Three calls happened recently. Here are the results.

Alumni Interest Group Leadership Meeting (6/25/08):

Attending: Aiton, Carsen, and members of AB Tech’s Alumni group, with Sarah McMullen.

1) Carnival recap included attendance figures for various events. Tom Wood believes the figure of 62 for HoB is pretty low. Carsen suggested that a form be available every year during Carnival and Homecoming events to add yourself to a club or activity listing. This way, graduates from the past 9 years will be included in our mailings the year after they graduate. Currently this form is sent out only the year before your 10th reunion and (I think) every 5 years after that.

2) A call for nominations is out to join the Alumni Association Board. There is a meeting in June, and a new Alumni Interest Group Committee will be active. If you are eager to voice your opinion or represent us in the committee or Alumni Association in general, please contact Carsen.

3) We discussed the Homecoming schedule briefly. We are currently not on the schedule. This is a topic for the next phone call…

4) A meeting on the 30th of June will hopefully give us good news about our tax deductible gift status. Currently the definition of “educational purposes” does not include buggy, and Anne Witchner is lobbying for our cause. This meeting I believe will include Jenn Church and possibly Mike Murphy.

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East Meets West brainstorming session (6/26/08):

Attending: Carsen, Aiton, Abby, Dani, Chris

1) Homecoming. Set up a table and/or pass out fliers advertising HoB and BAA kick-off during freerolls and around the UC during morning reunion activities. Merchandise to be included at table. Possibly have an old buggy displayed?

2) History of Buggy. We will encourage undergrads to attend and grab as many passing alums as we can during the weekend. A mailing will go out by the end of August to buggy alums with a letter, a link to the website, and possibly an “I heart Buggy” sticker.

3) Web site. Lots of ideas came out, and these will be passed on to Sam and Adam in the next couple days.

4) Chris has already put out the call for a logo on the Facebook Buggy Alumni Assoc. group. If you are not a member, think about joining, or DESIGN A LOGO! … and send it to Chris Stengel.

5) The psyche reel has got to be done well, and soon, to be included on the website and advertised before Homecoming mailings go out. Dani will be giving this a boost.

6) Carsen will meet with Tim Seidel of Alumni Relations to set up email addresses for BAA execs, and we’ll address combining forces with their resources to tie our database in with theirs.

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Call between Tom Wood and Carsen(6/26/08):

1) History of Buggy presentation will be condensed to about 45 minutes and focus on years ending in 8s and 3s for reunions happening this year. A teaser version may also be produced.

2) A flyer advertising the Buggy Alumni Assoc. will be handed out during HoB and at various locations during the weekend.

3) The preferred time for the presentation, followed by our kick-off event, will be between 11:30-2, hopefully in the UC, on Saturday, October 25.

4) There might be a panel of speakers talking about their years in buggy through the decades. This is still in its infancy, but a few members of the class of ’73 have expressed some interest.

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.

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

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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.

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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.

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Committees and tentative heads will be posted here soon.

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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

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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.