Minutes:12 Oct 2016 Board Meeting Agenda

AHA Mission Statement
We seek to establish, build, and support a collective of individuals organized around the principles of community-driven education in the arts and sciences, and to ensure ready access to the tools needed to pursue the realization of those principles.

• Meeting attendees: Nick R., Tyler W., Corey T., Nate Y., Alex W., Greg G.
• Meeting starts at: 1918
• Meeting ends at: 2103

Board Meeting Protocol

* Standing Committee Reports - Individual Updates by Assigned Director/Officer presented in the time allotted.

* Open Time: For anyone to bring anything up to the Board. IF the Board agrees the item requires action, it will be put into New Business and addressed at the end of the meeting.

Follow up

Corey - Did you schedule a marketing meeting? ETA is the 20th @ 5:00. How is the monthly marketing email coming along? ETA is Sunday August 14th end of day. Any progress on content for the blog?

(15m) Open For All

• All Are Worthy. All Are Welcome.

None this week.

Minutes Approval

• August 2016 Board Minutes.

5/5 approved

Education - Nick R.

Nick - KiCad and OnShape classes. Slides for KiCad were to be done August 14th and OnShape slides the week after. -- Still working on KiCad and OnShape, due by 10/12.

3D printer class slides need to be updated. -- Alex W. will update slides made for the Makerbot, due 10/12.

Previously:

• Advanced Learn-to-Solder (surface-mount) using Penguicon badges. -- Shelved for now. Nate will revisit October.
• Amateur radio General license review class -- Now in January.
• Professional Development opportunity (i.e. AHA training educators) via middle school teacher Rebecca B. -- Tyler contacted, no word from Rebecca.

Upcoming:

• Ann Arbor Academy. We've had a couple folks get in touch with us about running Arduino class here. Alex will reach out -- Tyler and Nate both agreed to take time off if the group is committed to doing a class.

Finances/Membership - Alex W.

TCF - $2800 in the bank, but haven't been paying rent (starting October). $1500-1600 is coming in from donations.

Members - 30 paying members currently, we need to get more soon.

The electronic membership form. Alex said he'd try to get it done by August 21st. -- Alex has the main form done, is breaking up the form into parts based on which membership type. Broke out the physical forms for signatures and current member vouchers. Forms will be separated by 9/21.

Nate will add giant notice on webpage to remind people to meet people/sign up in person before paying. -- DONE, but "tastefully large", not "giant".

Alex will meet with Lauren W. to transfer over Xero. -- Not done yet, will work with Greg to answer remaining questions.

Nate will look into getting an AHA referral code for Amazon purchases.

We need a Stripe setup to take membership dues and other payments again. Alex will let Nate know what he needs, and Nate will purchase. -- Tyler says Stripe has fees that are too high, would like to stick with Square. We should check into Square's Xero integration again.

Fundraising - Greg G.

Final push for AHA moving fundraiser by Larry W. brought in ~$1500

Emailed Bill Mayer of Spark on Aug 4:

Hi Bill -

Greeting from the Marine Biological Labs in Woods Hole. I hope all is well in Ann Arbor. I wanted to see how things were progressing with the MEDC. Is there anything I can do to help? Presentation, demos, etc.

We are in the middle of revising a $2.4M NIH grant this month for backyard brains. But after Sept 5, I'm free to work on All Hands Active.

Thanks for your support.

Greg

I haven't heard back from him, but I did run into him on Sep 9. He said he's been wanting to get back to me, but doesn't have an update yet. The reasons sounded wishy-washy, and he said he was upset with the MEDC and was going to see them again soon. I mentioned that we would be able to do a presentation / dog&pony show if needed.

Next steps:

1. Get our office sketches back from Architects to have something new to talk about. It is apparent that Bill wants to help us, so we need to give him ammunition to make him successful
2. Write up a short document with the ask, plan, and costs for Spark, which they can use to talk with potential donors.
3. Use the document as a template to apply for new grants

Large Grant Opportunities: Google Community Grants. (Application is due every Jan, June). Funding requests typically range from $5,000 to $25,000 and has a 10% cap on overhead expenses (rent, utilities, insurance, legal). We could schedule a meeting with Google to determine how best to apply for funding. They suggest to stop by Google Ann Arbor for our weekly Community Office Hours. Office Hours are every Thursday, 11 AM to 1 PM. Signup is here. There were no openings when I checked.

Smaller Funding Opportunities: SPARK: Had $1k to help support large events at AHA.

Corey will get in touch with Charlie R. of i3 to ask about White House Makerspace grants.

Greg put in NIH grant for BYB, will hear back about in January. Getting this grant could partially be used to grow AHA.

Marketing/Events - Corey T.

