May 20, 2020 Minutes

Zoom Meeting
6:30 PM

ROLL CALL:

Robert Soderstrom, ToiLyn Flick, Kelsey Gronlund, Heather Pittman, Nathan Schreier, Derek Olson, Jonathan Tinsley, Becky Tinsley

READING AND APPROVAL OF THE MINUTES OF THE PRECEDING MEETING:

Approved as presented

REVIEW AND APPROVAL OF BILLS:

Approved as presented

REPORT OF THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR:

Website

I am still waiting for BOD bios, if possible please get those written so I can update the website. I also received back my questionnaire from Darin Newton and Geno Pesicka for the spotlight section of the website so I will get that up in the next week or so. To accommodate the very specific radio play project we are doing, I will need to be working on the website coming up once we have things more ironed out to make the website a place to put all that content.

Merchandise

After trying to make the system I was talking about before for merchandise I decided to go with a different option. After using the system I decided it would not be a good fit for us. We are now going to be using TeeSpring for our merchandise. https://teespring.com/stores/bfact-store I will be styling this and putting on our logo. I will then make some basic products with just our logo. My big question is what we want to charge for things. There is a base price for each product, different pricing for different types of shirts for example, and then we add in our mark-up to come up with the final price. We need to decide what we want for mark-up. Is our goal to make this a fundraiser, if so we should make sure we can make a little bit per item, or if this is just an opportunity for people to have our branded merchandise. For example, several of the shirts base cost is around $15 so should we charge around $20 and we make $5 or like $25 so we make $10. I would like some Board guidance on that. Once we have that I will start creating products. (Discussion by BOD-plan for $5 over cost of shirts at this point.)

TeeSpring handles all of the shipping of products and unlike the other system I looked at, we don’t receive any payments directly from customers. TeeSpring is paid for everything, they take their base cost, shipping and taxes and send us our mark-up amount. I think this will be simpler, this way we don’t have monthly invoices to pay. The nice thing is this way TeeSpring will collect the taxes they need to pay for individual states and they pay them, that’s not on us to figure out. I would like to touch base with Kelsey, just to see if there is anything else we need to pay on this, taxes and what have you. TeeSpring is a very popular service and we will be listed alongside their other products on the main site. I don’t think many people not interested in BFACT would buy our merchandise, but you never know.

We will have to start paying tax on merchandise when sales are over $1000. This falls under the category of unrelated business income at that point.

South Dakota Arts Council

I did a preliminary sign-up for some South Dakota Arts Council CARES Act grants. I signed-up to say we are interested. There isn’t much information from them yet what they will have available right now. The actual sign-up period starts on June 1. I will check back then and should know if we qualify or not. If we do, I will work with Heather and Kelsey to get us signed-up and I guess we will see if we get anything. To sign-up I had to get BFACT a DUNS number. I got us signed-up and put the information in our Shared Drive if anyone needs it. It could be useful beyond applying for these grants.

REPORTS OF OFFICERS AND COMMITTEES:

President
- First episode of the radio play is written. Discussed possibility of creating an Improv Troupe.
Vice President
- Talked with Derek about the Belle Fourche library summer reading program children’s theater production idea. (See Creative Committee report)
Treasurer
- All checks are in with current balance of $2604.05. Robert purchased radio show software for $28/month-needs reimbursement for three months.
Secretary
- None
Grant & Fundraising Committee
- Nothing new to report at this time.
Membership Committee
- Jonathan added an IRS document to the shared folder concerning raffles. It gives examples and provides guidance on the tax implications of raffles. It lays out guidelines on how to avoid taxes.
Public Relations Committee
- Facebook/social media engagement is currently the focus for marketing. Nathan mentioned that he has a connection with a writer of children’s shows.
Creative Committee
- We haven’t had a meeting in May but things are progressing on several projects.
- We have a writer’s group for the radio play and we are plowing ahead. The plan as of right now is to produce nine episodes over several months, we would do them in three episode chunks. We will work to get three episodes ready then release them over the course of several weeks, have a mini-break then get the next three ready to go. This is because if we had to wait to get all nine episodes done to release them one after another would take months. This way we can sprint ahead and get some content out before all of it needs to be done.
- We are aiming to release the first episode by the end of June if everything goes right. Then we would release the next two episodes either weekly or every other week. There will be a decent amount of post-production I will need to do to get everything done so releasing in this manner gives me time to get it all done. We should have a more finished pilot episode next week and after that point we will get audition information out there and figure out the best way to handle that. This will be an open casting just like any show, it just will be done online. We may need to do a second casting for the next third of the show, will know more soon on that.
- This is a project that will last for several months which I don’t think is a bad thing. It also has us keeping up with content regardless of what other shows we are able to make happen this summer.
- Auditions for this show will take place online which will be a new process.
- Budget: For the first three episodes of the Radio Play
  Marketing – $100
  SFX & Musc – $100
  Total – $200
- Motion by Jonathan/seconded by Kelsey to approve radio play budget of up to $200. Motion passed.
- Toi had a great suggestion to talk to the library in Belle about their Summer reading program and seeing if we could help there so I reached out to them. The library has had to cancel their in-person Summer reading program and they were very excited about the idea of us helping them out. I don’t have final details of what this will look like at the moment, the library is working with the state on some kind of Summer program, once they have that information we will be able to plan with them what BFACT will be doing. As of right now what we are thinking is that we will do recordings of Community Theater members reading books or stories. I am ironing out details on this now and will be working directly with Toi on this program. It’s not something that should really cost us money so we will just move ahead with getting this done as more information comes in. Becky suggested asking the library if they still have their old puppet theater.

OLD AND UNFINISHED BUSINESS:

None

NEW BUSINESS:

The Rec Center will reopen on Tuesday 26th. Unsure of set strike of Jr. High show as they may try to hold performances yet.
4th of July Parade Float- BFACT is “technically” 10 years old this year. It might be fun to celebrate that with a big float.