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.
