Present:
Shelly Brown — Chair
Crystal Liechty — Chair-Elect, Guild Committee President
*Jamie Theler –Assistant to Guild Committee President*
Lori Parker – Finance Chair
Cindy Bennett–Finance Co-Chair
Rebecca Carlson — Membership Chair
Wendy Jessen — Conference Chair
Jessica Kendall — Conference Co-Chair
*T.J. Bronley–Conference Finance*
Annette Lyon — Communications Chair
*Jessica Thompson–Assistant to the Communications Chair*
Traci Abramson — SMIAH Conference Chair
Jerry Borrowman–At Large Representative
Jennie Bennett–At Large Representative
Taryn Skipper — Whitney Awards President
*Non-voting members
Absent:
Loralee Evans – Secretary
Lori Parker – Finance Chair
1—OPENING
Shelly votes to approve the minutes. Jerry Borrowman motions to approve.Annette Lyon seconds. Shelly Motioned to begin the meeting
2—CHAIRMAN & CHAIRMAN ELECT, Shelly Brown & Crystal Liechty
After this last conference, it took a long time for the bookstore manager for conference to get reimbursed for expenses. The bookstore manager would like two things this next year. 1: That it will be assured (in policies and procedures, or something like that) that she will be reimbursed as soon as she submits things for reimbursement. 2: She was also wondering if there is a way to pay authors more quickly when they sell in the bookstore.
3—SECRETARY, Loralee Evans
Loralee is absent. But will access the recording later (probably Saturday night) complete the minutes, and share it with Communications.
4—FINANCE CHAIR, Cindy Bennett and Lori Parker
Lori is absent.
Strategies were discussed about how to keep Conference and Whitneys this next year to not spend more than is taken in.
Dues can go up, as well as prices for the conference and the Whitneys.
We need to think about pricing this so that we don’t have to feel like we’re in danger of spending more than we income.
We can come to some good conclusions and make the conference and Whitney’s work going forward.
What prices would people consider for the Whitney Awards? If you consider ways to award more people if you recognize more people. If we go to a tiered membership, then we could do a pinning ceremony for people moving up in tiers.
It could be emphasized that you’re not paying for the meal, you’re paying to watch the Whitney’s.
Currently, the membership application fee is 10$ and is considered refundable. One thing we could change is to make it not refundable. That would help to stop people who wouldn’t qualify.
It is time to change signers on the bank.
5—WHITNEY CHAIR, Taryn Skipper
They’ve got a few official nominees in there. The committee is awesome. Whitney Chair wants to make sure that she gets her budget. She has a CPA on her committee, and there will be a meeting with her and someone else who will help to come up with some good fundraising ideas. We are going to try to make the money this year!
6—MEMBERSHIP CHAIR, Rebecca Carlson
Absent. People can contact the secretary so she can share the documents with you and you can see who is on the board and how long their terms are.
Question about how to set up how to pay with square. Outgoing membership chair wants to know who will be replacing her and will be happy to train the incoming membership chair.
7—CONFERENCE CHAIR & CO-CHAIR, Wendy Jessen, Jessica Kendall
They have their committee finalized. They are still working on a keynote.
We need to have a submitted budget and vision. Do you think that could be done by October? That would give you until February to come in with a more finalized budget. We’ll open registration in January. After opening registration, we’ll see how many people have signed up two weeks after registration, because by then, it’s about half the people who will be signing up.
You may sell out faster this next year because now that we’re coming out of the cloud of covid, people will sign up faster.
We’re looking at some more sign-up sites. The sooner we find out what we’re going to do, the better we’ll know the budget.
8—COMMUNICATIONS CHAIR, Annette Lyon, Jessica Thompson
We were talking about how we’d like to ask who’s leaving and when. That way we know when to post the BOD application and for which positions.
What are Thursday pitches? What’s the difference between the Thursday pitches, and the Friday ones? The Thursday workshops are three hours long where you’re working with others on helping someone design a world, etc.
9—SMIAH CONFERENCE CHAIR, Traci Abramson
I’d love to give an update on SMIAH. (We’re hoping to open registration on July 5th.)
Registration went live today for SMIAH. The virtual classes aren’t listed yet. In-person is pretty much set, and now it’s just letting people sign up.
She put it on the Storymakers guild Facebook page. Talk about it, keep it up at the top, and share it on our own.
It might be worth it for the Conference Bookstore people to add that bullet point that all proceeds will be coming from Storymakers finance chair so that people don’t complain to the wrong people if their checks are late.
10—AT LARGE CHAIR, Jerry Borrowman, Jennie Bennett
It would be helpful to see the names of every single member of the guild. Talking to the secretary will get that.
11—MOTION TO ADJOURN
Shelly moves to adjourn. Taryn seconds. Meeting adjourned.