Dear Guild members, friends of the guild and interested parties, We have successfully sponsored 2 puppet exhibit installations and had reported attendance of over 50,000 library patrons. We have not capitalized on establishing PGSF as a community resource because we failed to create a logo, failed to create signage showing the exhibit to be ours and failed to generate any external publicity - radio/tv/newspaper/blogs about the exhibits. The next library interested in the exhibit is the NW Regional in Coral Springs. They have 3 display cases and are interested in a ceiling exhibit. There is no date set for the exhibit, but it looks like it will be in the fall, possibly September. So we do have some time to rectify the situation. And after that... Now that we have created a public exhibit that was seen by many patrons, I think the next step is to create a public event. I think we should seek public funds (grants) and partners (Target, Publix, Ikea, local museums and parks...), but in order to do this we’d need some basic budget information and some specific plans (such as how many shows will be presented, what craft activities are possible, how many patrons can we accommodate, ticket prices, show fees, planner fees, insurance...). Or we can fund it entirely ourselves if we can find a way to raise some funds directly from the event. Lastly but not leastly we’ve had some fun meetings this year. We were able to do this because we have some funds in the bank and were able to pay a small honorarium to our speakers and workshop leaders. In order to continue we need to shore up the coffers. That means a membership drive for October. Our fiscal year starts then and it’s the best time to collect dues. Our dues remain at $12. How can you beat that? It has also been suggested that we collect a small fee for those special meetings (where we pay the presenter). I propose that we have that as an item of discussion for the next board meeting. In light of this, I’d like to schedule 2 meetings.
dave - July 17, 2010 |