Meeting Minutes: May 2019

SEATTLE SOUNDERS FC ALLIANCE COUNCIL

MEETING MINUTES

May 7th, 2019 – 7:00 PM

The NINETY

Present (16 of 19): Alex Eagleton, Ben Slager, Cameron Collins, Carmen Hall, Dan Roe, Duane Nakamura Jeff Williams, Jerry Neil, Kelsey Gallo, Lisa Angeles, Louis Garcia, Martin Buckley, Nicholaus Biela, Stephanie Steiner, and Todd Cowles.

Absent (3): Molly Wagner, Darla Langdon, Chris Urquart

Via telephone none

I. Call to order:  Martin Buckley 7:00 PM

Jessie Kilgore offered his resignation from Council, which was accepted.

Duane Nakamura is newly voted onto Council. Duane was welcomed and introductions made.

II. Roll. Jeff Williams:  16 of 19 present at 7.00pm.

III. Martin review on Player recognition wrap-up.
Wrap up workgroup on player recognition. Molly to send the email out with the wrap-up.

IV. Todd Presentation of the Rave foundation.

A summary of the plans the Rave foundation is planning. A small discussion on the great things the Rave are planning to Lead, serve, and invest. We were asking how the council can get more involved and coincide with the mission of the board. A request for the rave group to get up information sooner than later to help up plan. Darla went over some historical notes. Todd would help us bridge the partnership. The alliance can help promote.

V. Update: Social media plan and next steps.
Nicholas is heading the charge of how we need to use our tools to educate people on what is the council involvement. We will need to recruit additional help when the fan base increases to 30,000 season tickets. We brainstormed ideas to help drive the hits to social media.
Ideas: monthly mention in a magazine, content to include blogs, twitter, looking for material to regularly get information to the alliance members.
We need to educate people on the Yearly business meeting, scarf vote, fan event. Using these contacts for self-promotion.
We are looking for ways to get fan feedback and ideas to recruit more involved members.

VI. Working session:

We decided not to comment on the new code of conduct at this time. There was an open discussion on how it would be related to fan experience. We mentioned what items could be brought to the council for consideration.

Some of the ideas for driving awareness:

Scarf vote jersey planning, questionnaire.Fan appreciation day has the alliance council hand out the maps for signature places.
3 people can post to twitter, Molly can gather items.
Smaller events for the season ticket holders, example first day of practice.
Cards in the seats, information at seats.
Commit to every game to take fan pictures.
Pin and Pamphlet in the fan experience box.
Identify the council at games, bring awareness.
Promote scarf, jersey, garth visit regular parts of being a council member.
Partner with Rave at a bowling event.
Guest blog on Twitter.
Birthday acknowledgments.
Membership cards in the box.
GM vote and planning.
Branding Cups, napkins.
Some mention in the nightly pregame.

VII. Owner Meeting with Adrian and FO May 11^th.

We wanted to review how the council has developed and to what is in store for the council in the next 10 years. How does the alliance fit into the Sounders future plans?

Adjourn: 8:53 PM

Meeting Recap May 7, 2019

By: Carmen Hall

What potent blood hath modest May ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

A little later getting this in than normal.. so let’s take just a minute to appreciate that we closed out the transfer window with 2 new players (kinda… WELCOME BACK, JOEVIN) and are sitting 2nd in the West.  What is this… July??!

So, what did we do this month?  Glad you asked!

Clearing the Docket:  We closed out the Player Recognition workstream (for now) and sent out their final write up.  When the timing is right, we’re back on this like Brad Smith on Alberth Elis.

Making New Friends: Todd gave us a great presentation on the RAVE Foundation, their mission, and their current event calendar for 2019.  Whew, these folks are doing some awesome things out there using soccer as a medium and you should go check them out.  It would be really great if the Alliance Council could do more with RAVE and work together to help build that community – we’re hoping that Todd helps create that bridge for some partnership in the future.  No pressure, Todd.  We’re just watching you.

Let’s Talk About Us:  Our next chunk of time was spent talking about Alliance Council outreach.  See, we want amazing and diverse people to represent the Alliance Members and to do that we need to find ways to toot our own horn a bit.  We recognize that a certain percentage of the current Alliance don’t have the backstory on the creation of the Alliance so we need to work on getting better visibility into the Democracy In Sports concept in general.  If we get people excited in the Alliance, then we can get people excited about participating in Council.

