Agenda

Times are approximate and subject to change at the Chair’s discretion.

Meeting Minutes

Chair: Anthony L

Notetaker: Tiffany S.

• Called to order at 7:05

1. • Minnie motions to adopt the agenda, Mike seconds, no objections, agenda is adopted at 7:07
   • Minnie motions to adopt the minutes from last meeting, Anthony seconds, no objections, last meeting’s minutes are adopted at 7:08
   • Reviewing last meeting’s action items – all were completed

• Treasurer’s Report
  • Treasurer’s report is in the google drive
• Springtime Solidarity Event Update
  • Anthony: Event was canceled because of weather advisory. Kara mentioned wanting a social on the night of April 30th for DSA members in from out of town. Trying to find a new date for Springtime Solidarity. Looking at 5/7 possibly. Will continue conversation in the member engagement slack channel
• Recommitment Drive Update
  • Natasha: National’s priority is getting people to pledge to renew their dues. It does align with the cut off date to participate in our local convention. If we were to meet National’s goal of recommitting 50% of expired and 25% of lapsed, we would need to recommit 62 expired and 9 lapsed members.
  • Once we make the required contact with those people, we can use the recommitment drive resources to contact members in good standing, we could use that to drive turnout to our local convention.
  • National will be cutting the lists and entering them into the dialer
    • Tiffany: so what happens to people who have asked us not to contact them or who have been expelled locally but not nationally? We clear those from our lists but National is likely to keep them included
  • Minnie: Do we have to use the dialer? If we only have about 75 targets. Dialers are normally used for volume to affect speed, it seems silly to use the dialer for such a small amount of calls?
    • Natasha: The whole list is 160 people, 75 is the goal amount to recommit. Our list is small compared to other chapters. National did invest a lot of money in the dialer so they will want us to use it.
    • Anthony: We do have convention coming up and I would like to ask people to commit time and energy rather than money. Our general fund is well funded at the moment. Wants to consider doing our own approach instead.
    • Natasha: We can use the dialer after the stages of the drive to do general outreach
    • Tiffany: If we use the dialer for reaching out to all members, can we customize the data that we are capturing? Like the responses that are recorded in the dialer? Because if the responses aren’t customizable we won’t be able to track data for convention turn out
    • Anthony: They won’t give us the response data from the dialer until we’ve completed all the steps for the drive.
    • Tiffany: Would also like to set up our own system for this so we can collect more information including why members let their dues lapse/aren’t as involved
    • Natasha: They did say we can write our own scripts and collect data on our own
      • Tiffany: So we would make people phonebanking recording responses both in the dialer and in a separate spreadsheet for extra data?
    • Anthony: How do we want to proceed?
    • Natasha: They don’t give any guidance on whether you can build your own responses for the dialer. If we can use the dialer to our advantage for turning out members in good standing, i think it would be worthwhile.
    • Minnie: Feels neutral to negative about the dialer, but it is important to reconnect with lapsed/expired members. Preference would be to engage with the recommitment drive while it’s happening but do it on our own without the dialer.
    • Anthony: If we are going to do the recommitment drive, we should use the national dialer.
    • Tiffany: If we use the dialer, can we ask if we can give them our own list? Because we work hard to clean up our list, deduplicate people, and remove people who don’t want to be contacted or are a security concern. I don’t want to load those people in the dialer.
    • Lorenzita: Agree that using a dialer seems over the top for how small the list is.
    • Victoria: Why do they want us to use the dialer?
      • Natasha: For the dater, but also other chapters have longer lists of lapsed/expired that will take longer to get through, using the automated dialer will go faster since you’re only connected to people who pick up.
    • Lorenzita: What is the dialer?
      • Natasha: It is Scale to Win
    • Mike: What kind of commitment does it take on our end if we do go through with it?
      • Natasha: We need to do a phonebank, textxbank, and second phonebank through the ~160 person list. We could reasonably get through all stages quickly, after which we can use the dialer to turn out members in good standing for local convention
    • Paul John: It seems a lot for us at the moment and perhaps maybe not a good point in time for us as a chapter due to low engagement and not seeing a ton of real commitment. I’m not feeling the process really about the dialer and I personally feel that what Tiffany has mentioned makes some sense to me but honestly this whole national stuff im just not Vibing with. Kinda where i’m at right at this moment.
    • Anthony: When is the next meeting or training about the recommitment drive?
      • Natasha: There are open office hours on Sunday and there is a check-in on Tuesdays
    • Anthony: Seems like we all agree on a large push for convention. If we can learn more about this tool, that will help us make a decision about whether to use the dialer or not. Everyone should send Natasha any questions they have about the dialer/recommitment drive so we can make a decision.

• Executive Session
• General Meeting Prep – Guest Speaker, Agenda Items, and Quorum

• • Agenda Items
    • SocFem
    • Priority Updates
    • Convention Updates
  • Suggestions for Guest Speakers
    • Ironworkers
      • Minnie: someone from a starbucks or amazon too. maybe for convention or next meeting.
    • Wild West Fund as backup
  • Quorum
    • Anthony: Clarifying whether quorum is based on member in good standing or total membership
      • Tiffany: member in good standing
  • Minnie: Our GBMs have been a little bit pedantic, a lot of talking at members. Maybe we can make it more interactive?
    • Anthony: Feels like we don’t have any calls to action for people to participate
      • Tiffany: I’m confused by that because we have a lot of calls to action
        • Anthony: They are stale and people aren’t interested in them
    • Victoria: Has a lot of calls to action, but feels like it’s not getting engagement on Slack. Maybe that should be shared at the GBM instead.
      • Anthony will coordinate
    • Mike: Maybe we can have shorter speaking roles for community partners
    • Tiffany: I think we need something where people can actually interact and participate in the meeting. Maybe we could have time to discuss a current event during the meeting?
    • Discussion will be continued on Slack
• Convention Planning and Timeline

• • Timeline
    • If convention is around July 9th, we have two general body meetings left before local convention.
    • Anthony wants to do multiple strategic campaign trainings in the run up to convention, as well as multiple brainstorming sessions.
  • Should stewards give presentations/debriefs on the current priorities? Should that be during convention or before?
    • Tiffany: before convention so people can have that information in mind when working on new campaigns. The original resolutions had to have SMART goals so they should go over those goals to see how well they did, as well as including any other highlights they want to include
  • Minnie: Should we have more detailed guidelines for the priority campaign resolutions including leadership roles?
    • Tiffany: Here is the resolution guide we wrote last year, I think we can expand that to be more detailed, including stuff about defining member roles in the campaign  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l4Ro52cJWtCUUP-3xLpz0ae-cy8FdxiejjwHDMFY2TA/edit#heading=h.l4536j8uo31l
  • Mike: How do we reach members that won’t be able to attend the trainings? Will we be recording them and sending them out?
    • Anthony: Yes we can record the trainings. Also planning on hosting weekly workshops.
  • Natasha: In reaching out to people for convention turn out, we need to emphasize that this is how you set the path for DSA to be on for the next year.
  • Tiffany: Concerned about engagement, want to make sure it’s not the same people writing all the resolutions. Maybe we can also have a poll during the next gbm about broad topics to see what people are interested in seeing us work on next year
    • Minnie: Agreed, good idea, maybe this can be our discussion at the general body meeting. We can put people into breakout rooms and come back and share highlights with the group

• Meeting adjourned at 9:00