Boise State Public Radio Community Advisory Board Meeting Thursday, February 7, 2013 – 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Ron and Linda Yanke Family Research Park 220 Parkside Boulevard, Room 208 Board Members in Attendance: Susan Giannettino, Chair Michael Zuzel Kristin Mathews Shikhar Sarin Dave Fotsch Staff in Attendance: John Hess, General Manager Tara Cooper, Recorder
Maria Trebby Erin Duran Cornelia Sprung Shelby Zepeda Camille Oldenburg
Bob Youde Emily Walton Paula Brown-Sinclair David Lombardi
Kelly Palmer, Director of Development
***************** Call to Order – Susan Giannettino Chair, Susan Giannettino, called the Boise State Public Radio Community Advisory Board (CAB) meeting to order at 6:05 p.m. Patricia Johnson and Frank Zang have both given their resignation to the Board as they are both moving out of the area. Approval of December 2012 Meeting Minutes – Susan Giannettino No discussion on the minutes as submitted. Motion: Emily Walton made a motion to approve the minutes; seconded by David Lombardi. The motion was passed unanimously. Sub Committee Updates – Susan Giannettino Programming (Kristin Mathews): This group has not met since the last CAB meeting in December. The committee worked with Paul and Sadie to help publicize the community engagement event at Salt Tears in January. Maria Trebby contacted a lot of individuals and most of them showed up at the event. The event went really well and was well attended. If you have not already done so, please log into the Public Interest Network (PIN) and sign up and indicate your areas of interest and expertise. You can access this via the BSPR website under the Share Your Expertise tab or by this direct link, https://www.publicinsightnetwork.org/form/opb/af05e403206f/joining-the-public-insight-network. This information is used locally and nationally. We are currently running on-air spots asking folks to go to the website and put their data in. Advocacy (Emily Walton): Emily met with John to discuss advocacy at the national level. We are on hold as we try to sort out the implications of sequestration; it is set to begin in March. BSPR did receive some federal money already this year. 1|Page
We’ve developed a skeleton editorial that people could use for op-eds in their local newspapers. Please ask Emily for more information. Anyone can write one and Emily will help get it sent in. In the spring will be working with staff to meet with elected leaders in the smaller communities. Maria noted that she has received several emails from the nationwide 170 Million Americans campaign that is advocating for continued federal funding for public media. She would like to respond, but would like some guidance. John noted that anyone can go to their website (http://170millionamericans.org/) and they have sample emails and letters that can be used. Their message is the same as ours, urging members of Congress not to cut funding for public media. When you submit a letter on their site it will go to designated congressmen. Bob asked if a local op-ed article right now would be okay since the legislature is in town. John did not feel like there would be a downside to doing one. Sustainability (Kelly Palmer): Please continue to offer any feedback on our roadshow presentation; Shelby recently helped to punch up the graphics. Micah has given the presentation to the rotary in Jerome. He also has a presentation scheduled in Hailey with the Hailey Rotary in mid-March. Mary Reiman has been heading up the effort to bring in local groups for station tours. Our Assistant Programming Director, Erik Jones will be giving these tours over the lunch hour. We will have audio pieces for both Engineering and News explaining how we create on-air content. The audio for Engineering is done, and the News audio will be done by the end of February. Mary will have the green light to start bringing in tour groups at the beginning of March. Also, if anyone has questions regarding their notes that Kelly requested at the December, please see her after the meeting so she can assist you. Kelly will check with Vida bout the status of the listener testimonials, as she is heading those up. Kelly will also connect Vida with Bob to get some folks from the outlying areas. Sub Committee Membership – Susan Giannettino The following active members are part of each of the sub committees:
Programming – Kristin Mathews (lead), Camille Oldenburg, Maria Trebby, Dede Ryan, Michael Zuzel Advocacy – Emily Walton (lead), Dave Fotsch, Susan Giannettino, John Hess, Paula BrownSinclair, Bob Youde Sustainability – Micah Austin (lead), Mary Reiman, Kelly Palmer, Cornelia Sprung, David Lombardi
Please make sure you are in the group that you feel good about working on and want to assist with. If anyone is interested in changing committees, please contact your current committee lead and let them know and then contact the lead for the committee you would like to participate on. Shikhar, Erin, David and Shelby were encouraged to think about which group they would like to participate in and contact 2|Page
