4/12 Meeting Notes
We recapped the last meeting (full notes of that meeting can be found here https://www.culturemath.org/blog/march21meetingnotes)
Three areas of focus emerged from that meeting:
Addressing core technical issues and stabilizing the 2011 infrastructure, which no longer reliably supports basic functionality
Creating a system of support for researching and inputting events to keep the site active and useful
Expanding the board and fundraising capacity to support long-term organizational sustainability
These areas form the core of the 4/12 meeting. For each, we will determine what information is needed for a working group to be effective and schedule next steps.
1. Stabilizing the website
The site is currently on WordPress, but needs to update plugins and code from its original structure. The site is likely just a large database of 35,931 events and contains images for most of them. The site runs on HostGator for web hosting and Sucuri for a firewall, and is quite large. While it can be somewhat searched by tags, it cannot be searched by categories. It would be better for archival access to have a more robust search function.
To move forward, we need to analyze:
The hosting
Security
The site database
The user interface, both front end and back end
We will hold our next meeting on April 19th at 10am as a virtual meeting.
The meeting will start with a walk through of our back-end process for how we input and approve events, followed by a discussion of hosting, security, and the database.
2. Operations: Research for Events and Events Entry
The Visualist maintains a list of links that we check weekly to create a list of upcoming events. This list takes the form of a Google Doc, which we use to input events that are not submitted to the site by users. This is often a 10–15 hour per week process.
Events are submitted through the front end and then approved on the back end. To move forward, we need to create new systems so that volunteers can help input and research events, create a call for volunteers, and consider how we might better utilize marketing to assist with filling out the submission form, expanding awareness of the site as an archive, and exploring both print and digital formats beyond social media marketing.
We will hold our next meeting on April 26th at 10am as a virtual meeting.
We will break down our current workflow and discuss how it can be adapted.
We will share where we currently do our research and explore what could be expanded.
We will discuss what a call for volunteers might look like and develop a task list and expectations for time commitment.
We will discuss how to better utilize marketing both in print and online.
2. Fundraising and Organizational Stability
Since becoming a 501(c)(3) in 2018, culture/MATH has primarily run The Visualist, which is widely used but receives very little individual donation income (about $1,200/year), relying mostly on grants. Before COVID-19, costs were mainly for site maintenance, and a small volunteer research team supported the work. When the pandemic began, volunteers were let go, leaving one unpaid board member to manage everything.
After the pandemic, a $10,000 grant and $13,000 from the Living Wage for Artists project allowed them to hire a part-time researcher (10 hours per week for 3 years) and expand work (including a newsletter), reaching an approximately $25,000 annual budget. However, that funding organization ended its support for the arts after a few years, and the project income stopped.
Now, the organization is back to minimal operations: about $4,000 annually (with $2,500 coming from a single source, the Illinois Arts Council)—enough to keep the site running, but not enough to pay anyone.
In order to continue operations, we need to expand the capacity of the organization with more grants, donations, and earned income. We have ideas about how we could feed our information to other outlets (the Reader, Lawndale News, South Side Weekly) to help replace the loss of their listings sections for a fee. We also have ideas about creating publications using the archive, or working with small spaces to expand the archive through project grants. However, neither of these seem fully feasible until the site is stabilized.
Our next meeting is on April 26 at 11am as a virtual meeting, where we will discuss the following:
We will review the history of what we have done
We will plan a fundraiser
We will identify what kinds of grants might provide stability and whether we can form a committee to write them
We will discuss what an expanded board for the organization might look like and what roles people would need to take on
