Advisory Board Blues

I have my quarterly meeting on Tuesday the 21^st. I am beginning to get nervous. Today I will start generating the stats and any data I feel might be needed for the event. The stats are the most intimidating for me since I always feel they are less then the could be but I rarely have any of the folks here at the meeting say anything negative about the them. This meeting I may have shot myself in the foot by producing the music video of the Road To Freedom Tour. There has been some talk about making another presentation with Power Point with more descriptors of what is going on in the scenes. This would be a lot of work, not necessarily hard but time consuming and frankly, boring. And at this point in time I do not think I have the time to do a decent job—worse case scenario I start the projects do a couple of panels with the images showing a good start and then rush into describing another project which is completed and up on the website. If you are interested in seeing the new multi-media our office is doing go to www.accessut.org and click on the “multi-media” tab on the bottom of the list. Now that we have this capability in place I really want to start producing these short features, I hope I shift the boards attention to the new “toy” and off the numbers for the time being.

And again, I would not really mind, the numbers so much if I had decent dependable software which would generate good data. As it is . Then there is the problem that I was not able to get the minutes to the last meeting generated. The meeting was short, and poorly attended. I was going into the major events which dominated my last quarter: the Road to Freedom Tour and the Russians. By the time I did sit down to do the Minutes I did not have any memory of the meeting nor did I have notes which told me anything. The few people I usually use to remind me of stuff either were not at the meeting or could not remember stuff either. I am sensing the lack of Minutes will not be a big deal since they rarely are but I never know. I still may have to try to put something together

I sense the data I am producing or trying to produce is very sketchy at best. Luckily people are already beginning to call and email their cancellations—even my boss has another meeting. I have gone through this cancellation thing before and one can never get a date which is good for everyone unless , of course, your information is so valuable that these participants will choose your event, meeting over another. I have yet to get to that level of data yet. Our budget is so small, smaller yet when divided by our four funders, that my organization is a small blimp on their radars. However that fact remains, and regardless of how much I would like to trivialize the event, this event is one of the big events in my quarter and I cannot get back to my comfortable life until I have this event behind me.

I am including footage I took this morning of my train station. This has nothing to do with the content o today’s post but thought you might enjoy.