Board notes: April 14, 2020 – Anime Twin Cities, Inc.

Attendance

Board Attended: John Koniges, Tristan Anderson, Kevin Ehrler, Michelle Clark, Jay Bottem, Christina Kramer, Kim Hofer, Anthony LaBerge
Board Absent:
Observers: Troy MacDonald, Heather Bufkin

Notes

Agenda

Recap off cycle board actions and votes

Cancellation of Anime Detour
- All in favor
Making the April meeting Virtual
- All in favor

Open Session (First 30 minutes)

Reprimand/coaching punishment for not doing Reviews as board member
- Scorecard for performance
- Is there a definitive list for expectations and duties as board member
- Who would be doing the scoring
- Do peer reviews of each other 1 month before elections
- Michelle volunteers to start a rough draft for guidelines
- Also have members in general review board members vs just peer reviews
  - Verbal and written communication
Rolling badges over would include ATC membership?
- If or when an anime detour badge is rolled over, the ATC membership and dues are included as well.
  - All in Favor
Need to tell people to purchase membership to ATC if they want to vote. Will need to promote this strongly.
Board Micromanaging, board members telling people below the coordinators what they are going to do. Should just be communicating with the coordinators.
- We have gone over this many times, if it is a large scale thing, then that decision does come down to the board.
- Short term falls down to the coordinators
- Wants to define this so we don’t have to rehash this every time
  - Ex. request to leverage coordinators resources vs telling them to do something.
- Proposal: The ATC board of directors can not dictate to any coordinator what the responsibilities of the coordinator’s staff are, or how those staff are to fulfill those duties.
  - 6 in favor 1 against

Planned Discussions from scheduled visiting parties/ATC Partners

Equipment Rental Requests

Coordinator Updates

Anime Detour
- Emails went out about difference between refunds and rollovers, working with Artist Alley, Vendors. Still in holding pattern for meetings as waiting on covid
Charities
- No charitable giving for this year
- Michelle came up with a letter for charities we have given to in the past about the issues with Covid.
- Charity we couldn’t give to, of the week, and people could donate to, via ATC Social Media (Jay posting)
Clubs
- Clubs aren’t really happening right now.
Community
- Still looking for community coordinator, needs to set up communication
Media Relations
- Numbers are up on views on ATC facebook page, response time is about 2 hours
- Nothing new on instagram
- Working on Twitter
- Working on ATC Twitch page, seeing where that can go
SOS
- Online staff meeting last month
- Focused on how to help community connect when can’t be together in person
- New discord server, ATC SOS Chat house (60 participants currently)
  - Team has been very helpful in running and moderating
  - Looking at doing jackbox games, or streaming viewing party with anime, and scheduled online group activities.
  - Looking for ideas: bingo, mass video sharing?
Finance
- Bank account $244,094.97
- Education Fund $2,262.36
- Leg Fund $13,151.33
- Exhibitors still need to finish being paid out
- Artist Alley has been paid out
- Dave @ GPS financial update
  - Losing all of their income from cancelled rentals
  - If Convergence does not happen in August, then GPS will not be able to survive the year
  - If they don’t survive, then they would not be asking for our payment in October.

Updates on current Board projects

Proposal for recording board meetings
- John does not currently have a rough draft on this
- Life has been busy so they are going to continue working on this
- We are a public meeting in a public space, anyone could walk in and record the whole thing since it is public, unless they are disturbing the meeting. Looking into details
- Having this live streamed, helps people to be able to participate
- Will try to have a proposal by May meeting
Proposal for waiving Anime Twin Cities membership costs for Anime Detour staff who meet requirements for free badge
- To be a non paid volunteer you have to meet certain criteria, once you break $500 in compensation there is tax stuff involved, we are currently at about $100 in compensation (Volcon, tshirt, AD Badge, staff dinner, anniversary pins)
- Need to discuss with the legal consultant further.
- Clarification that people aren’t buying tickets, they are buying a membership to AD which includes the ATC Membership.
- Will come back to in June
Five Year Plan
- Reviewing the document
- Clarifying 20,000 target each year in additional funds coming from a number of sources that are not ATC Based sources
- No suggestions on %s for targets
- Frustrated with lack of feedback on the document
- Hard to come up with concrete plans on how to make goals
- After hearing his explanations, some felt the document was completed enough
- Will need to update it so it is not based on 2020 numbers
- How much can we increase through advertising?
- More recruiting for staff, not just SOS staff
- Idea: Recover to 2019 status by 2022
- Doesn’t want to steamroll 5 year plan, to entirely focus on Covid recovery.
- Michelle with work with Tristan to help complete this document
Charitable Giving Proposals
- Michelle will be sending out letters apologizing that we are unable to donate this year, but will promote charities through alternate means
May 3rd planning meeting will not be able to happen anymore, so we need to possibly look into voting online.
- Kevin and Christina will work on this.
- Kim says we should be able to budget for this.

Meeting concludes at 20:50 pm