2015 Final Wisconsin Farm Technology Days Report
Dane County
Executive Committee
Committee Overview
The Executive Committee oversees the entire show, trying to keep the big picture in mind and keep all the committees motivated and on task. Big decisions, that affect the entire show, are all brought to the Executive committee. Executive committee members also serve as a liaison to one or more of the 17 working committee to foster communication between the committees. The Executive Committee can play an important function in managing all of the ideas and personalities that come together for the show, there has to be one unifying body that puts everything together and manages all the moving parts.
Committee Responsibilities
Same as above
Overall committee structure and function for the show
Executive committee
Our executive committee was made up of 14 people. We had several people drop off and several more were added over the course of the three years of planning. We aimed to have the executive committee made up of people from various industries, with different sets of experiences and representing the county geographically.
There were 4 Executive Committee officers; Chair – Bob Wipperfurth, Vice-chair – David Fahey, Secretary – Heidi Johnson, and Treasurer – Kyle Myhre. The officers met more frequently than the rest of the Executive Committee so we could make important decisions in a timely manner or develop recommendations for the Executive committee to maximize time in our Executive Committee meetings.
Executive committee meetings
Our Executive committee met monthly from early 2013 until the time of the show. The meetings started off at 1.5 hours but we stretched them to 2 or 2.5 hours in the last 8 months before the show. We held our Executive Committee meetings at 7:30am which we feel helped with getting full committee attendance and full committee participation since it was their first activity of the day. The officers met in between each of the Executive Committee meeting so we could make decisions in a more timely manner and reduce the time the Executive Committee would need to meet. With both the Executive committee meetings and the officer meeting, Bob and I worked very hard to keep the meetings on time. We felt that people were much more engaged when we respected their time constraints and they could trust that we would get them out of meetings on time. We also frequently used email voting when decisions needed to be made between meetings and we had almost 100% engagement in those votes.
Working committees
Every Executive committee member served as a liaison to one of the working committees. We asked them to attend all of the working committee meetings and serve as a communication line between the committee and the Executive committee but not to take over the committees work. We did not want our liaisons to run the committees because we thought this would be too much of a burden on too few people. We consciously tried to spread out the workload to avoid volunteer burnout.
In the end, we ended up with 17 working committees:
· Admissions
· Communications
· Field Demo
· Fund Development
· Education
· Tent City
· Youth
· Equine
· Hospitality
· Grounds
· Food
· Volunteer
· Parking
· Family Living
· Utilities
· Signs
· Traffic
We had a lot of difficulty recruiting for some of the committees, particularly grounds, food and fund development. These committee require someone with a lot of available time and/ or some very specific experiences or skills. We eventually did fill all of the chair positions but we had to use all the contacts of the Executive Committee to fill those roles.
Bob and I attempted to attend working committee meetings when we could but it did not happen very often. The work of running the Executive Committee is very time consuming as it is without taking on extra meetings. In some situations in likely would have been helpful if we would have been at some more committee meetings to avoid some miscommunications but when we did attend, committee deferred to us instead of making their own decision, which does not help with developing them as leaders.
All-committee meetings
We held All-Committee meetings (attended by Executive Committee and Committee Chairs and Vice-chairs) every other month in 2014 and went to every month in 2015. These meetings were held on Monday nights from 5-6:30pm when they were every other month and then we stretched them to 5-7pm in 2015.
We specifically tried to design the all-committee meetings to make them as productive as possible. This involved allowing every committee to give a BRIEF update of their committee’s work. We asked them to keep these updates to 5 minutes and we reminded them at every meeting that their updates should only be with information that pertains to every committee. We then spent the bulk of those meetings providing an open time for them to move around the room and talk to each other. We generally put the tent city committee at a central table with a map of tent city since they were a very popular committee but the rest of the committee just met as needed at different tables around the room.
Leadership development
We tried our best to integrate some leadership development into our work with the Executive Committee and committee chairs. This involved asking them to be strategic in how they recruited their committee, do some long-term planning for their committees and use technology to be efficient with their committee’s time. We also asked liaisons and committee chairs to plan and announce committee meetings well ahead of time and use agendas and minutes to inform other’s of their work. Our attempts at this were only mildly successful. It seemed like most chairs ran things exactly the way they wanted to regardless of our advice.
Hiring a project coordinator
Our show hired a coordinator, Amy Czaplewski, a year before the show to help us getting details taken care of and to assist committees as needed. Amy attended many of the committee meetings to make sure they were on task and had everything they needed. She also helped a great deal with volunteer recruitment and management.
Budget
We had a very hard time developing a budget for the Executive committee since it seems that every year there are very different things that end up in the Executive Committee budget. We ended with a skeleton structure of an Executive committee budget and much more was added it to by the time of the show.
Getting budgets for all of the committees was also extremely difficult since they did not know much of what to expect. Many of them adopted the budget from the previous year’s show and adjustments were made along the way.
Timeline
• Three years prior to event
· Assemble Executive committee
· Choose host farm
· Recruit committee chairs
• Two years prior to event
· Begin holding All-committee meetings every other month
· Attend FTD show
• One year prior to event
· Plan monthly all-committee meetings
· Attend previous county FTD show
• Six months prior to event
· Executive Chair and Secretary attend some committee meetings to make sure things are on track and answer questions
• Four to Six weeks before the event
· Set up at the show
At the Show
The Executive Committee mostly split up for the show to work with their respective liaison committees.
Equipment Needed
No equipment needed for Executive Committee.
Volunteers
The Executive Committee did not need to recruit volunteers for its own use but we ended up helping the other committee recruit since they were not going to be able to secure enough volunteers on their own. Volunteers were a big problem in Dane county. We have a large population but there are many other things, including Dairy Expo, that are going on in the county and dilute the available volunteer pool.
Something that future shows may want to have a discussion early on about what makes a volunteer a volunteer. With the presence of paid volunteers in the show ( in the food and parking committees), there can be some friction amongst the groups.
Additional thoughts for a successful Farm Technology Days show
Some general thoughts regarding the show:
· A theme and logo for every year’s show does not seem necessary. We spent a lot of time on it and didn’t use it very much.
· We used a separately designed website for our show and we wouldn’t recommend that. The counties should just use the state run website and it would be less confusing for everyone.
Here are a couple of changes that we would have made to our committee structure:
· A stand alone Trams committee chair that attends parking, field demo and education committee meetings to make sure that there is enough communication across the committees regarding trams and can coordinate all the volunteers. One of our field demos chair played this role but it would have been better to have that coordinated better across committees.
· I would have added a volunteer recruiter to make sure that someone was actively recruiting early on.
· We needed an Innovation Square committee