ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING MINUTES
Annual General Meeting 10 April 2022 - Summary Minutes
Call to Order
An AGM of OGAE Rest of the World was held virtually through Microsoft Teams on April 10 @ 1.00AM CET, 19.00 USEDT, 9.00AM AEST
Attendees included: board members Luc S. Niall D. Kyle W. Ronny A. Kate K. and 22 club members
Meeting Opened at 19.05 USEDT
MEETING OPENING, ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF LAND AND BOARD INTRODUCTIONS
a. Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands across which we meet and are spread, and pay my respects to elders and leaders past and present. I walk in the footsteps of the Bunurong/Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Peoples, the original stroytellers of these lands, and continue to acknowledge and respect their continuing connection to culture and country.
b. Please note, the meeting is being recorded - if anyone wants to be present on Camera, we would strongly encourage it, but understand if you wish not to.
c. Introductions from Luc, Kyle, Niall, Kate and Ronny.
PRESIDENTS UPDATE.
a. Well, it has been an interesting year (again)… Coming off the back of world-wide lockdowns, new variants, continued lockdowns, a Eurovision without an audience, more lockdowns… But we, as a club, continued to grow. Our membership, our activities and our engagement across social media… More on that to come. 2022 promised to bring with it a return to a new form of “normalcy” … But more Covid impacts, many natural disasters, and Putin declaring war on Ukraine… It has not been the solace we were hoping to find. Through it all, our love for people, and Eurovision prevails - and more than ever, we have come together to support each other across the globe.
b. For the AGM this year, we asked, as we will always, whether there were any suggestions or motions they would like to put forward for changes to the club. We received 4 submissions. 2 of these were put out for a vote to understand the member’s sentiment. Kyle and Ron will address these in a bit.
c. We put forward a few surveys over the course of the year.
1. Firstly, looking at our communications tools, where the responses were overwhelmingly to remain with Facebook as our primary group communication tool. Status quo was preferred across the board, with one exception. For the “Club Activities” section of the website… to include a password to enter the page (a universal one). We have not yet attempted to implement this; however, we will ask if the desire to do so remains. If so - we will introduce this for a “trial period” of 1 month and get feedback from members on the success of this to see if we will retain this feature.
2. Thank you to the 15 members who completed the Skills Survey. As we move forward, we will be contacting you for assistance across a variety of things, including increasing our own capabilities - such as; audio/visual editing, website upgrades etc., and translation (to broaden our club’s reach).
3. Board/Club performance feedback. Thank you for the largely positive feedback we received (and continue to). In the spirit of continuous improvement, we are trying to simplify our language, provide better instruction and taking on feedback as it comes through. We hope you have noticed a mark-ed improvement.
d. Election year! Every 2 years, our club holds an election. In 2020, 3 positions on the board were vacated, 5 people ran for these, and 3 were elected. From that, the 2 remaining board members and the 3 recently elected (or re-elected) nominated which of the 5 positions on the board they would like to hold. As no one ran for the same position, all positions were filled. 2022 sees Niall and myself vacate the board and a call for interest in running for election across the membership will be made. Both Niall and myself are intending to re-run, however this should not discourage anyone who would like to take on the responsibility from putting their name in! Once this part of the election is done, and the 2 recently elected (or re-elected) join Kate, Ron and Kyle on the board, all positions are vacated and the elected members will nominate for a specific role on the board. If more than 1 person nominates for a position, another member vote will be required to elect a person to the role. E.g., If Kate, Kyle and Ron both put their hands up for President, the members will have to vote for who they would like as the figurehead of the club. If they all run for Vice President, the same.
e. Italy. Well… Organizationally challenged as they are, the contest is still going ahead. Ticket Packages, and ticketing in general this year, has been very bizarre, with parameters often changing, a ticketing agent who are unable (or unwilling) to do their job properly (and the reports from the public sale of the website being THE WORST keep coming through) … As information is known - we will keep members posted… But this seems to be drip fed as things are decided and changed last minute. NEVER have ticket sales for the largest international music production been this late in the game, sadly forcing some people to opt out completely. It is also the first year that the Broadcaster and Ticket Agent NOT provided the home OGAE Club a separate allocation of packages. All this - and a lot more - makes it feel like we, as die-hard, money-where-your-mouth-is fans are being alienated. High ticket costs, unregulated accommodation price increases, and the decision to split not just into LIVE and JURY, but to then split THOSE packages into several tiers, has forced a lot of people to either completely reconsider their travel, or to find an alternative to actually being at the contest. At the end of the day, however, it is actually up to the host country/city, AND their Broadcaster to make any and all final decisions regarding events/event spaces, cost of tickets, types of tickets, promotion, ticket sales etc. OGAE International are continuing to source a venue for a Euro Fan Café - as the Broadcaster (as is their right) is not going to have a EuroClub. The city of Turin asked local bars, cafes and clubs to register their interest to be a “Eurovision fan zone”, meaning there would not be a centralized event space for after-show events. This may cause some disparity across clubs, within clubs etc. However, every effort is being made to secure SOMETHING through our OGAE International board.
f. For those who care, the OGAE President’s meeting will not be a face-to-face meeting, but a virtual meeting held via Zoom on May 28. Many clubs are not being represented in Turin by their president, due to all the factors mentioned above and others, I am sure.
g. Lastly, we have our “OGAE ROW - Travel to Turin” Facebook group. This is designed as a primary communications platform for all members who will be present in Turin. We kindly ask, if you will not be in Turin, to remove yourself from the group. Every year, this will be rebranded and members will have the opportunity to re-join if they are planning on attending the contest. We have several events that we are currently trying to plan when on the ground. For those who will be there, please keep an eye out for more detail as things come to fruition. A poll will shortly be put up to ask if you will be attending, and any member in the group who does not respond to that poll will be removed from the group, so please make sure to respond.