the lead for that committee. Maria Trebby noted that she would be happy to be a worker bee for any group that needed one. Camille Oldenburg suggested establishing a standing Marketing committee. The group was encouraged to think about the value add for establishing a Marketing committee between now and the April meeting, at which point the group will decide if this should be established or not. A Nominations committee will also be formed in April to work together over the summer to determine a slate of candidates to bring to the larger group at the October board meeting. The Vice-Chair leads this committee. CAB Bylaws Proposed Amendment – Paula Brown-Sinclair The rewording is intended to note that we are responsible for recruiting and that we are trying to get students involved for more than one year. It also notes that students can and are encouraged to continue to be on the board even after graduation. Boise State University and the College of Southern Idaho are named specifically because they are partner institutions. However, this language is not limiting our recruitment to just those two institutions; it is as flexible as Paula could make it. The new wording allows us to cast wider net to find a student while giving respect to our partner institutions. The group suggested also including other institutions such as CWI and Treasure Valley Community College and doing some recruiting. Before we proceed too far, John would like to speak with the President’s office representative, Randi McDermott, about what they want to do before looking at other colleges in our coverage area as we are still part of Boise State University. There were some questions regarding various other pieces of the bylaws that were not proposed for change in Paula’s assignment. The group mentioned the piece that notes recruiting thirty days prior to first meeting, which is not enough time for this process since recruits need to be found and the Executive committee interviews the individuals. Currently we work around this by starting the process a few months ahead of time. It was also noted that the requirement for the Board to have 20 to 30 members, might be too many. Susan encouraged the Nominations committee (when determined) to look at bylaws over the summer and suggest updates. Motion: Maria Trebby made a motion to approve the proposed change as provided; seconded by Bob Youde. The motion was passed unanimously. Tara will edit the bylaws accordingly and send everyone a revised copy. General Manager’s Report – John Hess John showed a presentation that Shelby put together regarding the difference between what we do with StateImpact reporting in comparison to other news media covering the same issue. The presentation can be found at: http://prezi.com/rgvdaodrepl2/stateimpact-idaho-how-their-coveragediffers-from-other-media-organizations/. This presentation could be used to present to any civic organizations such as Rotary. It was suggested that adding audio to the presentation would increase its 3|Page
value because radio is still radio. Shelby is currently working on adding audio and will send a new link to everyone when it is complete. If sequestration goes through we will receive a 5.1% cut in federal funding (CPB) starting in March. That is about $22,400 for us, which is about what we pay for new transmitter. Sequestration will also continue over the next five years with an annual cut each year of 8.1%, which is 40% of our current budget. Most political analysts believe that this first sequestration in March will happen. Programming – We recently received our Fall 2012 ratings. KBSX up 17% in total listeners to 54,400, this is an all-time high! KBSU is up 21% to 39,100 listeners, up from 32,300 in Spring 2012. We receive these numbers from an audience survey called Arbitron that we subscribe to. News – We are currently planning our second community engagement event in April. If you go to our website, you can take a quiz to see if you would be a good proprietor of a local business. We also have an interactive map with the winners and losers of personal property tax removal. StateImpact is helping to decipher the news and show how individuals can be more active in their communities by providing information to make educated decisions which is what the news is supposed to do. Shikhar suggested seeding the survey out as sponsored link with Facebook. Shelby will follow up on this with the internal marketing group. Development/Membership – Our final FY12 fundraising total was $1.293,623, which is up 3%. However, our membership numbers were flat 9554. Meaning our average gift from members goes up a little every year, but we aren’t gaining new ones, which doesn’t