April 20, 2015 Board of Directors Meeting

Bloomington Community Band April Meeting Minutes

April 20, 2015

Meeting called to order: 9:13pm

In attendance: Jerry Jerome, Bill McGregor, Christy Townsend, Anita Elsey(visitor), Guy Hardy, Doug Davis, Lloyd Orr, Phyllis Solnzeff (visitor), Joe Car, Phil DiLavore, Gary Wiggins, Chelsea Hoover, Don Westerhaus, Don Talbott, Joe Car, Jim Kirkman (visitor), Bob Appelman

Not in attendance: none!

Meeting Minutes

Christy motions to accept the minutes as amended.  Bill seconds.  Motion passes

Treasurer’s Report

We made our final payment to St. Thomas as our donation.  Our publicity line is slightly overspent, and will be even more overspent.  Our Vanguard account has made roughly $500, but we should not expect that to continue.

The endowment fund has roughly $128k.

Bill motions to accept the treasurer’s report, Doug seconds.  Motion passes.

Endowment Report

The current value of the Endowment is $128k.  This endowment has grown about $18,600.  We got $55 outside the timeline of the Match Madness campaign.  In July we will get about $4500, but the projection is it will top out around $5800.  The best part about doing this is the matching the Community Foundation does, so we get about 8% return on our investment.  Total donations were about $8k, and they matched that with over $10k, which is how we ended up $18,600.

Brochure

We have a fairly basic mockup of what the new program will look like.  Now we need to go out and sell the ads.  The estimate we have from the printer is roughly $1 per booklet.  We have about 4 weeks to sell and drop the ads into the brochure.

Minimum Musical Standards

The committee has drafted policy to address minimum musical standards for players.  The section leaders also had some thoughts from last week’s meeting.  The policy language is:

All new members of the band join under an initial assessment period of eight rehearsals where the new member is present. This assessment period should include encouragement and support from the section leader and conductor(s) especially when a new member is struggling. New players not meeting minimum standards of musicianship following this assessment period should be sustained only as long as their interest continues and they are making progress. If, in the opinion of the conductors and section leader, a player is considered deficient after the assessment period, the conductor(s) and section leader will bring the matter to the attention of the Board, to determine future action, including suggesting private lessons or tutoring, or a recommendation that the new member return when skills have improved.

Doug moves that we adopt this policy.  Bob seconds.  Motion passes with one nay vote.

Concert Schedule

Our first concert is May 22st.  We will get marketing support for this concert, but we need to do some legwork ourselves.  As Bonnie is no longer able to help us with during-concert marketing, Jerry has asked the Area 10 agency for a couple people to hand out brochures and get a headcount of our audience, as well as a fishbowl etc.  We will hopefully have the trailer parked somewhere conspicuous to help with advertising.

We should alter the poster that Christy created, and Jerry is going to work on getting the fishbowl/during concert stuff.  Also, we advertise on the radio etc.

Website

There are still some minor glitches with the website.  Doug would like us to look at the website and send any feedback to Doug prior to that meeting.  There are plans in the works to look at our text on the website.

Being Audited

Lloyd thinks we are overdue for an audit, and that we should have our books audited soon.  Lloyd motions that we budget for an audit to be performed on 2015 fiscal year books.  Doug seconds.  Motion passes.

Benefit Concerts

There has been some mention of us playing a benefit concert for charity.  Our concert on November 1 is a good example of that.  There might be an issue with our sponsors being okay with this.  Jerry included it in the agenda so we can start to think about it.  We also need to look our budget to see if we want to give up the fishbowl donation.  It may make more sense to plan a concert around a charity event.  Doug volunteers to look into a charity, and Jerry will help too.

Sale of Band Shirts

Don used to work for a company that used Lands’ End as supplier for their uniforms that helps make the shirts more accessible and takes the pressure off of Lloyd.  He will look into how that would work for us.

Meeting ended at 10:17pm