Meeting Notes: General Membership – May 28, 2024

Attendees: See sign in sheet

Minutes:

Call to order: 7:04 PM

Andrew Epps welcomed everyone and called the meeting to order.

Officer Updates:

• NPO:
  • Not in attendance
• Code Compliance:
  • Not in attendance
• Deputy Constable:
  • Not in attendance
• District 9 Representative:
  • Not in attendance
• Most were not able to attend due to shifting this meeting this month to a Tuesday, due to Memorial Day being yesterday.

Community Garden Update:

• Working through the backlog on the waiting list
• No longer doing composting due to difficult with managing it and mice families
• The garden board is thinking about doing a town hall meeting with all gardeners and community members, but have not set a date for this yet.
• There are now coffee grounds available for the community to use in gardens from Ostara Coffee

Community Library Update:

• Not in attendance

Board Updates:

• Home Tour Update: Andrew Epps
  • 510 presale tickets last year
  • 632 presale tickets this year, plus 221 tickets were sold on site
  • Approximate sales this year: $18,000
  • The final numbers are still being pulled together by Lauren to figure out the profit
  • The home tour committee this year pulled together 5 houses and 2 businesses after many setbacks early on when multiple locations pulled out and we only had 3 locations.
  • Second annual fair was a hit
  • The event was successful in fostering community with local businesses
  • Home Tour is the biggest money maker for FNA
• Newsletter Update: Andrew Epps
  • There is a different, larger, scope of work for the Communications Board Member these days with all the prevalence of social media in addition to the website, email newsletters, and physical newsletters.
  • Physical newsletters are intended to be sent out 4 times per year – 2 for members only and 2 for all Fairmount neighbors
  • Part of the TCU marketing capstone course included looking into ways to streamline this process in order to lower the barrier of entry for this board position. This included potentials to outsource newsletter creation and distribution, website simplification, and social media help via student interns. The voting item later on today will be one of these ideas that we are looking to incorporate.
• Public Safety: Ray Feyen
  • June 8th is the next Citizens on Patrol training
  • Reminder to all to take any weapons out of vehicles
• Membership Social: Barbara Crotty
  • June social will be at Barbara’s house
  • June 8^th or the 15^th as rain day at 8 PM
  • Burgers, beers, sodas, sides as a potluck
  • Will be publicized

FNA Membership Voting Item: Back-end website re-design for ease of use

• This is part of the TCU capstone project that we discussed earlier and have discussed before.
• We have a beautiful website, but there is a very extensive back end that was set up by web design experts in the past and is not intuitive for board members to change or add anything to today.
• The program that was used to create our website back end is 11 years old and does not have a lot of support for troubleshooting.
• We do not want to switch over to a new domain because we have a lot of pictures hosted on the WordPress site.
• We do not have a way to easily track sales, or update shop items, etc. – which is difficult for volunteers helping out for events like home tour.
• We got quotes from Squarespace (was expensive and would require moving to a new domain), Scheafer (they required a more expensive and intensive service), and Bluebird Creative (option to upgrade the existing WordPress site).
• There will be no change to a person visiting the website but would make it easier for any board member to make any change in 5 minutes as opposed to spending hours trying to figure something out.
• Available FNA funds are about $21,000, before the Home Tour profits are announced.
• The $9,625 cost is to maintain the existing view without losing anything we already have.
• No recurring fees would be incurred with this change on the back end.
• Need any backup support? This is the whole point about this change so that we don’t need a website expert to do something on the website.
• We do have a backup of the website that we could revert to if we need to.
• Barbara Crotty motions to move forward with Bluebird Creative’s proposal to upgrade the existing WordPress website back end. Rey Feyen seconds this motion. The motion passes unanimously.

Andrew will check with Kelci if there are any leftover home tour shirts and will bring any extras to the next general meeting for people to purchase.

Coming up later this year is board re-elections. We will need to fill a nominating committee. Public Safety, Finance, Communications, Promotions, Historic Preservation

The membership committee is supposed to come up with a social per month, except for during home tour and Festivus. The committee is welcome to suggestions for social events from August and onward. The Fairmount/ Ryan Place softball game is coming up in July – this will likely be the July Social. July 3^rd in the evening.

Adjourn: 7:35 PM