Hiawatha Bicycling Club meeting minutes

Board of Directors Meeting  7:00 pm  February 13, 2018

Location:   Have Fun Biking

                 1321 E 66^th Street   Suite 102

                  Richfield,  MN  55423

 

Board members present: Dan Robinson, Barry Cole, John Johnston III, Mark Kleczewski, and Marty Rosenstein (phone)

 

Board members absent: Jack Soltis, Theresa Ditter

 

Other club members present:   Leon Webster, John Zeiss, Russ Lowthian

 

Meeting was called to order at 7:08 pm

 

The January meeting minutes were approved.

 

Treasurer’s Report: 

Meetup and storage were only expenses.  Reserve fund is doing well.  The issue of moving money between the TCF checking account and Reserve fund was discussed.  It was decided to stay with the present method of moving money back and forth as needed (3-4 times per year) rather than transfer enough funds to permit a year of financial operation totally from the checking account.

 

Vice-President’s Report:  Barry

Nothing to report.

 

Web-Site Discussion – Leon and John

Leon and John described the functions, features, costs of Wild Apricot (WA), BR4HC, and ipage and their importance to HBC and TDA cost centers.  The calendar which is now on BR4HC is being implemented in the WA website and when this happens ipage will only be needed and paid for by TDA.  One benefit is that only one login password will be needed.  Their was discussion of improving the HBC webste for mobile devices and this improvement is underway at WA. 

After a discussion of the website functions and operations the subject of website content was briefly discussed.  It was agreed that content needed to be changed and Marty and Russ agreed to meet to start working on improved content, especially for facebook.  Marty attended a class where web site improvement was highlighted as being more important than ads for improved site visitation.  As part of this thrust, John J and Leon will work on getting low-priced Googe certs.

 

Ride-Leader Awards:  - All

Another item on agenda was a discussion of ride leader awards.  Many options were discussed including asking ride leaders for their input at the ride leader banquet (Dan), giving Damico gift certificates for $50 at the cost of $25 to the club (Russ), going to Ascend to get jerseys in the absence of Palamasino response (John Z).  It was decided that for 2016 and 2017 with the absence of jerseys, the award will be a $50 gift certificate for each year.  For 2018, the award will be a jersey.   A decision on the requirements for a ride leader award was postponed for a future meeting.

 

Membership Report: – Dan and John J

John described his analysis of the membership demographics and trends over the years. We have 2 new members and are currently at 203.  Dan revealed that our membership is probably higher than that number and might be more like 296.  Haggith’s membership number is based on assuming 2 per family membership.  Dan and Leon will try to get more accurate membership numbers from Wild Apricot. 

 

Marketing and Public Relations Report:  Marty and Russ

Russ presented a proposed $2k market plan.  The plan calls for $500 for Facebook, $200 for Group-on, $200 for Meetup, $150 for Progressive ride program, and $950 for 2 ads.  The current budget has ~$750 allotted for marketing.  Marty and Russ will review their plan but the consensus was that the budget might need to be increased.  No decision was made.

 

Tour D’Amico (TDA):  Dan

A discussion of TDA followed.  The two main focus areas were the jerseys and TDA cost.  Dan had some discussion with TDA about getting better TDA jerseys.  It is prohibitively expensive for the club to work directly with the TDA designer to get better jerseys but Dan will work with Damico personnel who were not aware that the design was not generally popular.  They appear open to improving the jersey design.  Russ said that May 25 is the cutoff for ordering jerseys for TDA.

The main subject was about reducing the price of TDA.  It was felt by many on the board that a price in excess of $50 was prohibitive and affected attendance.  Dan pointed out that Tour of Lake cost only $25 to which Russ commented that Tour of Lakes does not try to make money.  It appears that with a $13 fixed cost and a sizeable profit last year there was room to reduce the TDA price and perhaps get more riders.  A special board meeting will convene on Feb 20 at 7pm  at HFB to establish a price for this year’s TDA.

 

Volunteer Banquet:

There was no discussion of the volunteer banquet venue.

 

New Business:  

None

 

Next Meetings:

The next regular board meeting will be held on March 6, 2018 at 7:00 pm at the Have Fun Biking office in Richfield.  

A special meeting to decide on TDA price will be on Feb 20 at 7:00pm at HFB.

 

 

The meeting was adjourned at 9:45 pm.

Respectively submitted by Barry Cole for Jack Soltis