• Maker Faire - Corey will come up with ideas for next year and float them to members. ETA is 9/23.

• Fall Open House -- Was September 10th, 3PM-10PM. Ran classes the week before (well attended), flyers were made, and space was spruced up. Gave ~30 tours. Big thanks to Zandi and all who flyered, taught, or helped prep the space. Not super great attendance at the Open House proper, could have used more flyering, dropping the word at other places?

• Content Calendar - (Greg) To make things a bit easier, perhaps we can start with 1 item a month for the content calendar. Did a marketing meeting take place?

• Mailing List - (Greg) I wasn't sure if we had signed up for MailChimp, so I created a free account. We can use an existing one, if we have it. They don't have a non-profit version, but as long as we have 2,000 or fewer subscribers across all lists in your account, we can send up to 12,000 emails per month for free. We need to import emails.

• Google Ads - (Greg) We have Free Google Ads. AHA has $10k/month credit for cost per click credit, but we are limited to a value of $1 per click. This means we have to limit our scope of search terms... (children, charity, etc.) are going for $4.00+ per click I suggest we make Laser cutter, 3d printer, hackerspace, incubator campaigns and see the the cost for ad words. We may need to create landing pages for each campagin with Call To Actions (Signup for the mailing list, get more information about becoming a member, schedule a tour).

• Google Analytics - (Greg) It would be nice to include a monthly report on emails and web statistics to see how our digital footprint is growing. Nate points out we have a very old one somewhere, but Greg points out we should just start a new one. Alex and Corey will get it set up, give Nate the info to put on the webpage.

• Tyler will put our new letterhead graphics on the NAS.

• We should get in touch with Vanya to fix up door logo, get other signage running.

• Greg mentions another UROP tour is tentatively scheduled in November.

• Corey brings up a Kickstarter for a hobby-grade waterjet, is interested in getting others to kick in a bit of money to get a little discount. Will put together a proposal for the Board.

• Greg proposes a marketing meeting, 9/23 at 4PM.

Operations/Volunteers - Tyler W.

Improvements:

• Swapped the loud noise and craft rooms
• Painted the back room
• Pallet wall built
• Poster frames hung
• Computers are in place for all machines. Laser computer is set to be refreshed in late September

Upcoming improvements

• Hang mailbox (it's at the space)
• Nate will work on securing new space
• Light bulbs in new space
• UPS to be mounted in rack.
• Order new work tables for current front room and move desks across the hall?

Recycling - Haven't followed up with city again. We've been leaving cans in bags for people to collect outside the dumpster (other tenants do that) and I've been recycling the non-returnables at home.

Tyler AHA phone number switch. Gave up and may just drop the phone number. Alex W. suggests looking into VOIP/SIP?

Member meeting - Next planned for Early November. Skipping late October to avoid too many events around i3's Halloween party.

Tinker fixed the loud noise room door.

Volunteers:

• We're short again. 3 volunteers stopped last month because of school resuming
• Have Friday's and Saturday's covered. Tyler is filling in for Thursday's until we get someone else.

Do we have plans for installing a monitor / switch for Laser? Greg can help build a circuit. Just needs help understanding how to talk to our server.

(30m) Unfinished Business

Stephanie is here to help AHA with marketing, has a Engineering/Business background, working with marketing automation software (Buffer currently, not chained to anything in particular). She believes working with her hands is a valuable experience, enjoys informal/impromptu teaching opportunities; but is also a good planner. She brings a unique perspective given the background. She and Corey will meet afterwards to talk about marketing. -- Still not met up, is waiting for us to on-board her. Corey proposes getting her into the upcoming marketing meeting.

Alec wants to have some kind of long-term agenda of "things to do" (recurring events), view-able in the minutes. - Happened 16th of June need to circle back.

Upcoming:

• Tour of AHA by AADL - 2nd week of October
• Halloween costume themed build night - 2 weeks in early october
• WeMakeHealthFest - Late October
• i3 Halloween party - Late October
• Christmas ornament laser class - Weekend after Thanksgiving. Training on InkScape and Laser
• Festifools - April
• Mini Maker Faire
• Penguicon
• Makerfaire

Alex W. - Drafting a Storage / Clean Tabletop Policy - Still working on it. Alec suggests also having a cheap "storage box" solution, you could rent a cardboard box to put your projects in for a limited time. ETA is August 20th. -- Alex has a draft storage policy, and printed out "parking permits" for existing projects. Still working on the locker policy, and amount to charge for longer-term storage.

Nate suggests adding incentives for members to do their required volunteer hours. We could have a "volunteer of the year", or allow people to pay more to skip the volunteer hours entirely? Harassment policy - Alex has a wonderful draft done. Ana commented. We haven't resolved the comments yet.