Conference Call Minutes, 5/22/08

I noticed things are awfully quiet on the message boards these days. However, your fearless leaders have been going full speed ahead on getting us recognized as an official Alumni Interest Group. We have a lot to do this summer! Committee MFICs, get ready.

Please read on and comment/volunteer where you can.

We had a conference call today to clear up some questions with Alumni Relations. On the call were Sarah McMullen, Carsen Kline, Abby Sullivan, Dani Barnard, and Chris Stengel.

Donations/Accounting:

An account has been set up through Annual Giving for all donations to the BAA. Other methods of accepting donations will be in place eventually, but right now you can go to https://www.cmu.edu/giving/give.shtml, designate the donation as “Other” and under “Comments” write “Buggy Alumni Association.”

All donations will be ours to keep. There will be no overhead to the University or “dues” to Alumni Relations for their support. Sarah will assist us in making payments for our programs and clear up any matters of spending restrictions.

On top of operating costs, the money raised will help us be a foundation able to support student programs, buggy team startups and others. We will try to tie in strongly with Sweepstakes to make funding available for improvements to to freerolls and races, e.g., more scoreboards, big screens, timing devices.

We’ve put out the idea of having tiered giving levels with incentives to go with them. Repeating monthly gifts might be a possibility, too.

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Contact lists and Web integration:

Tim Seidel in Alumni Relations is the gatekeeper of contact lists and website info. We will have to review his lists and compare them to what we know already, and fill in blanks where we can. There is already a large base of registered users on their site, and we would like to tap into that resource and share that information. It would take away a lot of the headache of creating all new contact lists and keeping it updated.

For anyone who isn’t registered with Alumni Relations, we could have our own subset of contacts. This would be useful for city neighbors, keeping with our non-exclusive take on membership.

Abby is going to be talking to Tim initially to get the ball rolling with him. Actual contacts, who have been tagged as buggy people, can either be given to me as a big paper list or mailing labels, or they can be emailed via Alumni Relations whenever we want to get a mass mailing out. We cover postage at a bulk rate.
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Programming and Advertising

The things looming largest on our radar are Donations, Website, Sweepstakes interfacing, and Homecoming. In order to get the word about our kick-off event, we’ll need some funds. To get the funds, we’ll need to start spreading the word, starting here, and continuing with the website. We’d like to work with Sweepstakes potentially in an advisory position, and we’d like to offer them something as early as this fall, whether it’s timing or video of freerolls, or something else that would help them out.

The plan is to have a kick-off event for the Buggy Alumni Association at Homecoming. We’ll have a captive audience at the History of Buggy presentation, so we’ll target that afternoon to have the meet-and-greet wine-and-cheese social. Lots of memorabilia, pictures, handouts, stickers, tshirts, etc., will give us a big start and hopefully build our community in a big way.

We’d like to put out an ad in an upcoming alumni publication; more on that later.

Discuss, volunteer, donate.

Committee Heads & Participation

Hi guys,
I hope you’re all willing and able to help get the Carnegie Mellon Buggy Alumni Association off the ground. If you have time to offer in any of these areas, we want to work with you, in any capacity! It doesn’t matter where you’re located, you can help.

The Executive Committee has roughly filled in people to head up these committees, but they may shift. We still have a couple “leadership” vacancies–and we need a ton of people to be part of these teams. So, if you have the time, skills and interest, please let us know. And please pass this on to other alums from your organizations.

*If your name is already listed under a group (you previously expressed some interest), but you don’t want it to be, please let me know and I’ll remove your name.

Some of you have already offered help in general, so now is the time to sign up for specific tasks.

If you want to help out, but prefer not to post on this forum, you can email any committee head to get involved.

Committees:

DONATIONS

WEB DEVELOPMENT

HISTORY & PRESERVATION

COMMUNICATIONS & EVENTS

EDUCATION & MENTORING

CORPORATE SPEAKERS & SPONSORSHIP

SWEEPSTAKES REGULATION

Proceedings from 5/7/08 Meeting

Goals for the first meeting were to elect officers, lay groundwork for bylaws and formalization as an official Alumni Interest Group, discuss committees, and brainstorm ideas for the upcoming official website.

Attending: Tom Wood, Carsen Kline, Sam Swift, Aiton Goldman, Chris Stengel

Your fearless leaders are:

Carsen Kline, President

Aiton Goldman, Vice President

Chris Stengel, Treasurer

Sam Swift, Secretary

Tom Wood will be an advisor and guiding force for history and preservation efforts. Sarah McMullen will be our connection to Alumni Relations.

The official name of our Alumni Interest Group, pending approval of our formalization request, will be the Carnegie Mellon Buggy Alumni Association, or BAA for short. We generated ideas for a first draft of the bylaws, and following some polishing by Dani, some brief discussion, and approval by Alumni Relations, will be posted here.

The general goals and purpose of this group will be to grow the sport, bring alumni like us together, and get the community more involved and educated.

In turn, membership is planned to be non-exclusive, generally open to anyone who loves buggy or wants to know more about it. Dues were discussed, but no official rulings have been made. They will likely be nominal to encourage greater membership.

Committees and tentative heads will be posted here soon.

Ideas that we could help fund or support: more trophies/categories for races; better scoreboard; more tv screens around the course; activities for kids (e.g., safe buggy ride) at Carnival and Homecoming; design comp prizes to encourage more participation; Buggy Graduates Job Placement Network (recognize talent and experience instead of GPA); stream more events (like HoB) on the web for far flung alums; voluntary chip timing for freerolls in which only participating orgs have access to the data

Website ideas: Forum, history, rolls reports, team profiles/home pages, individual profiles, how to support buggy/BAA, social network tie-ins (Facebook, Linked-In, etc.), Hall of Fame, polls, calendar of buggy events

Meeting time approx. 3 hrs. Next one planned for early June.

First Executive Committee Announced

Hi all,

We have six terrific, dedicated volunteers in Pittsburgh who will serve as the initial Executive Committee, and work with Alumni Relations to get our Buggy Alumni group established and recognized by CMU.

The next immediate step will be to identify Committee Heads (who don’t need to be in Pittsburgh) to lead individual projects outlined in the group’s proposal. We will open this up to everyone, and reach out to people who have already volunteered help and/or expressed interest in specific projects — either to head, or work within, these sub-committees.

In the meantime, here is our fearless Executive Committee:

Carsen Kline – Fringe 1997-1999 (Chairman 1998-1999)
Aiton Goldman – CIA 1994-1995 (Helped CIA return, as Chairman 1997-1998 )
Adam McCue
– KDR Chairman 2005; Sweepstakes Safety 2006; Head Judge 2007
Sam Swift – Fringe 2001-2004
Chris Stengel
– Sweepstakes Asst. Chair 1992-1993

Advisor: Tom Wood – PiKA 1969-1971; also Sweepstakes Safety (was the second and third person to hold this position); Head Judge (4 years); Helped revise Sweepstakes rules 1986-87; History of Buggy