RDR General Manager

Hi Sami! Below should be plenty of information to get you started with the basics of running the station, including some of the misc. stuff we do. If you ever have any questions, shoot me a text or a message (I did this a lot with Will early on). Many of these sections include information on how I did things, but don’t hesitate to change things if they can be improved!

You are going to do so great, and I wish you and the station the best. I’ll be tuning in and keeping up with the changes, I can’t wait to see what you all achieve!

Best,

Dom

Google Apps (Mail, Calendar, etc)

Username: gm@rainydawg.org

Password: ShindigSTM

Google Apps (Analytics, Business, etc)

Username: admin@rainydawg.org

Password: bigdawgstatus

Facebook

Linked to your personal Facebook, you will be admin of pages.

Instagram

Username: rainydawgradio

Password: bigdawgstatus

Twitter

• Main Twitter (@rainydawgradio)

Username: rainydawgradio

Password: poplevi

Note: this is tied to the am@rainydawg.org email.

• Playlist Twitter (@rdrplaylist)

Username: rdrplaylist

Password: rainydawg’splaylist

Note: this is tied to the playlist@rainydawg.org email. That email’s login password is: Trevorlovesyoga

Spotify

Username: asuwrdmd@uw.edu

Password: flakeocean9276

Soundcloud

Username: top200md@rainydawg.org

Password: trevorlovesyoga

Bit.ly

Username: rainydawgradio

Password: bigdawgstatus

GoDaddy

Username: rainydawgradio

Password: weRnotKEXP420

SORC Print Code

rainydwg-radio

Rainy Dawg Radio Budget Number

16-9409

HUB EMS (HUB Room Reservations)

Note: You should switch this over to asuwrdgm@uw.edu account. Ask HUB front desk about this.

Username: asuwrdgm@rainydawg.org

Password: ardr14

SORC EMS (RSO Center Reservations)

Username: gm@rainydawg.org

Password: rainydwg-radio

Tumblr

• Main

Username: blogmaster@rainydawg.org

Password: bigdawgstatus

• Blogger

Note: Blawgers use this to draft their posts in the current system.

Username: blogteam@rainydawg.org

Password: topblawg!

GM Desk PC

Username: ASUW\asuwrdgm

Password: 2017ispoppingoff!

Icecast Credentials

Admin:

Username: admin

Password: Sn4fuze1!

Office iMac Credentials

• DJ:

Username: DJ

Password: april2002

• RainyDawgTech:

Username: RainyDawgTech

Password: Sn4fuze1!

Studio Computer Credentials

Username: ASUW\asuwrddj

Password: Rainyd@wg

Soundexchange

Username: asuwrdgm@uw.edu

Password: Sn4fuze1!!

WordPress

Login site: http://rainydawg.org/wp-admin/

Username: rainydawggm

Password: Sn4fuze1!

The position of General Manager has the broadest job description, involving many tasks in different areas. Therefore, there aren’t many “routine” everyday tasks, but rather a continually changing list of tasks to complete to make progress on projects of various lengths.

Here are some things you should do everyday regardless of what you are working on:
1. Check your email throughout the day.
2. Work on high level projects (concerts, collaborative programming, specialty radio programming, etc).
3. Help your team with their own projects.
4. Improve Rainy Dawg by brainstorming and planning new initiatives.
Make sure your hours are updated for the upcoming week every Sunday at http://hours.asuw.org. The Personnel Director will check that you’ve
filled out your hours and they will come by and check that you’re actually in the
office. Make sure you’re in the office when you say you will be. The best way to ensure this is to think critically about setting your hours ahead of time, blocking out time for studying/personal things.

These are some things that have historically happened every year. You don’t have to follow this exactly, but these are some traditions that I feel it would be great to build upon. Note that these are general things; critical, specific days for things like mandatory payments will be noted after this general list:

• Autumn
  • Table/recruit. We’ve got some stickers ready to go for this. Hit the Dawg Daze events and just some general Red Square / HUB Patio tabling.
  • Work on a smaller show (Local Music Show). These are usually ECT shows, but you can always think out of the box about venue.
  • Hold an all-staff (meaning including volunteers) meeting. Try to recruit new DJs early on so you can invite new DJs to this. You grab the room through HUB EMS, but book early, as there is a lot of competition for space on this campus.
  • Hold social events, on and off campus, to help people mingle and get to know each other. This can foster awesome community that just becomes effortless. Make sure not everything is ragers though; you want to be open to all of our community.
• Winter
  • Another all-staff meeting.
  • More social functions.
  • Another smaller show! We usually do our hip hop showcase in the Winter.
  • Solicit/begin work on the Zine. The last few years, it has been released just before Birthday Fest, but if you have your crap together, you can push it out this quarter.
  • Get ball rolling on Birthday Fest booking (I’ll have a special note about this later that may adjust this timeline; it is currently based on a Springtime show) – it is best to have artists secured before Spring Break. I would start planning this at the start of winter quarter. You never know what obstacles you may run into when booking artists.
• Spring
  • Another all-staff meeting (the last of the year :/).
  • More social functions (the last ones of the year :/).
  • Potentially a smaller show
  • Run a battle of the bands called Birthday Battle to select an opener for Birthday Fest!
  • Make sure all logistics are ready to go for Birthday Battle/Fest.
  • Have a great Birthday Fest :).
  • Reach out to people about working for Rainy Dawg next year to make sure hirings go smoothly.
  • Clean the F out of the office/studio.
  • Celebrate your accomplishments and maybe play some Gasworks bocce ball/Golden Gardens.

