April 4, 2013 CAB Minutes

Boise State Public Radio Community Advisory Board Meeting Thursday, April 4, 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: Susan Giannettino, Chair Erin Duran Shikhar Sarin Dave Fotsch Staff in Attendance: John Hess, General Manager Tara Cooper, Recorder

Maria Trebby Cornelia Sprung Shelby Zepeda Camille Oldenburg

Dede Ryan Paula Brown-Sinclair David Lombardi Randi McDermott

Paul Stribling, Program Director

Guests in Attendance: Dave Edwards, Strategic Planning Specialist ***************** Call to Order – Susan Giannettino Chair, Susan Giannettino, called the Boise State Public Radio Community Advisory Board (CAB) meeting to order at 6:02 p.m. Dave Edwards is here again as a guest.

Approval of February 2013 Meeting Minutes – Susan Giannettino No discussion on the minutes as submitted.

Motion: Dave Fotsch made a motion to approve the minutes; seconded by Maria Trebby. The motion was passed unanimously.

Sub Committee Updates – Susan Giannettino Programming (Susan Giannettino): Kristin is out sick. There will be a Programming Committee Meeting scheduled sometime this month. 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.

Advocacy (John Hess): Recently the committee sent out information about what NPR is doing to create grassroots movements to connect with legislators. The group discussed doing some outreach in the translator areas. We have approximately 150 members total in all the outlying areas combined; the group will work on scheduling some meetings with those individuals and community leaders to let them know what is happening and how the communities may be affected.

Sustainability (Susan Giannettino): Micah was not in attendance. CAB members expressed interest in attending a Station Experience event.

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Nominations Committee – Susan Giannettino Mary Reiman is the Chair of this committee, as per our bylaws. We need a few additional people to help with assembling a slate of candidates to be CAB members for the existing CAB to vote on in October meeting. {Note from Chair: The new members term as CAB members will start in with the December meeting.} There will need to be a lot of recruiting this year. The Nominations Committee is also asked to look at the current bylaws and make suggestions for changes, in needed, to the section that outlines membership. Especially, look at the items involving board size and quorum requirements. We want to try to keep the board as diverse as possible especially in the following categories: geography, gender, ethnicity, and age. We are looking for individuals who can contribute their talents and time, have community connections, will make BSPR at least in the top 3 of their charitable given organizations, and are passionate about public radio. Tara will send out the materials that were sent out last year that include a job description. In the past, the committee requested names and a brief bio, vetted the individuals and presented recommendations to John. John then interviewed each of the candidates and their names were presented to the Board to vote on during the October meeting. It is up to the committee how to create a slate of candidates.

Nominations Committee Members: Mary Reiman, Cornelia Sprung, Maria Trebby, Shikhar Sarin, and Randi McDermott Marketing Committee – Susan Giannettino There was a suggestion at the February meeting that the CAB should consider establishing a standing Marketing Committee. There was brief discussion about what has gone on in the past and why the suggestion was made.

Motion: Camille Oldenburg made a motion to create a standing Marketing Committee; seconded by David Lombardi. The motion was passed unanimously.

The current staff marketing committee meets twice a month and would welcome CAB involvement.

Marshall Brezonick led the previous ad hoc Marketing Committee that developed the current marketing plan that has been used. Tara will send out this marketing plan to all members as background information. . The committee is requested to look at the previous plan and come back to the CAB during the June meeting with some ideas about how the new marketing committee might proceed.

John will act as the staff liaison until the new marketing manager is hired.

Marketing Committee Members: Camille Oldenburg (co-lead), Shelby Zepeda (co-lead), Shikhar Sarin, and David Lombardi Sub Committee Membership – Tara Cooper With the additional committees and a few changes, the following active members are part of each of the sub committees:   

Programming – Kristin Mathews (lead), Maria Trebby, Dede Ryan, Michael Zuzel, Erin Duran 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 2|Page

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Recruitment– Mary Reiman (lead), Cornelia Sprung, Maria Trebby, Shikhar Sarin, Randi McDermott Marketing – Camille Oldenburg (co-lead), Shelby Zepeda (co-lead), Shikhar Sarin, David Lombardi

BSPR FY14-16 Strategic Plan Overview – Dave Edwards & John Hess Dave Edwards – He has really enjoyed working with our team. A year ago he came out to do an assessment of the station. At that time he met with the staff and was impressed by John’s leadership and the management team. Shortly after that, it was time to do start looking at the next strategic plan and he was invited out again to help with the strategic planning process. In December, he and John met with a lot of stakeholder groups: senior management team, staff, community leaders, CAB, university leaders and others. He was very impressed with the CAB and the level of volunteerism, as he has worked with a lot of different boards and that is unusual. He applauded the Board for their dedication.

Through the stakeholder conversations issues and themes were quickly identified.

Five key areas were identified and an entire day was spent with the senior management team to define the next steps. Strategic planning has to be an ongoing process with an open dialogue with all stakeholders. We also need to acknowledge and face the current disrupters we are facing as well as future ones that we are unaware of. The strategic plan needs to be flexible enough to be able to address future problems that may arise.