MOST IMPORTANTLY - thank you. Thank you for your membership, your support, your feedback, your participation in our events, for being a great family of people. YOU are w what makes this club happen. YOU are what makes all the work in the background worthwhile. YOU are what makes Eurovision great. Thank you.
No feedback or comments from the floor
FINANCIAL AND MEMBERSHIP REPORT
Niall has given an overview of the club’s financial position, and went through the financial report showing members the clubs expenditure and bank balance. Due to privacy reasons,we don’t wish to display them on this public website. If you wish to view these, please email us at membership@ogaerotw.com
Niall also displayed a member breakdown of our Euphoria, Moltiva and Satellite members, and from where our members reside in the world. We currently have 353 members in the club. This is a huge increase from the 208 members we had at last year’s AGM. See attached reports for further information.
SOCIAL MEDIA REPORT
Kate, our social media manager spoke of our accounts on Facebook, Instagram, twitter, You-tube and our newest baby, TikTok.
Important Notes
Kate reported that due to our increased social media presence we have found many new followers on all our social media platforms. The members only facebook page is by far our most important platform receiving the majority of hits, but increases across the board were recorded. Kate has also joined us into the land of TikTok, and is feeling her way around it at the moment. The open facebook page is doing very well and has opened our group and its desirability to join the paid membership. Many new Eurovision fans, have found us this way.
Kate made a request of the membership from anyone who may be savvy in the Apps, particularly twitter and TikTok, to please reach out to her in regards to creating new content and to give her a hand in these two platforms as she is relatively new to them and could use some inspiration into some new content for the club.
While we continue to create content, we ask those members with these accounts to participate as much as possible to further expand our reach. The more interaction the platforms have, the more traffic they generate.
OUTCOMES OF THE AGM MOTIONS PUT FORWARD BY THE MEMBERS
Important Notes
Ron:
As Luc mentioned - 4 motions were received. Kyle will run through the two that went for member voting; however, we would like to address the two which the board did not put forward.
First - there was a suggestion/question, more than a motion:
Variety of Ticket Packages - Richard
This may be out of your control... Wondered if there could be a way to buy a variety of ticket packages, e.g., all live shows only or all jury shows or individual shows, instead of a mandatory six shows (which is quite expensive).
Surprisingly, this seems to be happening since Israel’s Broadcaster introduced the breaking up of ticket packages into either the three live or the three jury shows. Italy expanded on that as Luc mentioned. However, it is at the discretion of the host Broadcaster on the allocation of packages at all, as well as the volume, cost and breakdown of the ticket packages. We can, and do, provide feedback to ask through OGAE International on the member’s suggestions. Individual contest ticketing agents handle ticketing differently also. Sometimes, it maybe you are issue a single ticket for entry to all the shows, individual tickets to all shows, transferable and non-transferable… all of this is at their discretion. We can only provide feedback, and that isn’t solely through official channels. Members have taken to social media to complain to the host country/city, ticketing agents, and to ask for the EBU to step in and regulate pricing (as fans are being priced-out of this over the last couple of contests), and other things such as fan allocations, seating vs. standing (not as big an issue this year for Italy’s seated event) etc.
Second - the motion to form “sub-committees” to work on projects or short-term pieces of work.
We put out a survey - which we will continue to run every year, asking for members with any particular skills to register their interest in assisting the board should this be a necessity. We currently have a small number of members who are willing to lend their time and expertise to assist when the need arises. Thank you. The caveat to this is that we will not be offering additional points necessarily for any assistance provided on an ad-hoc basis.
As we have this register, the board did not feel that a formalized sub-committee arrangement would be something we would be utilizing in the near future.
We will put it out for all members to review and/or express interest again in July.
Kyle:
The two motions which were put forward to the club:
The first one we will discuss is “Recognition of the Board”.
Put forward by Niall, our current Treasurer and Membership Manager. This was to recognize that there is an extraordinary amount of work being done in the background by the board, all on our own time, and that in recognition of this, an increase in points allocated to the board was put forward. The vote, while non-binding, was to gather the sentiment of the membership on this.
The results:
Nearly two thirds of members who voted advised they would support an increase in allocated points to board members. This will be discussed at our next Board meeting in Turin, in May, and any final decision will be communicated clearly with the members.
The other vote was based on a significant amount of member feedback about multiple posts from individual members linking to their affiliated/person websites. While this is still Eurovision related, members feel that this has become “Spammy” (their words, not ours) and would like to see a restriction placed on this.
The results:
A significant proportion of members would like to see a form of restriction in place on this, 83.3%. Of this, the majority, 41.7%, have asked for these posts to be limited to one per week (a weekly update from these member’s sites/affiliated groups. We will be working on this over the next month to implement some guidelines. However, we will NOT be putting in place any form of “post approval”, we will trust that members will follow the guidelines. In the cases where these guidelines are not being followed, we will then place something similar on the individual member/s following a discussion with them.
COMMENTS FROM THE FLOOR
Mike W expressed an opinion on the recognition of board points. While he has no problem with the increase to the boards points, he did query whether in this case, the board should be allowed to continue to share their points on the ticket list. The board will address this question at the next board meeting to be held in Turin during Eurovision week.
MEETING CLOSED 02.08AM
R Addamo
25/04/22
Secretary
Date of approval