via conference call
The meeting was called to order by Chair, Denise Colley at 9:03pm EST
Members present: Denise Colley, Ron Brooks, Tom Mitchell, and Doug Powell
Member absent: Judy Wilkenson
Ex Officio members present: Nolan Crabb (PR), Kim Charlson (President, Bob Hachey (IOC)
Editor: Sharon Lovering
Contractors: Annette Carter (Website), Larry Turnbull (Internet and ACB Radio)
Guests: Rob Hill, Ken Stewart, Sue Ammeter, Carla Ruschival
The agenda was approved as modified by Denise
The February meeting minutes were approved as distributed.
Doug renewed the request that people giving reports to the BOP get their reports out a week in advance of the meeting for our review and timely inclusion in the minutes.
Guest Comments: There were none.
Editor's Report
Because of weather and Mid-Year meeting cleanup, Sharon could not submit a report or get the email of the March Braille Forum out. She’ll try to get the email out 3/3 and the report out by 3/6.
Nutshell Report received 3/13:
March 2015 ACB Braille Forum
Print Page Count: 48
Large Print Issues Mailed: 3,305
Date Large Print Issues Mailed: Feb. 23, 2015
Braille Issues Mailed: 735
Date Braille Issues Mailed: March 5, 2015
Cassette Issues Mailed: 1,385
Date Cassette Issues Mailed: still in duplication; hoping to mail by March 23rd
CD Rom Issues Mailed: 163
Date CD-ROM Issues Mailed: Feb. 27, 2015
Date Posted to Website: March 2, 2015
Date E-mail version sent: March 2, 2015
E-mail issues mailed: 3,676
# Of Large Print Copies Returned Undeliverable: none yet
# Of Braille Copies Returned Undeliverable: 2
# Of Cassette Copies Returned Undeliverable: none yet
# of CD Rom Copies Returned Undeliverable: none yet
# Of Miscellaneous Copies Returned Undeliverable: none yet
I continue to work on the April issue, as well as on the affiliate lists, changes, additions and deletions that come in via mail and e-mail. I’m also training Kelly Gasque, the new assistant to Melanie and Eric. You’ll probably hear her voice on the phones in a few days.
Committee Reports
PR Committee, Nolan Crabb/Tom Mitchell
The focus has been the Convention session, and trying to get Nolan there via inexpensive audio inclusion. The subject of the session will be How to Drive People to Your Website through Social Media. Nolan acknowledged that “social media” has received, and continues to receive a lot of attention, but feels that people still don’t get it about using these outlets to forward affiliate goals.
Nolan also asked if we were interested in scheduling the Editor’s Workshop and the PR sessions contiguously. Ron suggested that the same people would be going to both of these sessions, so it would make sense to schedule them in adjacent time slots. Tom said he had mentioned this idea to Nolan because he could see the synergy. Denise agreed that there was common threads between the two topics even though the subject matter was somewhat different.
Denise summed up the discussion by saying we should talk further about it and perhaps approach Janet to see what was available.
Oral History/Leadership, Berl Colley - no report
Lists, Bob Hachey
Bob mentioned that the L list has been fairly quiet. He’d like suggestions on how to keep discussions going in a positive vein. Since ISPs blacklist listservs quickly when they are very negative, we are having to rein in negativity, and that is tending to stifle conversations.
ACB Radio, Larry Turnbull
Larry mentioned that Perkins has not been able to produce the audio versions of the Feb. E-Forum nor the March Braille Forum yet. Kim replied that the two versions will be to Larry in the next day or two. Feb. is late due to Boston weather, and March will be on or close to deadline.ACB Radio will start charging affiliates $100 to stream their conventions. Kim mentioned that this fee does not in any way cover ACB Radio’s expenses such as Larry’s time, but it is a tangible commitment to the partnership of ACB Radio and the affiliates.
Larry is working on bringing on a couple of new broadcasters, who should be on in a couple of weeks.
Here are the listener counts for the month of February 2015. (received 3/9)
Listener counts obtained from the server:
Mainstream average 19 per day total listeners for February 532
Café average 4 per day total listeners for February 112
Trove average 75 per day total listeners for February 2100
Interactive average 20 per day total listeners for February 560
World News and Information average 8 per day total listeners for February 224
We averaged 30 listeners per day during the week of the sagebrush conference.
We had 20 listeners for the president’s meeting and 35 for the legislative seminar.
Listeners by phone:
Average call per day 148.
Average listen time 55 minutes per call.
We had a total of 4156 calls for the month of February.
