Fort Collins Youth Broadcasting

Well we finally have the money to pay the rent for September! Now we just need to find the money to pay for October. Please everyone pay your dues and keep donating or we wont be around for much longer!

Besides the nasty financial facts we’re starting to get back into the school year groove with more then a show every day. We’re also going to be subleasing the conference room during the day, if you have any personal items in that room let me know so I can get them out for you. Thanks for all your support and help!

Peter

Hey everyone,

As you might know I am officially the Manager. And also you might know that i got left with a pretty crappy finance situation and a lack of volunteers. First please donate and pay the newly created dues (10$ a month or 80$ for a year). Right now I am having trouble paying the rent. Also to help our money situation if you have any items to donate for the klik yard sale let me know or just drop by the station. (there will be more info on the yard sale later too). Second I have some posters that I will put in the station room. If you have the great desire to hand them out or hang them up in your school please do! Well i think thats it thanks for every thing you guys do for klik!

Peter

This is my two weeks notice to FCYB. On September 4th, I’m headed on JetBlue to Boston for Northeastern University, so Peter officially takes over that day.

The new board of directors is also already in place. Their information can be found in the “About Us” tab of this web site.

Whether you’re a community supporter, alumni or former volunteer of KLIK Radio, or a current volunteer…stick around! I’ll make sure Peter keeps updating this site on a fairly regular basis (once a month minimum, which I haven’t done the greatest job sticking to lately, either). Enjoy KLIK Radio v2.0!

We’ve made some improvements to KLIK lately on the IT side to hopefully give a better listening experience:

• We’ve re-installed SAM Broadcaster so as to eliminate any built-up overhead in the SQL databases, logs, and other complicated issues that advanced programs create.
• We have installed a new router, which both provides wi-fi to our studio and provides us with better traffic shaping capabilities, allowing us to dedicate more upstream bandwidth to the encoder.
• We’ve ordered a new SHOUTcast server.  Originally, we were on a dedicated server running Icecast.  However, this server had some real buffering issues, so we have replaced it with a regular SHOUTcast server (which is actually going to save us quite a bit of money each year)
• Oh, and, we have a new web site!  About time.

Open KLIK Day is this Saturday, which is essentially our way of saying “open house.”  It’s from 10 AM to 9 PM at our new studio on Cherry and Howes St.  Come check it out if you’d like!

Peter has some news about the fund-raiser which I haven’t heard yet, but hopefully it’s good stuff!  As far as I know, the date is still set to August 1st at Bas Bleu Theater.

Hello Everyone,

Now that school is over for myself (and i think today is everyone else’s last day) I’ve been starting to work on the fund-raiser! Currently Matt, Aaron and I are working on getting a space to rent and looking for items for a silent auction. (The fund-raiser will consist of a Concert and a Silent Auction). If you are able to help with the fund-raiser or have items to donate for the silent auction let me know. My email is peter@fcyb.org

Thanks!

Peter

I don’t have any pictures yet, but I will be taking some…most likely tomorrow…with my parents’ incredibly nice wide-angle lens digital camera.  Our lease on the new space at 230 Cherry St began May 1st, and continues through January 15, 2010.  My mother loves the space, all the volunteers who have seen it so far love it, everyone seems to like it.  So, I’d say we’ve got a winner!

Now…NAI, our landlord, who is also a non-profit, does something very cool.  On each office, they have a plaque dedicating the office to its user, in addition to whomever paid for the office.  This made me wonder if we could get people to pay for our office space directly, in exchange for a plaque and advertising.  I’ve put it up as an option on the “Sponsors” page, and I’ll be talking to Pete to see if he thinks we can get some businesses in on donating large chunks of change to pay for entire leases.

While we were originally going to try to relocate the entire studio this weekend, I realized there was no phone service at the new studio, so we’ll probably end up moving throughout the entire week.  Plus, we still have some stuff to fix at the old studio (like the color of the walls).

We’ll have to see what happens!  I’m also going to create Pete a new accont on this blog so he can start making posts about his progress as incoming manager.

Or, it could also mean that nothing has been happening.  Over the past few weeks, KLIK has done very little.  We have been continuing our work on finding new office space, recruiting volunteers, life is usual and happy.

However, KLIK has some pretty significant stuff going on very soon!  First off, our new management team is going to be announced May 15, 2009 at a KLIK Radio volunteer party.  It’s only open to our volunteers and their guests, so please don’t stalk us.  We’ll probably put up a YouTube video and pictures of it, though, so it’ll be just like being there.  🙂

Another HUGE announcement: we have finally found a new office!  Our move-out date is tentatively set for Saturday, May 2.  We’ll be paying the second half of rent for April ’09 and will be packing our bags and moving up the street.  We’ll be downstairs from the National Association for Interpretation, on the corner of Cherry and Howes.  Our address will be 230 Cherry St.  No leases have been signed, and nothing is in writing, but we’re fairly certain we’ll be moving into their larger space with our own set of doors (yay!)

