3pm Monday 29th September 2008
5 Camillus Road,
Newcastle-Under-Lyme,
Staffordshire,
ST5 6EA

Board Members:- 
Paul Smith [Administrator] - Present
Andy Lovell [Chairman] - Present
Sandy Hristov [treasurer] - Present
Jim Boylan [Secretary] - Present

Quorum present - Yes

No others present.

Proceedings.

Meeting called to order at 3.00pm by Chair, Andy Lovell

1  Administrator’s Report.

The advertising and placement of the WDJA on various directory listings, also projected membership.

The target number of members for the first year of the WDJA was set at 100.
In the first 4 months we have had 134 applications and 31 of these have been approved, that equates to a predicted 93 members by the end of 12 months, so we are on target. We are also aiming at 100 enquiries per week for our members, to enable this we must increase our placement within the search engines, Sandy is going to look into this.


2  Chairman’s Report.

No report submitted.


3  Treasurer’s Report.

Statement of Accounts and Breakdown of Link Statistics presented to the board.

A balance sheet for income and expenditure was submitted by Sandy and the figures were approved by the board. There are some expenses that the Administrator has incurred but have not been claimed back, it was agreed that these will be claimed at a later date.
The board also agreed that monies upto £200 can be spent without the boards formal approval.
The links from sites appear to be consistent with what we have paid and the board agree all the fees are justified. Some of the links have been a little lower in August but that is to be expected due to the tail end of the wedding season.


4  Secretary’s Report

No report submitted.


5  Discussed the definition of Committee roles, titles and responsibilities.

It was agreed to rename the position of Administrator to that of Vice Chairman, it was also agreed that the Treasurer would become Acting Vice Chairman on occasion’s when the Vice Chairman was unable to fulfil his role due to other commitments.


6  Discussed the capping of areas.

The Treasurer supplied a breakdown of all subscribed areas and the number of members subscribing to each area.
It was decided that at present no area is over subscribed, however there are a few areas with few or no member subscriptions, when enquiries come in for areas with no members the enquiry is passed to members in the surrounding areas.
In order to calculate what would be a suitable number DJs to cover each area the Chairman is going to poll all DJs in order to find out how busy they are in the areas they cover and compile a report to be forwarded to the Vice Chairman. The Vice Chair will also contact all enquirers to find out how many replies they had to their enquiries.


7  Discussed WDJA Stationary.

Further to a members request about official WDJA stationary it was discussed and decided that members already have the facility to use WDJA logos on their own stationary and that is sufficient. It was decided however that the Vice Chairman was to approach the Administrator of DJ Associates to get costings for personal membership cards so members have proof of their membership of the WDJA.


8  Discussed the range of member benefits and potential new benefits.

It was decided that we should send the marketing tips link to all members so they may improve the quality of their marketing and also increase their enquiry conversion ratio. The Chairman is going to approach the legal music download sites to enquire about a discount for WDJA members. The Secretary is to email all members for suggestions of who they would like discounts from.
In the acceptance email sent to new members we will now suggest that they visit the various forums where they can gain help and advise on running and improving their service.


9  Discussed methods of authenticating membership of the WDJA.

It was discussed and agreed that it would be advantageous to the members if there was a system in place for future clients to check that DJs who claim to be members of the WDJA are in fact members. The Vice Chairman is to contact Jason (software developer) and get him to write some code so that clients can click a link on members websites and it will respond with confirmation of their membership and expiry date.


10 Discussed Multi Ops & Agency applications.

It was discussed and approved that all applications from Multi Ops and Agencies should be considered by the Registration Panel, however the applications should be purely for the person applying and not for the agency, this will be explained in the acceptance correspondence and the Multi Op or Agency must not claim that all their DJs are members of the association. The individual DJs from the Multi Ops and Agencies are welcomed to apply for themselves.


11 Discussed the confidentiality and openness policies of the association.

It was discussed and agreed that criteria for membership is that the applicant should provide "a professional wedding DJ service", they should also agree to "the Code of Ethics" and also "the Constitution", their application must also be filled in fully and honestly. It was also agreed that the process used by the Registration Panel to assess what they consider to be "a professional wedding DJ service" should not be elaborated upon as this may lead to applicants exaggerating certain points of their application in order to be accepted.
It was discussed and agreed that we will not at present make public details of how and where we advertise, members who have gained work is enough proof that our advertising is working.


12 Discussed the policy for warning and ultimately expelling members that breech Association rules.

It was discussed and agreed that any member that breeches any of the membership criteria should be warned via an email from the "Admin Team" about their breech, any subsequent breech will lead to their membership being either suspended or terminated as felt appropriately by the Management Committee.


13 Discussed obtaining more enquiries and the membership fee.

It was discussed and agreed that the membership fee shall now be 100%. It was further agreed that we should alter the fees for new members, as from today the new annual fees will be £45 for 4 areas and £55 for 6 areas.
The Vice Chairman is going to contact Pro Mobile to see if they will print a small article or letter about the association.


14 Discussed inviting members from undersubscribed areas.

It was discussed and agreed that we need more members in the under subscribed areas.
The Treasurer is going to email the list of numbers of members in each area to the Registration Panel. This may help the panel decide on how strict they are with the criteria when vetting applications from these areas.


15 No other business was discussed.

16 Date, time and location of next meeting.

The next Board Meeting has been set for 3pm, 9th March 2009 at the same location.


Minutes Submitted by Secretary Jim Boylan.