Nicholaus runs this initiative as an At Large member of our Executive Team (aka: this is IMPORTANT) and helped lead the conversation including a roundtable brainstorm of ideas from the group for outreach opportunities.  We had a lot of ideas – some we’re already doing (spoiler alert… see you at the Fan Event this summer) and some that we need to work with the Front Office on to implement.  If we do this right, You Will Hear Us (see what I did there?)

One of the easiest things that we can do is to generate more, valuable content for this site.  It broke my heart a little bit to find that my recaps aren’t a big driver of clicks (I SWEAT OVER THESE THINGS, PEOPLE!) but I get it – who likes meeting notes no matter how they’re written?  So we’re going to work on doing better there.   If you DO happen to read this (HI MOM!) and have an idea on what sort of things you’d like to see leave a note in the comments below.

We wrapped up with a quick level set session for a meeting that we had with Club Ownership and Front Office folks before the Dynamo game on the 11th where we discussed the work we’d been doing with the Council of the Future.  We have some small working sessions to set up to keep that moving forward.  Stay tuned.

Schedule wise we’re looking at drought of home games until the end of June – pro-tip:  Scarves Up works from *wherever* you happen to watch our guys play.  You know what to do.

Alliance Council Meeting April 2nd 2019

By: Carmen Hall

Stepping into Spring, Ready to Take Care of Business

Hello April!  So much has happened since our March meeting – we had a time change, the cherry blossoms are… blossoming…, everyone came back healthy from the International break, and after a hearty game of bunkerball in Vancouver our Sounders are sitting on the best start in club history.  And we’re just getting this month started!

In the spirit of the season, the Alliance Council also sprung right back into business on the 2nd by focusing on wrapping up some loose ends from previous meetings and checking in with our workgroups.

First on our agenda was a read out from the jersey workgroup.  Prior to our Council meeting they had a working session with Taylor Graham where they walked through 2020 mock ups and talked about the feeling and vision for 2021.  We have a pretty quick turn around to get our thoughts back to the club and overall the feel from the group was that it’s starting to feel like we have a bit more strength behind our voices.  Time will tell how much influence any of us have when it comes to working with adidas and their templates and that includes the front office.  And no, don’t ask me any details about upcoming designs – I’m not part of that workgroup and the closest I got to that meeting was sitting near the pizza that was left over from their dinner.  BTW, I now have Opinions about the amount of green pepper should be on a pizza.  Opinions.

Next we continued our work on Future Council.  We locked in our North Star – you can read more here if you haven’t already seen it. We feel good about it and it’s something that we’ll be checking ourselves against as we look at how we make our plans and priorities.  After finishing our Vision, we talked about some possible organizational changes as the Council scales over the years – we’ve all been in those large meetings which are pretty terrible and don’t seem to bear fruit at the end.  Bigger isn’t better without a deliberate structure and set of expectations. Luckily, we have the time to test out some ideas and see if we’re getting the results that we want over the next couple of seasons.  This workgroup will continue to work on next tactical steps and bring back those recommendations to the larger team.

In the new business roundtable, Chris talked about starting planning for early 2020 season Inclusion activities such as World Autism Day that we missed this year and then we seeded the agenda for next month:  get updates from the Player Recognition, Youth Outreach and RAVE Foundation workgroups and start early planning the Annual Business Meeting (specifically talking about venue options that support a larger in-person audience and streaming if possible).

And we wrapped up a little early.  Which is probably good, because if you’ve looked at the schedule for April we all could use some extra rest – the Sounders still have 6 (6!!!!!) games to play in April including 2 (2!!!!!!) against LAFC in a week.  A WEEK!  Buckle up and strap in – this is going to be a crazy month.  Scarves up, Seattle!

SEATTLE SOUNDERS FC ALLIANCE COUNCIL

MEETING MINUTES

2 April 2019 – 7.00 pm
The NINETY

Present (11 of 18): Lisa Angeles, Martin Buckley, Cameron Collins, Todd Cowles, Alex Eagleton, Carmen Hall, Darla Langdon, Jerry Neil, Ben Slager, Stephanie Steiner, and Chris Urquhart.
Via telephone (1): Daniel Roe.
Absent (6): Nicholaus Biela, Kelsey Gallo, Louis Garcia, Jesse Kilgore, Molly Wagner, and Jeff Williams.

I. Call to order – Martin Buckley

II. Roll – Cameron Collins: 11 of 18 Present

III. Update: Player Recognition – Molly Wagner
Tabled until next meeting.

IV. Update: 2021 Jersey Subgroup – Cameron Collins & Stephanie Steiner           
The jersey subgroup met with Taylor Graham, Seattle Sounders Vice President of Operations, to discuss the 2021 kit and adidas’ vision. The subgroup will be providing ideas to the Club on inspirations for the kit. If the larger Council would like to provide feedback, it can be submitted through Cameron or Stephanie.

