Members:
Jaime Theler –Chair
Ranee S. Clark – Chair Elect
Loralee Evans – Secretary
Cindy Bennett–Finance Chair
Karen Hoover — Membership Chair
Jessica Kendall — Conference Chair
Emily Huey — Conference Co-Chair
*T.J. Bronley–Conference Finance*
Annette Lyon — Communications Chair
*Jessica Thompson–Assistant to the Communications Chair*
Heather Justesen — SMIAH Conference Chair
Jerry Borrowman–At Large Representative
Jennie Bennett–At Large Representative
Taryn Skipper — Whitney Awards President
*Tiana Smith— Website Coordinator
*Non-voting members
Absent:
Ranee S. Clark
Annette Lyon
Jerry Borrowman
Jennie Bennett
1—OPENING
Motion to approve the previous minutes. Conference Chair motions to approve. Membership Chair seconded. Minutes approved.
2—CHAIRMAN & CHAIRMAN ELECT, Jaime Theler & Ranee Clark
Chairman has the following to discuss.
- Amend the bylaws
- Membership approval process
- Financial audit
- Conference discounts
Amend the Bylaws
Many members want to keep the membership free from publishers to have a safe place for authors.
Self published authors no longer need to have their manuscript “professionally edited” with gross earnings of 750.00 on a single, self-published work.
Associate members will be added on in a separate tier.
Would it be a good idea to require people to submit a letter of resignation of they want to leave the guild?
It would also be a good idea to put that if a member doesn’t pay, that indicates that they have left the guild.
What are the perks for being an Associate Member? They get to be part of the Storymaker community, they are able to join the Associate Facebook group, they have access to guild events and activities, and they get an Associate member ribbon at the Storymakers Conference.
Once the wording has been changed, Chairman will put it on the BOD facebook page for the BOD to vote on.
Membership Approval Process
Chairman can’t find our process written down anywhere. We should solidify the process. Chairman and Membership Chair have been working through a document. They’ll start with the professional level decide on what we want to do for the official process. The Membership Chair’s process is that once the applicant has been vetted, she sends the name to the board who then votes on that member.
Could we vote in the meeting, rather than by email? Or on the Facebook group. The Conference Co-Chair likes the board approval process, because if there is something problematic with an applicant, then with the members of the board looking at that applicant, someone might know of something that would have slipped past one person.
Does it make sense to share current membership list with everyone who needs it, like Whitney’s, finance, etc?
Would it work to have People who have been former members return by paying registration fee,and reapplying?
3—SECRETARY, Loralee Evans
Nothing new to add.
4—FINANCE CHAIR, Cindy Bennett
The Finance Chair anted to let SMIAH Chair know that starting in January Jessica Thompson will be replacing Cindy in January as Finance Chair.
We’ll be making everybody due in January regardless of when they join during the year. We don’t want to do the Associate membership at the same time, that would be too much for the Finance Chair.
Would it be a good idea to have the Associate members pay their dues in June or July. That way you can do a push during Conference to draw people into the Associate section of the guild, but not have it right in May while we’re still recovering from the Conference.
You can’t have 2 separate bank accounts when we’re a non-profit. If Conference wanted to do its own thing, it had to entirely separate from the guild.
If we have five different entities with 5 different tax numbers, then the finance person will have to do 5 different taxes.
We should explore the possibility in the future of being able to have different accounts for different money for Conference, Guild, etc.
5—WHITNEY CHAIR, Taryn Skipper
All good!
6—MEMBERSHIP CHAIR, Karen Hoover
Membership Chair is having a hard time finding information on who has paid and who has not. It’s not under “wishlist”. Finance Chair has a list of who has paid. It would be good to have spreadsheets that the Membership Chair can have access to. If you have a living document, you can have a list of people who have been approved that the Membership Chair can go to.
7—CONFERENCE CHAIR & CO-CHAIR, Jessica Kendall, Emily Huey
Everything is going great. They were just announcing the agents and editors this year. They’ll be starting registration January 26th. There was a little delay for the keynote. But there are backups, so conference is doing great.
We have a budget to review and approve. Conference Finance is trying to find some time this week and then email it to the executive board members for review.
In discussing conference budget, we’ll need leftover to be able to afford discounts, professional membership, and board of directors. We’ll want to standardize the discount so we know what to expect.
Conference is trying to keep the cost down as much as possible, and still stay in a good place financially. Has the conference raised the price on food? Their menu hasn’t come out yet.
8—COMMUNICATIONS CHAIR, Annette Lyon, Jessica Thompson
Assistant to the Communications Chair is switching to a different department. Did a newsletter go out in the last few weeks? Conference sent one out at the beginning of October. We were going to announce the membership again.
9—SMIAH CONFERENCE CHAIR, Heather Justesen
If our spreadsheet is correct, we ended up several hundred dollars in the black. Cindy has all the invoices by now. Everything will work out hopefully, and Cindy will let us know how well that worked out. Because of conflicts in the fall, we’ve moved to October, but that had conflicts so we’ll move in March 7 and 8 2025. Will We need to know for sure if you’ll build pages for us on Storymakers, or will SMIAH need to remain separate with their own website.
The pages SMIAH has probably 5 or 6 pages. If SMIAH is not heavy on storage with images, then it will probably be fine to add SMIAH to Storymaker’s website. It will be fine if SMIAH stays separate, they just need to know soon.
Is SMIAH now officially part of our organization? They are, and their finances come through us. SMIAH was originally with Storymakers, then partnered with a local library, and SMIAH separated, but now we’re back with Storymakers.
Pages that take the most labor intensive upkeep, because they have to be updated regularly.
SMIAH would probably be a similar thing where things are being changed regularly for their conference.
That would be more upkeep for the conference person who would be adding information for a new conference.
Right now, the person in charge of the website is in charge of the guild, conference, adding SMIAH would add on more work for the website person. That increases the possibility of messing up the website. Tiana’s concern is the added workload, and the possibility of making a mistake on the website.
10—AT LARGE CHAIR, Jerry Borrowman
My one item to accomplish is proving difficult – getting three members to join a Zoom audit of our finances. I’ve sent out multiple emails to members asking if they’ll help us, but have received NO replies. So at this point I don’t have the people needed to do this. I can reach out to people I know, such as Gregg Luke and Amanda Sowards, but that doesn’t make it random. Another option is to ask people live at the next conference — I don’t know how urgent this audit is. At any rate, I’ve failed in what seems like a simple task. I’m open to your thoughts.
We’ll need to find some people to help Jerry with this by the end of the year.
11—MOTION TO ADJOURN
Conference Chair motions to adjourn and Whitney Awards President seconds the motion. The meeting is adjourned.