really make sense. We are getting more listeners, so we have to figure out why we are not getting more members. Are our one-day drives to short? Are we not getting the members we need from that effort? In regards to fundraising dollars, we are doing much better than similar markets as the average gift is typically $103 and we are at $134 per member. We have one of the highest sustainer percentages in system. Currently we are up 1% YTD in membership dollars and our membership numbers are up 3%. Major Donor/Mid-Level Giving – John and Kelly have a trip to Sun Valley scheduled in March. We have developed the first layer of donors for the Capital Campaign, now we are working on second layer. Right now we are relationship building and cultivating these individuals. People have to have an affinity with what we are doing before they will give. We have quite a few proposals out right now. We have a $75K naming proposal that looks really good. We also have a $100k naming proposal that we are getting ready to send. There is a new VP in BSU’s University Advancement area which is the central division on campus that deals with fundraising. This individual is very donor-centric and is coordinating with other units within university. It looks like we will have more opportunities to have a place at the table with large donors. Corporate Support – We’ve had a lot of changes in the last year in corporate support, we now have a new corporate support manager. We have 115 active underwriters which is a pretty healthy number and we are 75% to goal for contracted business. Our goal for the year is $500K. This sounds really great, but since the entire year needs to be done by May we will really have to push this quarter to make our goal. We are at 51% of revenue collected which is right on par. If anyone knows of additional 4|Page
underwriters that are interested, information regarding how to be a sponsor can be found on our website. Business – We submitted our Annual Financial Report (AFR) to CPB. We had a 4% increase in nonfederal support to the stations in FY11 which equals more money for us. We are 47% to goal for revenue and 62% to goal for expenses due to unexpected roof repairs. We also have a new traffic manager who recently started, her name is Paula Jensen and she has 40 years of traffic experience. Engineering – We are working on the plan to move the broadcast operations to Yanke. We should be operational by Thanksgiving. We’ve had a couple of issues at Deer Point in McCall, but we believe we’ve resolved all of those. Also, all the Sun Valley upgrades are finished we are just finishing up with the backup generator which we hope to complete by the end of the year. BSPR Strategic Planning Update – John Hess Shikhar Sarin has been working with staff to help put together a listenership survey. We would like to hire Shikhar to develop a comprehensive listener survey and compile a report with the results that we can use for future strategic planning. We are looking at a 40 question survey that we would send out to approximately 20,000 individuals. John wanted to clear with the Board that Shikhar will still be a CAB member, but that we would be paying him for services regarding the survey. If you have not already taken a look at the focus group summary that was sent out, please do so, as CAB engagement is critical. The main points were:
Branding – there is universal confusion. Marketing – more of an internal problem. Local News – where are we? What do people think? Is it valuable? Should we continue? Technical Capacity – whatever we decide to do about the network, we need to do it well. Community Engagement – Is it valuable? What do listeners want to see? Fundraising – this is a major issue going forward especially with loss of federal funding. For every $1 raised it costs $0.35 to get that dollar. Digital Future – we have invested a lot into website, but our streaming capabilities are lacking.
Dave Edwards will be back at end of month to work with staff to develop general plans for each area that all managers will be responsible for. We will then talk to the stakeholders to make sure we are on the right track. This will be an ongoing process and we don’t expect to have a fully formed plan until the end of the summer. Shikhar will be meeting with news staff tomorrow morning to get more information from them for the survey. By April we’ll have a roadmap. Our new facility will be really great and we already own the web space we just need to toot our horn louder and tell people about who we are. Adjourn – Susan Giannettino The next Community Advisory Board meeting will take place on April 4, 2013. 5|Page
Tara will be sending an electronic version of the CAB contact list out, please review your information and if you have any changes, please let her know. Meeting adjourned at 7:33 p.m.
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