British Parachute Association bpa.org.uk
Wharf Way, Glen Parva, Leicester LE2 9TF
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Communications Committee
Minutes of the meeting held on
Saturday 21 February 2015 at 10:05
at the BPA Office, 5 Wharf Way, Glen Parva, Leicester LE2 9TF
Present (quorum is 2): Adrian Bond - Chair
Gordon Blamire
Jack Bradford
Brian Cumming
Craig Poxon (by telephone)
In attendance: Liz Ashley - Editor, BPA Skydive the Mag
Alex Crawley - Partnership & Sponsorship Manager, Archant Dialogue
Tony Butler - Chief Operating Officer (COO)
John Hitchen - Vice President, IPC Alternate
Delegate & STC Chair
Jason Kelleher - from item 10.4
Mike Lewis
Jeff Montgomery - Safety & Technical Officer (STO)
Martin Shuttleworth - Secretary-General (Secretary)
Apologies for absence: Paul Applegate
Yassi Molazadeh
Item Minute
01/15 Composition of the Communications Committee 2015
Adrian Bond (Chair, elected by the Council), Paul Applegate, Gordon Blamire, Jack Bradford, Brian Cumming, Yassi Molazadeh and Craig Poxon. Co-opted, ex officio (non-voting) as Editor of BPA Skydive the Mag: Liz Ashley.
02/15 Terms of reference
The Committee’s terms of reference had been circulated with the agenda. Noted
03/15 Declarations of interest
No personal, material or financial interests were declared in relation to items of business at this meeting.
04/15 Minutes
The Committee noted that the minutes (circulated) of the meeting held on Saturday 6 December 2014 had already been approved electronically by the 2014 Committee, ratified by the Council and published on the BPA website at bpa.org.uk/member/agendas-and-minutes/
05/15 Matters arising
5.1 BPA strapline (minute 61.1)
Following the availability of the first draft of the sectoral map of skydiving in the UK (Development Committee minute 14.1), Brian Cumming said he would be meeting with some of the respondents to his survey last year, and would report back to the next meeting.
Action: Brian Cumming
5.2 ‘From the Chair’ column in the Mag (minute 61.2)
The Development Chair’s article had been published in the February issue. The Competitions Chair would be the next to be invited, followed by ‘From the COO’ & ‘From the STO’.
Action: Editor
5.3 Certificates of Merit to Paul Boorer and Baz Carey (minute 62.1)
These had been awarded.
Awarded
5.4 Policy on including Affiliated PTOs in the DZ listings page in the Mag (minute 62.2)
This policy had been followed in the February Mag and was referred to in the Editor’s Report (minute 6).
Noted
06/15 Report from Archant Dialogue including Editor’s Report
This had been circulated in advance. The Editor highlighted key points as follows.
- Club Zone had been redesigned with a gallery page at the beginning, encouraging readers to engage more widely beyond their own Club.
- Photographs from the AGM & Expo that the Editor had posted on the Mag Facebook page had been extremely popular.
- The Editor had agreed to exchange articles with British Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association (BHPA) to promote each other’s sport in their members’ magazines.
Alex Crawley (Dialogue) reported on advertising sales. Brian Cumming asked for sales figures to be included as a graph in future reports. He also asked for website access statistics to be included in future reports. Alex Crawley said he would forward the latest statistics following this meeting.
Action: Dialogue (Alex Crawley)
07/15 Royal Aero Club Conference on marketing & communications
The COO reported that he had represented BPA at a RAeC conference on marketing in which he had taken part last Saturday, 14 February. This was for member organisations to exchange ideas, and he said there had been considerable interest in BPA marketing and communications initiatives such as the BPA Skydive Starter Mag in both hard copy and digital.
Noted
08/15 Update of BPA training manuals by STO
The STO tabled a list of the contents of the BPA instructor manual, in which were included other BPA manuals. He planned to publish all manuals online in due course. Brian Cumming suggested that registration should be required to download the documents, so that we could provide updates to them by e-mail - the technology for this would be a function of the website/database. The STO said that, in the longer term, he hoped that some of the manuals could have a design makeover.
Noted
09/15 Safeguarding BPA intellectual property
The Secretary reported that the name ‘British Parachute Association’ and the BPA logo had now been registered as a trade mark. The name ‘Skydive the Expo’ was in the process of registration. The Chair updated the meeting regarding the position of ‘Skydive the Mag’.
[Secretary’s note: Confirmation that ‘Skydive the Expo’ is now a registered trade mark was received during the week following the meeting.]
Noted
10/15 Communications Action Plan : 1 July 2014 to 30 June 2015
10.1 Target 1: Publish a communications strategy on inspiring and growing the skydiving community drawing on Archant’s corporate strategy of inspiring communities
Being finalised
10.2 Consider options to review and update the BPA website to give it a new look and feel
The Chair would liaise with Brian Vacher to find out what progress he had made, and whether or not he would be in a position to continue to co-ordinate the website project now he had been elected as Chair of the Competitions Committee.
Action: Chair
The Chair confirmed that the plan was for web design and hosting to remain with Dialogue as BPA’s media partners. In response to a question, Alex Crawley said that there was no SEO or PPC activity in BPA’s web contract with Dialogue, but that the BPA site happened to be performing not too badly on search engines probably because of the unique position of BPA as the sport’s NGB.
10.3 Develop an innovative Starter Mag app which was dynamic and interactive
The tablet app had been released last year.
App for Tablets successfully released
The Committee decided not to proceed with development of an interactive version of the Starter Mag for Smartphones, as much content would have to be omitted for the smaller-file-size version needed for Smartphones. However, the Editor asked that a Starter Mag App should be made available for the App store and Google Play to allow download of the pdf version of the full Starter Mag. Alex Crawley (Dialogue) said he would provide a price for this.
