Denton Reads Executive Committee Meeting

November 5, 2008

Present:   Annie Downey, Sue Parks, Greg Hardin, Annita Owens, Stacey Irish-Keffer, Donna Kearley, Thom Anderson, Lily Ramin, Kimberly Wells

The statistics for the 2008 Denton Reads event are:

Author Event with Orson Scott Card – 600 attending with 30% Young Adults, 270 stayed up to 5 hours to have their book signed by the author.

Movie Event – City of Ember – 93 people attended, 30% were Young Adults

Lessons Learned:

Publicity

·         More publicity.   The publicity for the author event helped to make this much more successful than last year.   But the movie event and the book discussion groups needed more publicity.

·         Survey the public to see what we could do better.   Donna Kearley will put together a survey and Starr Hoffman will post it to the Denton Reads website.  Kimberly Wells will ask Lucinda Breeding to give the link to the survey in any follow up articles she might write about the event.

·         Centralize the publicity.   Ask librarians about bookmarks, slides, and the Denton Record-Chronicle ad and how successful each was in order to focus the publicity.

·         Focus the publicity for the different groups represented.  For example, UNT and TWU both suggested newspaper ads in the campus newspapers.

·         Cohesive Look.   If everything was in one flyer it will have a cohesive look.   This would include the movie events, the book discussion groups, and children and youth activities, and the author event.

Fundraising and Corporate Sponsorships

·         This would be a good goal to work on for the next program.   Now is the time to solicit donations and grants.

·         We need a team to write grants to support this long-term.

Movie Event

·         Cinemark was a wonderful location and very easy to work with.

·         Attendance was lower than expected.  It is possible that we could use more publicity or it might be that there were too many other things going on that day – like the OU/Texas game.

Book Discussion Groups

·         Banter and Barnes and Nobel were successful.  

·         An online group was suggested.

·         One suggestion was to hold one book discussion group after the author event .

Suggestions for 2009

Books/Authors/Suggestions

1.       Block out the dates for next year NOW.

2.       What book/author would you like for 2009?   Come to the December meeting ready to discuss this.

3.       Look at the time of the event.  This was a very long day for the volunteers.

4.       Guyer HS was a good location.  Consider using it again.

The next meeting is December 10, 2008 at 2:30 PM at Emily Fowler Public Library.

Action Items:   Please come ready to discuss:

·         Possible authors/books for the 2009 Denton Reads event.

·         List of suggestions of members to serve on subcommittees.

·         Ideas on how to restructure the subcommittees.