Monday, April 18, 2016

Report on 2016 Sponsors' General Meeting

The 2016 Borderlands Sponsors' General Meeting was held at 6pm on Thursday, March 31st at Borderlands Cafe (870 Valencia St.  SF  CA 94110).  Roughly 50 people attended.

After some entertainment from Alan Beatts in the form of a cautionary tale about bookshelf building, the main topics of discussion were the future of the bookstore, a (relatively) rapid-fire Q&A, the handling of sponsor funds, political involvement on the part of Borderlands, and the creation of a book subscription program.

Alan began the meeting by giving an overview of the current financial situation of both the bookstore and cafe elements of Borderlands.  In brief, both are as to be expected.  The bookstore is showing a slight loss before accounting for sponsorship income.  That is as expected since the minimum wage increase last July was expected to produce that result. However, factoring in sponsorship income, the bookstore is doing very well.  The cafe is also showing a slight loss but that is being addressed by improvements to the menu selection this year.  Like the bookstore, not a matter for concern.

Next he explained the remaining terms on both the lease for the bookstore (5 and a bit years) and the cafe (9 and a half years).   His concern is not for the next few years because the sponsorship program (with 611 sponsors at this time) seems to be a sustainable model for the business.  Instead the concern is what to do when the current lease on the bookstore expires. It is the expectation that, barring major ("or almost Biblical") changes in the economic situation in San Francisco, the cost of rent under a new lease would be unsustainable.  At this point, Alan's plan forward is to spend the next three to four years raising money (and conserving excess sponsorship income) to have a down-payment on a building one to two years before the lease expires.

After this explanation, the discussion began about how to achieve this goal.

The Main Question: Sustainability and Purchasing A Building
The consensus was a unanimous "Yes" to exploring ways to purchase a building for the bookstore, with further discussion about how to raise the money continuing after the intermission.  Questions included: is the landlord the same for both the cafe and bookstore (it is), and where the new bookstore might be (universal consensus was "nearby").  There were no votes for closing rather than relocating once the lease expires.

If The Plan Should Fail
One of the biggest questions was regarding what would happen to the funds if they were ultimately insufficient. There is not yet a cohesive statement about what would happen in this case, but general thoughts passed around the audience were to either expand the building search to include areas outside San Francisco or even the Bay Area, or if the store should ultimately close, then there would most likely be an additional Sponsor General Meeting to discuss options - including the possibility of refunds to donors and / or passing the funds on to another beneficiary such as SFWA (and its mystery and horror counterparts) or another organization in line with Borderlands' mission.

If The Plan Should Succeed
The ultimate goal, assuming success in purchasing a building, is to establish a non-profit foundation to run Borderlands in perpetuity once Alan is no longer involved in running the business (the phrase he used was, "When I'm taking my dirt-nap.").  Alan went on to observe that if this two-part plan were to be successful it will be his life's work; also that a clear path does not mean a short or easy one.  A question was raised that it might be better for him to be involved in the creation and establishment of the foundation, rather than it starting upon his death -- Alan cited the current lack of a complete plan, that a lawyer had pronounced the idea "complicated", and promised to keep us all updated as the process moves forward, but that he was open to the idea of helping start the foundation.

General Q&A

ALAN Q: If the building purchase deadline were looming and we were still a little short, should we increase sponsorships to $200?
A: Hand vote, generally yes

AUDIENCE Q: Have you considered crowd-funding?
A: Alan had lunch with a Kickstarter representative and feel that that platform would be an excellent idea once things are a bit clearer, but that we need to be further down the road on the budget range for purchase, budget for a buildout, the timeline, etc before working with them.  Anyone with specific questions about this is encouraged to reach out to Alan directly for a private discussion.

AUDIENCE Q: If a nonprofit wanted to help fundraise for the building, would that make the donations tax deductible, and could the nonprofit own the building?
A: A nonprofit entity cannot have their benefits go to a single for-profit entity.  The nonprofit would need to have an incredibly broad mission of which only a tiny part was supporting a bookstore, or it would need to rent space to several different small businesses.  Basically, there's no way to do this and have it be just for Borderlands, and is not feasible on the larger scale.

ALAN Q: If we raise money for a building and are getting close but need an extra push, would you (the sponsors) be individually willing to put up an extra sum of money to get us over that goal line?  Donations would not be tax deductible.  In totally arbitrary amounts:
$200? - Unanimous yes
$500 - Unanimous yes
$1000 - 24 yes
$5000 - 4 yes
$10000 - 2 yes

AUDIENCE Q: For sponsors who’d like to do more to help, can people put up a sponsorship for someone else?
A: Yes! Absolutely! We have a "scholarship program" where sponsors can purchase a sponsorship to be given to a deserving person -- generally to young people, or other people who don’t have the means to become a sponsor on their own.  This is something that's been unintentionally below the radar, and we will definitely spread the word.