Action: Dialogue (Alex Crawley)
10.4 Embark on a regular PR campaign, ideally once a month
The Editor pointed out that the first she had seen of recent PR had been on its release, and asked that she be included for feedback at draft stage. The Chair asked that (i) BPA Council and Vice Presidents should be included in the PR circulation list; and (ii) Google Alerts should be set up for BPA PR.
Action: Dialogue (Mike Waters)
10.5 Combine the support of media partners Archant Dialogue and event contractors
EventPro to relaunch, improve and enhance the exhibition on the day of the AGM on Saturday 24 January 2015
See minute 12.
Achieved
11/15 Communications Action Plan : 1 July 2015 to 30 June 2016
The Chair asked the Committee to consider targets for the next Action Plan year for agreement at the next meeting in April.
The Committee agreed that upgrading BPA websites would be a key target in the Communications Action Plan for 2015/6.
Agreed for inclusion in Action Plan 2015/6
Brian Cumming suggested some ideas as follows.
- Formulate a BPA communications policy including a social media policy, including 2 & 3 below.
- Develop a policy on whether supporting papers to BPA meetings should be published or not, depending on the confidentiality or non-confidentiality of each paper.
- Offer members the option of an e-mail alert system to the publication of BPA minutes.
- Design a new visual to promote the many branches of the sport, possibly in the form of a tree of opportunity. It might perhaps start with the structure of the current ‘progression’ poster, but inverted, so it began at the bottom and branched out.
The Secretary suggested, and the Committee agreed, that 2 above should be referred to the Stronger Future (Governance) Working Group.
Refer to SFWG
Ideas 1,3 & 4 above were carried forward by the Committee to the draft Communications Action Plan 2015/6 for further consideration at the next meeting.
Consider at next meeting
In relation to idea 4, the ‘tree of opportunities in skydiving’, the Chair invited Brian Cumming kindly to work up this concept with Alex Crawley (Dialogue), liaising with the COO & STO to assure technical accuracy. Brian Cumming said the idea was both to inform and inspire. It might also be used for marketing, as the next stage after the Starter Mag. Alex Crawley noted that the concept might also lend itself to dynamic interpretation on the web.
Action: Brian Cumming & Dialogue (Alex Crawley) / Next meeting
Mike Lewis noted that the process for generating a Committee’s Action Plan appeared to be bottom up, with each committee contributing its own ideas. The Chair said Council’s BPA Strategy informed communications strategy. The elements of BPA strategy most relevant to this Committee included safety first, pursuit of excellence, and the retention of members. The Secretary said the forthcoming conversation with the membership about governance was a top-down target (under the strategic aim of the pursuit of excellence) that would be likely to feature in the next Communications Action Plan. The Committee agreed that this be carried
forward to the draft Communications Action Plan 2015/6 for further consideration at the next meeting.
Consider at next meeting
The Chair asked all Committee members to bring forward any further ideas to the next meeting in April when the best selection of targets would be included in the Communications Action Plan targets for 2016/7.
Action: Committee
12/15 BPA Skydive the Expo 2015, Saturday 24 January 2015 at EMCC Nottingham
The Chair reported that estimated attendance had risen to at least 630, of which 547 had pre-registered including a spike just before cut-off on the evening before - incentivised by free entry to the Grand Prize Draw - compared with attendance of 450-500 (with no facility for pre-registration) at BPA AGM Days in previous years.
The Chair thanked all who had taken part in the planning and delivery of the event, including the exhibitors and the seminar speakers. The Expo had been a success, and there had been no major problems.
The seminars had been well received and they, and the AGM and presentation ceremony (which had also been streamed live), had subsequently been made available online. The seminars by John Le Blanc of Performance Designs and by the Freefall Camera in particular had been extremely popular with 5,000 hits within 24 hours of being uploaded.
The Editor suggested one way to encourage more teams to present seminars might be to consider making it a condition of BPA funding.
Refer to Competitions Committee
Feedback on the Expo had been requested on the BPA Facebook page and this, together with members’ and organisers’ feedback through other channels, would be considered at a debrief meeting to be held early next month. The Chair gave a flavour of the feedback which, in aggregate, ranged across many different aspects of the event. This would be very helpful in building on our successful formula and fine-tuning the arrangements for BPA Skydive the Expo 2016.
The Chair said that, going forward, there would be a need to differentiate our event from the two-yearly Parachute Industry Association (PIA) Symposium in the USA, possibly by a marketing focus on the UK and Europe.
The budget for BPA Skydive the Expo 2015 had been £13K plus another £5.3K from the Action Plan. The financial outturn had been a net cost to BPA of approximately £5K.
Mike Lewis enquired of exhibitors’ returns on investment. Alex Crawley said exhibitors did not share that information with us, but he believed that we had had slightly under-priced exhibition space. He also believed there to be an opportunity next time for pre-sales on the basis of an advantageous price and/or guaranteed position. The Chair asked him kindly to provide a sales and marketing strategy, with costings, for the 2016 event.
Action: Dialogue (Alex Crawley)
13/15 BPA e-Newsletter
The Chair said there had not been a BPA e-Newsletter in January because there had been so much social media about the Expo. The next e-Newsletter would be due for transmission in March, for which he would shortly put out a call for items to Council, Competitions Discipline Reps and staff.
Action: Chair
14/15 Dates of future meetings in 2015
At the BPA Office, 5 Wharf Way, Glen Parva, Leicester LE2 9TF:
· Tuesdays at 13:00: 14 April, 16 June, 11 August and 6 October;
· Saturday 5 December at 10:00.
The meeting closed at 11:54 (duration: 1h 49m).
Approved by the Committee, ratified by Council and published on 10 March 2015,
republished with corrections on 16 March 2015
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