30% of the callers listened to mainstream
45% listened to treasure trove
5% listened to interactive
5% listened to café
5% listened to World News and Information
10% listened to Live Event
Web hits:
We had 3600 hits for the month of February
Downloads:
MainMenu archives 2600
Speaking Out for the Blind Archives 125
We picked up 2 new subscribers for the Braille Forum and 1 subscriber for ACB Reports for February.
We had a total of 3832 tuning hours reported by Stream Licensing for café and interactive combined.
The hours were evenly split at 1916 for café and interactive.
We averaged 5 calls per day for the ACB Braille Forum, E Forum and ACBReports.
The total calls for February is 152.
Social Media, Carla Ruschival
Twitter: 965 followers
Facebook: 1167, and getting 5-7 new people per week.
Carla mentioned they could use a couple more people on the Facebook team to put out posts, and there have been a couple of interested people so she is hoping to add them and increase the number of posts.
She also mentioned that John McCann and Emily Starr have been helping on Facebook and also trying to combine posts to Facebook and Twitter at the same time. It’s not working yet. Emily is adding some valuable sighted help on the non-mobile website.
Denise asked if we could post the release of the new issue of the Forums on the social media sites. Annette will get that post to the social media list each month.
Website - Annette Carter
Doug had been asked by members if the email version of both the Braille and E-Forums could have links from the Table of Contents to the article within the email. Annette mentioned that the process is different for the website and the email, but that it could be done. She and Sharon will work on trying to get that to happen.
Web site report for March 2, 2015 BOP meeting
submitted by Annette Carter
- Posted Legislative Seminar Agenda and downloadable version
- Posted Hill Visit Report Packet and downloadable version
- Posted Legislative Imperatives pages
- Updated Legislative Seminar Agenda with links to Legislative Imperatives
- Sent links to the Social Media list for all of the above
- Closed the Mid-Year registration and adjusted page text
- Closed the AD Institute registration and adjusted page text
- Closed 2015 scholarship program; there were approximately 117 applicants
- March 2015 ACB Braille Forum
- Working with Larry on the daily backups timing out on the server. We are achieving daily backups, however with ever-increasing size of the website Larry is looking into how he can adjust the server to accommodate this without errors being received.
- Continuing to add pages to the new site
Old Business
Readership Survey
Denise, Ron, Tom, and Doug had a meeting with Matt Wiesler this afternoon. Denise summarized the call as being productive. We went through a preliminary analysis of the data, and identified areas where cross tabulated data would be useful. Matt will provide a written report by the end of March which Denise will distribute to the BOP for discussion at the April meeting. Denise hopes to devote the bulk of the meeting to this discussion and urged all reports be submitted in advance to streamline discussions of that work.
Denise reported from the Board meeting that the Board wants us to use the email addresses on AMMS to distribute especially the E-Forum with the opportunity to opt out. Denise is meeting with Lane to figure out how to get those addresses out of DonorPerfect, and she wants to work with Larry to ensure server stability, but the Board has charged us with making this happen.
Denise then reported that her presentation to the Presidents Meeting detailed all of the ways members could get the Braille Forum, the E-Forum, and ACB Reports. She emphasized that there was no reason why affiliate leaders couldn’t suggest ways for every member to get ACB information.
Ron suggested that the email going out to all email addresses should not be the full text of the Forum, but a Blast that it was available and have buttons to access different versions, etc.
We are going to pursue the idea of running the whole list from DonorPerfect against the current email subscribers so that the current subscribers get the complete text of the magazine, while the remainder get a monthly Blast that the new issue is available and link or reference different ways to receive it.
Editors Workshop
We reiterated our interest of a panel including Judy, the editor of the Houston newsletter, and Sharon (if she can) or someone else from another affiliate to talk about what types of content grabs the interest of today’s reader. We’re still looking for a snappy title for the session.
Simultaneous Distribution
Denise acknowledged that she has not been able to complete the outline she promised to distribute for our discussion. The document she thought had provided a template was not as helpful as she originally thought, but she promised she would talk to Sharon and Annette and come up with a schedule for us to look at.
New Business
BOP Awards
Tom expressed concern about advertising and receiving submissions in a timely manner for us to process. He asked what the timeline was. Denise answered that she has written the announcement requesting submissions for the March issue. She couldn’t remember if the deadline was April 30 or May 15. Sharon mentioned that she would start to organize the Forum articles next week. We would finalize awards at the June meeting.
We also need to discuss with Kim what we’ll do about the Candidate Forum at the April meeting,.
The meeting was adjourned at 10:47pm EST.
Respectfully submitted,
Doug Powell, Secretary