Finally, the new, soon-to-be-announced management team will be putting together a KLIK fund-raiser.  In my attempts to distance myself from the day-to-day operations of the station to allow them to take over, myself and the other current board members will only be serving as advisors to this event.  The location, setup, etc. will be completely picked out and completed by the new team.

The KLIK volunteer fest location is still to be determined, so…we’ll have to hold off on that.

Until next time, folks (which might be from the next manager), have fun reading about us!

Yes…Valentine’s Day is upon us. Which means we’re busy as ever at the KLIK Radio.

We have narrowed down our office space options to two. We’re not sure if the Key Bank Tower will be willing to work with us on alternatives to electronic access, but hopefully they will. 🙂 The other option is above the Olive Street Bakery, the Kinko’s, etc. at 120 W Olive.

The United Way Volunteer Drive for PSD schools starts in a couple weeks! We’ve got plenty of opportunities lined up, just give us a call for details.

I’ve also been ordered by the board of directors to create a standardized volunteer application and show profile form, so I suppose I’ll be doing that with the little free time I have.

We’ve decided our biggest concern now should be our volunteer count. The count has slowly been going down, and after we graduate, the number will drop tremendously. My goal is to get the number of seniros involved in the station to, at most, 25% by the end of the school year. All we have to do is recruit more young people, and things will be fantastic!

In addition, we’re going to do as much as we can to improve the quality of our programming. This includes getting our hands on a new prorgamming director, cutting back on inconsistent volunteers, and making it easier for volunteers to accept phone calls, download new music, and interact with listeners.

My personal goal is to start posting to this site more often. And possibly get a design change…I’m getting a little tired of the regular FCYB design.

Thanks for reading! I’m hopefully going to get in the habit of posting weekly, if not more. So check back soon for the latest FCYB gossip.

And that means all kinds of crazy stuff is going on.  Mostly including annual reports, an IRS 990-N, a board meeting in 2 days, and possibly an organization name change.

An organization name change would be the biggest change to date with our non-profit.  My personal suggestion is Colorado Youth Radio.  There are plenty of good reasons to change it:

• Currently, on our IRS confirmation letter, my home address is listed as the agency address.  This is competely inaccurate.
• We no longer have only volunteers in Fort Collins.  We are an Internet radio station.  People will associate better with “Colorado” than “Fort Collins.”
• “Fort Collins Youth Broadcasting, Inc.” is just way too long.
• “Colorado Youth Radio” is far shorter.
• On the other hand, we lose our spiffy domain name and would have to change to “coloradoyouthradio.org” or something like that.
• It would allow us to run any new manager through a complicated business-related process.

Unfortunately, going back to that last reason, I still do not have a replacement! At the rate things are going, I may never find one!!! Very bad news for the station.

In other news, our Bohemian Foundation grant check was lost on the mail somehow.  So, I am personally paying the bills until that check comes in.  On the plus side, we recently received a $250 grant from Do Something, as well as a $50 donation from Dana Clark.  Woot!

I also need $65 to buy Peachtree.  I’m running out of trial attempts.  I too have been conned in by Peachtree’s scheme to make you buy their product.  Thankfully for us, we’re pre-approved at TechSoup and can get a copy with a 90% discount.  Talk about awesome!

Studio move!  Our lease is up in February, which means that we’ll be taking the month of February to slowly transition into the new studio.  All the essentials will be moved as soon as DSL is installed, and the other stuff that’s in “storage” will be migrated over slowly.  I have heard tell, though, that the aforementioned Bohemian Foundation has purchased the building in question.  Hopefully this means the incredible deal we struck with Ada Chen won’t go away.

Until next time, folks, have a fantastic day, and continue reading if you so desire.

Great news! Two things things have happened that have put us in a good financial position:

• Because of your donations and coffee sales, all our expenses for December are paid for without having to borrow any money.
• We have received the largest grant we applied for.

With that in mind, we can change up the “everyone needs to donate $30” thing a little bit. First off, my sincere thanks to everyone who donated:

• Ed King
• Nels Gerstner
• Tyler Johnson
• Michelle Lotz
• Durrie S.
• Evan West

On the other hand, we still need the $30 from everyone so that we can use the full grant for our regular expenses. But we can change it up a bit.  Instead of paying a huge amount all at once, everyone will need to donate about $6/month in January, February, March, April, and May. This obviously adds up to the full $30 from each member, allowing us to fully pay off our debt.

The new year is going to bring in a lot of changes: new studio, possibly a new mixing board, quite a few things will be happening. We’re wanting to quadruple our annual budget, which will hopefully make things a bit more fun for volunteers everywhere!

There will be a fairly significant staffing change in the board. Simone is leaving as board president. Justina (VP) will be taking her place, Mia (secretary) will become vice-president, and Antonia (treasurer) will become secretary. Meanwhile, Mara Nielson will hopefully become our treasurer. Mara is taking Accounting 1 this year as a junior, and wants to take Accounting 2 as a senior, making her an excellent candidate for
the treasurer position.

So, all is well in radio land!