Payment Dates:

• January 31st, Soundexchange dues.
• Set up Spotify and Dropbox accounts we talked about at the end of this year.
• I only have one mandatory date here right now, but regular payment dates for Spinitron and GoDaddy still need to be finalized. I’ll make sure Trevor pays them through the Summer, but you’ll need do double check payment situations once you get back in the Fall. You may not stick with GoDaddy as a hosting service for next year, based on your discussions with the new tech manager and his feelings about its performance as an internet radio hosting solution.
• It’s important to know these but if you have any questions or concerns Trevor will be able to help!

Trevor Whiton – Rainy Dawg’s SAO adviser, and the major campus concerts producer. He will guide you through larger ASUW policy things, such as booking a big show. He is a good person to bounce ideas off of.

Rene Singleton – Another SAO Adviser. She is well versed in the legal/procedural stuff related to ASUW. For instance, I worked with her through the Spinitron audit of 2016 to make sure we were following the law and doing such a large payment correctly. She did college radio back in the day!

Paul Zuchowski – HUB administrator aka badgers@uw.edu. He makes a lot of stuff happen around the building and is good for stuff like recycling equipment and making infrastructure updates to the station (like changing the locks on the door or something like that).

Ryan Vandervegt – HUB Event Services/building supervisor guy. He makes sure events go smoothly in the HUB. He is your go-to for AV needs for events and such, although you’ll mostly be coordinating with his staff when renting a room.

Copy and Print Center – CMU B042, this is the place to go for high quality printing, think Birthday Fest posters. They have better printers than the RSO Center, and can accomplish larger/more complex projects. They are a bit spendy, but worth it. Make sure to always have them print a proof and have a couple people look at it before you run a large order. I usually would just bring files over in pdf form on a flash drive.

A&E Staff – They are the main programming entity, and thus we share some crossover in interests with them. There have been strong ties between our entities over the past years, leading to some cool programming. It’d be cool to keep that going. I used to sit in on their staff meetings to keep updated on their stuff, see if they are cool with that, or you can just meet with their director from time to time.

Hip-Hop Student Association Staff – They do cool stuff related to hip hop, like a fashion show and cypher/dance sessions. Make sure to get to know them and talk about collaboration opportunities; they carry awesome clout on campus and have a large constituency. They also started hosting a high-quality radio show with us last year, keep that relationship going.

You and your staff should be meeting at least once a week. I just did one meeting a week, but past staffs have done multiple. Try to meet early in the week so you have lots of time to work on things, rather than setting goals and then forgetting about them over the weekend.

I didn’t distribute but, it’s a good idea to take notes of google docs and then distribute weekly to keep your staff accountable for the items talked about.

Booking is a matchmaking process. You want artists to come perform, and artist/their agents want to get paid. Trevor has lots of experience with this process, but it is not an exact science.

The best place to start is to make sure you know what dates you are looking at and what your venue is. Once you have this, you can reach out to artists or their agents with availability asks, using your list of artists you are interested in. Make sure this list is deep so you can handle rejections. Don’t get too sappy or complicated with these first asks, your goal is just hear back from the agent about availability/interest. Keep it simple and quick. Once you have a nibble, you can get into the nitty gritty of offer amounts and such. This will be a dynamic and tough process as you weigh many considerations (such as other artists you may be interested in, who have their own needs in terms of money and date availability), but quick decision-making is usually rewarded. Talk things over with your staff and Trevor about offer amounts, and don’t get discouraged if you are rejected. Just keep moving on and try to build a good bill.

Birthday Fest has historically been in mid to late Spring Quarter. Trevor has some thoughts about moving it up to Winter in order to have better booking prospects. I think that if you start early enough and are ok with some frustrations in people not being available, Springtime should be just fine. Think about it though and discuss it with your team.

Book the room through HUB EMS (as a free meeting space, you get one of these a quarter; you need to request an open room though, with no AV/room setup stuff.), after polling the DJs as best you can about availability (Do this at least 2 weeks in advance.). Run through introductions and maybe an icebreaker. Explain DJ policy (you can use the DJ contract to guide this because it is divided into sections), allowing your other staff members to lead discussions for their parts.

This file is in the Google Docs. Update it every quarter with policy changes after discussion with staff. Print it over in the RSO center.

I tried to do a weekly update email, accompanied by a matching Facebook post. Keep in mind that some people will not have a Facebook, and thus email is an important contact method. I kinda fell off the train with this toward the end of the year but it’s important to keep everyone updated when you can.

Your main account is asuwrdgm@uw.edu, which you can use through gmail. Do not set up forwarding to some other address; you are a state employee and your communications need to be archived (not everything needs to be saved, like music submissions, but stuff you work on or that you feel is even somewhat important, go ahead and archive it).

