal, if not surpass it. Shikhar recommended having new member, Kerry Carnahan Ellis join the sustainability committee. Station Report – John Hess It is important to keep in the mind that when we talk to donors, they won’t donate unless it’s the right project, the right time, and they have the trust and have confidence that we are doing the right things. The reason we are getting traction in the campaign is because people have confidence in us. It has been really nice to find people with the capacity to help us. We have a strategic goal in programming for a consistent cume at 60K. We just recently received our spring Arbitron books and KBSX is at another all-time high at 58,500; we are very close to our goal. KBSU is doing better than expected at 42K. We are consistently in the top 30 for ALL station with our P1 listeners (core audience that listeners 5-6 hours/week), and we are moving up the list. We are currently at #25. Paul and Scott both play a huge role in this. We’ve talked a lot about Morning Edition improvements and we added Scott to line up and put more local news into the show. We also added Diane Rehm. We are now also reaching more people through our website. We get monthly analytics from Google for page views and amount of time spent on the site. Our page views have steadily increased. Our fire coverage in August increased our page views to 150K and more time was spent on the site. Our new Digital Content Coordinator, Emilie Ritter Saunders, has done a lot of stuff on the web and worked to incorporate stories and increase our social media. And even after the fire coverage we maintained 110K page views for September. More people are turning to us for their main source of news. We also won a National Murrow Award for best website. John will travel to New York City next week to accept the award. John is very pleased with all the work the news team as done. Another part of the reason is because we’ve been able to provide better technical quality. We have a new Eastern Chief Engineer, Rick Strack, and Tom Lowther is now our Chief Engineer. They have both done a lot of work at all our sites. We now have a new translator station in Hailey on Bald Mountain which should provide more coverage north of Ketchum. We wouldn’t be able to do this without the good mix of local/national programming that we have. We will not be filling our high-level reporter position at this time. We do need the help, but financially we need to be strong enough where we are at before we add on. We must start paying the university back on the loan that we have with them for the building in January. John wants to see how that filters into our new budget. We will wait until end of the fiscal year and evaluate where we are at and what the next fiscal year looks like. Our new studios are coming along and John would like to take everyone that has time on tour after the meeting. We should get keys and get finish work done by December 9. All the SMITC staff won’t be 4|Page
over until mid-January due movement and to testing of studio equipment. There is a lot of work that has to happen during that process. We don’t even know how this is going to change our organization. We want to keep standard of quality and keep our local pieces sounding like NPR pieces. We did our first road show in Stanley over summer. It was well received and led to a connection with the Sawtooth society. We may be able to get a grant from them to help pay for towers up there. David noted that he has seen more news items attributed to BSPR. John said this is coming from our website and John/Emilie pushing it. Shikhar would like to put the MBA marketing team, working on the station survey, in touch with the Membership and Programming committees. It will be good for them to have broader input and diversity of opinion. John is meeting with the team every two weeks. This will be completed by the end of the Fall semester, as it is their grade for the class. Shikhar can have them present and December board meeting. The survey should go out by the end of October. Adjourn – Mary Reiman There was no discussion. Motion: David Lombardi made a motion to adjourn the meeting; seconded by Shikhar Sarin. There was no discussion and the motion was passed unanimously. The meeting was adjourned at 7:04 p.m.
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