Oklahoma Aquarium Association Meeting Minutes, July 1st, 2001
OKCAA Executive Committee Meeting
Sunday, July 1st at the Varsity in Bricktown at 2PM
Members present: Brad Newton, Kelly Higgins, and Joe Anderson
Topics discussed:
Nominations: Need for new Treasurer, Secretary, and committee chairs/members. Noel will be helping to get nominations together for the November election soon.
Public Relations: Considered redesign of flyer and an inventory of where are flyers are currently and where they need to be. Kelly is considering some plans to help with PR for the club.
Website: Considered password protected calendar site, on-line membership application and *Banner Advertising*. We've got some prospects already and could probably get more if we had this service available. It was brought up that we probably will need to get some type of count of page hits (this is available in the server reports already - or we could get a counter)
Newsletter: Discussed the need for a process for distribution and a detail of the costs for printing. Receipts from the May printing costs were submitted and the total was approx 16-18$ to have them printed, folded, and stapled. We would then only have to stamp and mail them. It was suggested that we look into bulk mail rates which would be considerably less. Time frame is the most important.
Ideas for helping with article submission were using other clubs articles and public domain information (with permission and prior authorization of course). This is standard practice around the country and would greatly improve the amount of content available to our membership.
It was our consensus that the newsletter needs to be our main priority right now. If we can get it produced & mailed out quicker and improve the content, we could begin to offer advertising space to local and national merchandisers. This would be a great fund raising source and would help to pay for improvements in the look and quality of the document.
As an aside, it was suggested that we improve the quality of our current flyer (the tri-fold) and leave it at area merchants to reach even more prospective members. these could be mailed out to clubs and merchants in surrounding states as well. We already have an obligation to a few surrounding clubs to send them copies of our newsletter. We really need to work to improve our newsletter so that we can be proud to share it with other clubs.
Donna VanTreese has volunteered to edit the newsletter for content after it has been produced. Sean and Ramey are in charge of this process and can best decide how this should be accomplished. Members should probably be solicited for help at the next couple meetings and let them know that if they've got anything they want to include (articles/editorials/Q&A/trading post info) they can and should.
A copy of Acrobat Writer has been acquired and will enable us to convert the Publisher files into pdf formats that everyone can see. So, as soon as we've got a time line and process in place, we can begin steps toward getting the newsletter emailed out (this will also save on postage).
Membership: Noel is currently working on creating membership cards for everyone. He proposed that we try to get some more area merchants to offer discounts to members and these could be presented on the back of the cards perhaps. He is also working on a members awards program that would involve a point system we are adapting from the SFGA Breeder of the Year program. The winning member would receive a floating plaque with his/her name and the year. Then, the following year it would be presented to someone else.
Fundraising: These activities really rest on the improvements to the newsletter and website discussed above, so we tabled this topic until later.
Member forum: It was suggested that there was a need for a member forum. Brad has worked in a link to a forum that he already administered, so now we have a forum link directly from our website. We'll need to get some people to try to help out answering questions if it really takes off. Bailin had volunteered to do something similar earlier concerning a similar idea using the newsletter (another idea for space, Q&A Section) perhaps others would offer to ck in now and then and respond as well.