AUDIENCE Q: What about tiered sponsorships?
A: Universal no from both Alan and the audience.  General response was that we are not going to create an "elite" group of those who paid more and those who still paid.  We're all in this together.

AUDIENCE Q: What about multi-year sponsorships?  Like 3- 5- or 10-year sponsorships?
A: We’re slightly uncomfortable with that idea -- what if we close? -- but will take it under advisement.  This would need to be part of the fundraising "What if we don’t make it and have extra cash?" statement which is being considered.  Multi-year sponsorships might be a better idea when we get closer to buying a building.

AUDIENCE Q: What if there comes a year where you don't get the 300 sponsors, but the previous year you had 400? Does that extra money mean you can stay open past that year?
A: We're obviously going to need a statement of what happens in the event that we have extra money but still need to close.  However, if we don't get 300 people a year, every year, it's still time to close up shop.  The idea behind the sponsorship program, the building purchase, and the foundation was sustainability; if there's ever a point where this whole idea can't make the bare minimum, it's over.  We need a foundation of support, and having 300 sponsors is an excellent metric.  But, this can be a topic of future discussion.

AUDIENCE Q: Can we set up some kind of general scholarship fund so people can donate even if they can't afford a whole other sponsorship?
A: It might be possible to set up a fund so people could contribute lesser amounts and scholarships could be merited out at whatever factor of $100 the fund reached.

Handling of Funds: Sponsor Oversight
Advisory Board
There was a large discussion stemming off of the aborted possibility of loaning money to Precita Eyes to help with the purchase of their own building.  Many solutions and tools were suggested to properly randomize rapid responses from the pool of sponsors and not subject anyone to information overload (Survey Monkey, Google forms, etc), but the main questions boiled down to two points:

ALAN Q: Should we have an advisory board?
A:  General approval.

ALAN Q:  How should the members be selected?
A:  Mixed, half are for Alan appointing the board and half in favor of Sponsors volunteering (and, perhaps, serving in rotation of, for example, 10 people per quarter).

AUDIENCE Q: Did someone complain about the Precita Eyes thing?
A:  A couple of people did speak up, which seemed to indicate that more people might have concerns but didn't mention it.  This seemed like a good time to ask.

AUDIENCE OBSERVATION: Borderlands has always been forthcoming on what's going on and why.  Please take this as a vote of confidence that this will continue to be the case and leave it to your judgment.

In the beginning, Borderlands steered well clear of politics thanks to two motivations: disillusionment and disenfranchisement.  Later the reason was more one of respect.  Since sponsors, customers, and especially Borderlands' employees have wide-ranging opinions and beliefs, to pick a side could make them uncomfortable and associate them with ideas that they didn't support.  That being said, there are two specific examples that impacted the store directly: the $15 minimum wage increase, and our district supervisor lying about his involvement with the store along with his associated actions.

The general consensus was "It’s Complicated", with a lot of opinions both for and against, but the ultimate conclusion was that the bookstore should steer clear of any wide-ranging political involvement.  Further, taking any stance now could direct the future path of the bookstore and, ultimately, the foundation.  We should start as we wish to go on and both Alan and the sponsors attending generally felt that setting a foundation in motion with a political axe to grind was a poor idea.

Book Subscription Program
And then -- there was much discussion about a book subscription program.  If you’ve read this far (and even moreso if you sat through it the first time), thank you all.  The very condensed version is that there is moderate support for a book subscription program and many, many ways that it could be administered or tailored to suit the sponsors.

Possibilities are:
Creating a fantasy and science fiction subscription and a separate one for mystery and horror.
Letting subscribers return or opt-out of some number of titles per year (e.g. 2 or 3).
Offering author-specific subscriptions (e.g. a subscriber would get a copy of any book published by that specific author).
Creating an associated monthly book group meeting at the cafe.

There was also an explanation from Alan about the economic advantages of such a subscription: specifically that knowing an exact number of copies of a book that will be sold and ordering on that basis provides income projections and economies of scale that far offset the extra cost and effort.  The consensus was that it was something worth thinking about in more depth and that many of the sponsors present would be interested.

(Big thanks to Salem Evans (sponsor #0.5) for taking notes at the meeting and for preparing this overview)

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