John Hess – Dave has been very helpful in this process offering guidance and vision. John presented a PowerPoint presentation outlining the FY14-16 Strategic Plan. We will be tying our listenership survey to strategic plan schedule; we will likely do this before the new plan is created so we can use the data collected to guide our next steps for a strategic plan.

Local News: We want to build on success of StateImpact Idaho that is ending September 30, 2013. We want to work on core strengths and invest in people. We plan to hire a highly-skilled journalist. It will cost more money to hire high-end people, but it will help to elevate our entire news staff. We want to work on developing our partnerships with other national media organization which will hopefully gain us more exposure. We plan to delve deep into subjects (education, environment, etc.) just like StateImpact did with the economy. We want people turn to us as the news sources for specific topics. We also plan on investing in online reporting by reaching out with our website, Facebook, and Twitter to hopefully reach younger consumers. Going forward, we will have to be good at that. This will require us to hire a knowledgeable digital content coordinator.

Technical Capacity: We want to continue to provide services to outlying areas, to do that, we need more resources. There is no federal money left to build new towers or repair current ones. We’ve asked the university to help by providing an additional $20,000 a year over the next five years to create an equipment repair fund. We can’t really ask the members in those communities to fund repairs/replacements because the money currently being raised needs to go to helping operating budget for the entire system; and most likely the members in those areas would then want to move their funding to capital equipment and it would take away from overall operations. These areas have limited capacity and are unable to fund additional needs on top of what they provide for general operations. If university does not provide the additional funding, we all will need to decide whether we take $100K away from everything else we want to provide.

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CAB Concerns: It was suggested that we do a cost/benefit analysis with each community. It was also suggested that we talk to the legislators and community leaders that represent those areas and let them know the issues we are facing. Susan suggested that we still go to communities with the issue and let them know what is going on.

Branding/Marketing: We want to engage our current listeners and new listeners, as more listeners equal more revenue. We plan to closely align ourselves with NPR; our listeners are already saying and thinking it already. We also want to get people to think of dial position; this is important as the Arbitron survey attributes count this way. We will also focus on dial position for the classical as well. We plan to earmark funds specifically for part-time person (20 hr/wk) marketing person to serve as the point person for our marketing plan.

CAB Concerns: There will still be a tension with a too close affiliation with BSU; KBSU still seems to present a problem. Also the tag line (NPR News 91.3) still seems to be Treasure Valley/ Boisecentric, because the signals are different in each of the communities. Susan and others felt this is still very off-putting. The “NPR News” piece does add value.

Community Engagement: We will be going from 4-6 to 12-18 community engagement events. We’ve already changed some job descriptions to help with this. Adrienne Zachary now does the planning for events in the community. This is the best kind of marketing that we can do. We want to be looked at more than just a radio station; we want to be a community institution. We will be committing more staff resources to this area. We will also do event evaluations to be sure these are a good use of our resources.

CAB Concerns: Is our interpretation what the listener sees as connecting to us (deepening their relationship)? Should we be looking at other forms that we could engage in? We may want to do some focus groups to determine this. Ask an open-ended question: What makes you feel connected to us?

Raising Revenue: The funding goals for membership and underwriting will be increased. This increase keeps pace with the additional cost of operations. We plan to hire an additional corporate support representative. We are also working on our sustainer plan; we already have one of the highest sustaining percentages in the country. We are looking a starting a local news initiative fund; getting people to earmark extra money specifically for news. We are also looking at ideas for a signature event that could help us connect with a younger listener group. We are also look at developing a regional capital campaign in the Wood River Valley to create more of a presence in that area.

The one item not address in the plan is the CPB funding issue. Other organizations already plan for no federal support. We need to think about this going forward and hopefully get to point where CPB money won’t necessarily have to be spent in the year that it is received. This will require us to really think long term about fund raising.

CAB Concerns: Shikhar suggested that we formalize a 5-year plan going forward that makes us independent from CPB funding.

If anyone has additional comments or concerns regarding the strategic plan please send John an email or call him as soon as possible. John will be presenting the plan to staff tomorrow (4/5). The

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management team has begun work on their first year plans and the goal is to have a finalized plan by May 15.

General Manager’s Report – John Hess Our next Community Conversation will take place on April 10. The discussion topic will be federal public lands in Idaho and their management.

Our spring fund drive will take place on April 18. We may have an end-of-year drive in June with the food bank; however, this has not been finalized yet.

We are getting calls and emails regarding NPR’s decision to end Talk of the Nation. This programming change was not necessarily very well explained, but NPR has to make changes as well and is reaching out to other stations and developing strategic partnerships.

We are in the process of upgrading our internet streaming from a capacity of 100 to a capacity of 1000.

The last piece we are waiting on is the new servers.

Everyone was sent Kelly’s development report. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact her.

Adjourn – Susan Giannettino The next Community Advisory Board meeting will take place on June 6, 2013.

Please review the contact list and be sure all personal information, including the appointment terms, is up to date. John and Tara will also double check appointment terms.

Meeting adjourned at 7:40 p.m.

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