May 23 Bolton Cultural Council Minutes
Present: Margot Brody, Teresa Sauer, Bharti Bhakta, Pat Bensetler, Nan Shnitzler
Absent: Alison Morgan, Julia Quinn-Szcesuil, Marie Fusaro
(Minutes submitted by Nan Shnitzler)
Votes
Unanimous to hold monthly meetings on the fourth Monday. Next is June 27.
Actions
Nan will ask Linda Day how to get BCC meetings added to the town Meetings & Agendas distribution and to post the survey.
Margot will check with Alison and Marie if they want to be reappointed to another three-year term.
Nan will ask editor Cyndy Bremer about a spot for a “Cultural Corner” in the Independent.
Discussions
Harvard reception
Teresa noted that Harvard had a person who emceed the reception, instead of flowing from one speaker to another like we did. Also, having an emcee branded the reception as a Harvard CC event.
Collaboration
We talked about a joint reception w/ Harvard in the future. The folks in Harvard seemed amendable. Dependencies included town “culture”, number of grantee overlaps, encouraging more overlaps if we feel Bolton would benefit from an entity that didn’t apply to us for funding. We talked about a balance between the autonomy towns are granted over arts funding versus savings if we do certain things jointly. Also more attention paid if towns collaborate on marketing or events. Stow and Harvard seemed likely candidates for collaboration. Nan will check the applications to see other towns that our grantees applied to.
Awareness
To keep a master calendar of all publicly pertinent information (submission deadlines, performance dates, free ticket info, etc.) about the events and organizations we fund so we can advertise it and keep a constant flow of information coming out of the BCC to the town. We can put blurbs in the town Announcements bulletin board and the Cultural Corner in the paper. And perhaps via various town social media pages. A way to advertise ourselves.
Teresa. We should advertise everything we help sponsor.
Free tickets
Pat talked about how successful the free ticket distribution was for the Worcester Chamber Society concert at the Harvard UU church, but not so much for Symphony Pro Music. She said the press release Julia wrote that appeared in the papers was helpful. We agreed ticket distribution via the library was best. We talked about getting a better handle on the free ticket program: which events provide free tickets, how tickets are delivered to the distribution point, and if organizations would be amenable to the Cultural Council buying a block of tickets (at a discount?) to give away. We talked about coming up with free-ticket distribution guidelines so Kelly and her staff would know what to do. Teresa & Margot suggested the award letter could say that Bolton is interested in free tickets; how many are you willing to
donate. A BCC person would have to follow up.
We also discussed using free tickets as a way to capture info on who is using them and whether the event was enjoyable. Perhaps putting a ticket and a survey in an envelope and getting users to sign for it. Teresa said she would contact Kelly at the library and Sheila at the senior center to see if they are capturing the names of people who take free tickets.
Survey
Pat wondered if we could use a town Survey Monkey account.
Teresa suggested adding demographic info on the survey. Age, gender, income range. Alison is a survey statistics expert. Nan thought it would be more difficult to correlate the survey responses to the demographic information. Teresa said that Alison said that 95 survey responses would represent a critical mass for our population. There are now 54 responses. Nan is not sure what the surveys are telling us and thinks they need to be parsed in more detail.
Margot said we need a regular way to find out from attendees whether programs were well done, enjoyable, worthwhile the money. We discussed doing a survey that lists the actual events and activities we funded and ask people: which are you aware of; which did you attend; did you enjoy, if not, why?
Persons Park
Martha Remington has created a nonprofit 501c3 and formed a board of directors for Friends of Persons Park. Teresa will ask Martha to come to our next meeting to give an update.
“We invested in it and deserve to know what’s happening,” Teresa said.
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