V. Alliance Council Mission/Vision – Martin Buckley            
Council discussed the Mission Statement created at the March Meeting.  After review, it was adopted unanimously as below:

The Seattle Sounders FC Alliance Council strives to achieve the best fan experience in North American soccer and to build upon our historical foundation in order to preserve the Club we love.           

We do this by being the voice of the fan and by upholding the principles of Democracy in Sports.

VI. Alliance Council Future Structure – Martin Buckley

Currently, the Council is pretty well distributed throughout the Stadium, more so than the Council has ever been before. The question before the subgroup has been, “how does the Alliance Council work to be representative as the Council grows?” Doing so in a more strategic manner would allow for more information sharing, increased participation, and emphasis of areas of the stadium where representation is lacking. One suggestion to achieve this would be to have the equivalent of “Section Mayors,” where Council Members would represent the section where they sit. This model would allow for “at-large” members, such that there could be more than one representative from a specific section.

The group has also looked at different structures for the Council itself, including quarterly meetings for a larger Council and then monthly meetings for an increased-in-size Executive Committee.

Council will target the summer fan event to grow Alliance Council and get more information to and from the fan base.

VII. Other Business and Open Discussion 

1. Away Game Travel: Alex Eagleton has continued to look in to the notion of allowing Alliance Members away game travel experiences. He will continue to research the topic.
2. Inclusion: Chris Urquhart would like the Council to do something surrounding World Autism Awareness Day next year. Council agreed that this would be a great idea.

VIII. Adjournment

Moved. Seconded. Council votes unanimously to adjourn.

SEATTLE SOUNDERS FC ALLIANCE COUNCIL

MEETING MINUTES

5 March 2019 – 7.00 pm
The NINETY

Present (15 of 19): Alex Eagleton, Cameron Collins, Carmen Hall, Dan Roe, Lisa Angeles, Louis Garcia, Gilbert Ko, Jeff Williams, Jerry Neil, Kelsey Gallo, Martin Buckley, Nicholaus Biela, Molly Wagner, Stephanie Steiner, Todd Cowles
Absent (2): Ben Slager, Chris Urquart
Via telephone (2): Darla Langdon, Jesse Kilgore

I. Call to order: Martin Buckley

II. Roll. Jeff Williams: 15 of 19 present

III. Working session: Alliance future state

Martin gave an overview of how the council started, numbers of Alliance Members and numbers on Alliance Council. The club goal is “to fill CenturyLink” by mid 2020’s.

The question is how Alliance Council is ready and adapting to this? Martin displayed the situation of where we are today. We created a map on where the current Alliance Council members are situated within the stadium.

We perceive there could be up to 50,000 Alliance Members in the next ten years. We want to be more representative in all aspects; demographics, stadium coverage.

Discussions were centered on several topics.

• What is the Alliance?
• are new fans aware of what the Alliance is?
• are fans aware of the Alliance Council? What the purpose of Alliance Council is?
• How do you join Alliance Council? What being part of Alliance Council means?

Discussion on Hurdles we are facing.

We have ten years of history and in looking to the future the discussion on what some of the challenges we are facing and how the Alliance and Alliance Council are perceived. We believe that the majority of current Season Ticket members do not have tenure back to 2009 – and we will need to work to educate them on being an Alliance member. We need to have the Season Ticket membership buy into the emotional part of being a fan.

We had a conversation on how we are interacting with the Front Office, positive and negative. One of the pillars of the front office is Community, and the Alliance is a large part of that.

A North Star.

Some workshop and discussion about “what is the Alliance” and “what is the Alliance Council” led to a need for a mission statement, or North Star, for the Alliance Council.

Key themes included:

• looking forward
• represent all Alliance members
• help with the fan experience
• enrich the fan experience
• encourage the emotional hook
• establish pride
• speak with a unified voice on behalf of the communities we represent.

To help focus on this direction we wrote a draft of the mission statement:

The Alliance Council strives to achieve the best fan experience in North American soccer and to preserve the Club we love.
We accomplish this by being the voice of the fan and upholding the principles of Democracy in Sports.

IV. Other business

The summary of the Player Recognition project will be emailed to the Council for discussion next month.

The value menu did not show well enough and needs to have better placement, this will be passed to the Front Office team.

Adjourn: 8:58 PM

Addendum: Gilbert Ko submitted his resignation, and it was accepted.