There is a legacy account that goes by gm@rainydawg.org. We transitioned out of these emails this past year, but some people might still only have that. I’ll create an autoreply for it that pushes people to the new email, but check on it maybe once a quarter to see if there is anything weird going on.

Many of our operations are supported by these google documents/spreadsheets/forms. Take a look through them when you get a chance to find the things you need, such as the volunteer application, the DJ request form, the DJ contract, the weekly announcements list, and more.

Every quarter, you should recruit some new volunteers, mostly to fill any empty DJ slots. This is facilitated by the Volunteer Application google form. Its up to you have to evaluate and select people for interviews; I’d usually have another staff member or two read through stuff, and use a new column on the response spreadsheet to input thoughts/a color code for what they think.

(I kept this in from what Will had written last year, we didn’t do this this year because we didn’t have an automatic way to record shows but, if you can figure this out it would be helpful for DJs.)

Each quarter, with the help of the Assistant Manager, you should do show reviews in order to improve the quality of Rainy Dawg programming. Last year, Gabe and I created a Google Form to speed this process up, and evaluated shows across three criteria: Music, Airbreaks, and Transitions. You can adjust this process however you like, but the goal is still to make sure people are doing the best shows possible.

You have a budget for equipment maintenance. A large charge will come out of this for an insurance payment at some point in the year. Otherwise, any remaining money can be used to repair/replace/buy new equipment for the station. The best thing to do for this is to have the tech manager compare a couple different options including price, warranty information, durability, etc, and then make a final decision. That way, there is a record of the decision-making process and you pick the best option. If something you want to buy is too expensive for your budget, you can make a funding request from the Board or another funding group.

There is lots of random equipment sitting around that is either just unused currently or broken. Over time, if you can review these pieces of equipment and get rid of them, that should free up lots of space and let you know what the station is capable of in terms of providing miscellaneous equipment. If you want to get rid of equipment, just give Paul a call to come pick it up once you organize it into a pile.

One thing that should be checked on early in the year is all of the cording we use. The ones running from the board to the inputs are largely custom, so it’d be a good idea to get a handle on being able to make/fix them, or finding someone that can do this work for you (check out the board manufacturer for a good starting point). Also, we have lots of cables in the tech cabinet; it’d be good to do an inventory of what we have, what is broken, and what we should replace.

Again, I kept most of what Will had written in this section as well because it is still fairly relevant. Will Bernbaum did a lot of work on the mics this year so they should be good to go. If you run into any issues with volumes try to find the source of the issue with the Tech Manager or contact me or Will.

We’ve had a bit of trouble getting Mic 3 to be on the same volume/quality level as the other two. The d culprits could be the mics themselves, or their cords. It’d be good to take some time to check out the equipment to make sure it isn’t defective, then do a good EQ/leveling session where you get the mics at the same volume/sensitivity. A key tip for all DJs though is to make sure they are monitoring their volume level so that their mics are not too loud or quiet when compared to each other and the music. They can adjust the board level, or speak louder/closer to the mic. They should not be touching the rack dials. Hook up with William early to get this dialed in so the DJs can get started off right.

All of our website and stream software is hosted on a server through GoDaddy. The final connection between the station and this virtual private server is Icecast, which sends the board output to the stream server using Computer A. William and Josh will have more details related to this, but this basic schematic should be enough. You can talk things over with Joshua about the performance of the current setup (we had some skipping issues this year), and any possible changes you’d want to make.

Will didn’t really touch this this year but it might be a good idea to run through this with Joshua this year.

Henry got a revised version of the DJ handbook started, it is in the Google Docs. The old one has lots of outdated information about FCC guidelines and equipment we don’t use anymore. We wanted to make the new one more relavent to what DJing is like now. Critical instructions include how to use Spinitron correctly and how to do simple stream troubleshooting. Unfortunately, this did not get finished. It is not too far from being done though, so it would be a good first project for you, the AM, and the TM.

Historically, we have provided some free DJ/PA services to on-campus entities for their on-campus programming. We organized this process a bit more last year by utilizing a request form (in the Google Forms) to filter requests. We usually accepted any event as long as we had the staff support for transporting the PA (the most annoying part). It is up to you how you want to continue this service. There are some upsides to it: it is a great way to promote the station, to increase ties between Rainy Dawg and RSOs/other ASUW entities and the greater campus community, and to give DJs a fun thing to do. I did see it as costly though, as if we are gonna do it, we need to do it well, so a lot of time can be sunk into overseeing it.

Talk it over with your staff and decide if you wanna continue it or not, and if you are going to keep doing it, any changes you want to make to the process.

The CD library still needs to be organized. Currently, there are a huge amount to CDs on the big table that need to be filed.  They need to be alphabetized and put into the shelves (I think).

This project would be a good early volunteer hours thing. I think it is good to have a solid set of CDs in the station for DJs to explore/use on their shows. You could even make a blog post series where a DJ or blawger reviews a random CD or something.

You also have CDs continuing to come in through the mail. You should set up a clear process with the music director to check the mail, open it, filter it/review it, and file or dispose of the CDs.