Mission Statement
Message to Potential Members of SERGMA
SERGMA (South East Regional Gospel Music Association) is a grass roots effort to showcase up and coming talent in this area. The idea here is to encompass all gospel music and providing a platform for the artists to come face to face with churches, civic organizations, and other parts of the industry. The idea is to bring all of the tools together in one place to help with most aspects of your ministry.
The focus will be on the artist. We want to provide you the tools you need to continue furthering your ministry from songwriters, studios, duplicators, churches, promoters, as well as other artists. While the initial plan does not include radio promotion, it does give you the contacts you need locally and regionally to make the next steps in your ministry.
In the list of tools that we will have at your disposal will be a website that will offer a plethora of options for your ministry. There will be links to member artist’s websites, major concert schedules, positions open and positions desired postings, a review page to tell of your experiences both positive and negative (this will be moderated and will not be anonymous so we will have to own what we post), a categorized directory of members as well as many other helpful options.
The administration of this association will consist of a fair representation of the membership of the organization. Each sector of the association will have a voice in the direction of the organization. Groups from each of the genres of gospel music, from churches, from studios, and from songwriters will be present on the board of directors to assure representation in the decision making process. This conglomeration is not intended for financial gain but rather to assist ministries in reaching the lost.
We do plan to have an annual convention that would most likely consist of a two to three day event with day showcases as well as nightly concerts. The nightly concerts would be with larger artists from the area as well as artists selected from the afternoon matinee concerts. The judges for each day will be selected at the event. There would be booth space set aside for purchase. For all artists, buying booth space will get a spot in the matinée concert.
There will also be awards given based on voting by the membership of the association. These awards would be categorized by genre of gospel music, songwriter, promoter, church or venue, and so forth. These categories may be combined until there are enough artists in each category to justify the additional awards.
Another service we intend to offer is press releases for all members as possible. There are several media outlets at our disposal as well as new avenues in process that are based in our area. Using these outlets as well as social media, we feel that we can be of a great benefit to our members by pushing your newsworthy events and happenings to be on our site as well as in the public media. This efforts effectiveness will only grow as our membership grows and we are able to each more people from a geographic standpoint.
To those artists, churches, studios, promoters, and songwriters who are receiving this, you are asked to be a part of a focus group. The targeted roll out date for this association is January 1, 2016. We plan to start a dedicated effort to publicize SERGMA in mid-October 2015. We would like to have the website built, have artists involved and their information on the site when we go into the limited launch in mid-October.
To those invited to be a part of the early roll out of this endeavor, there will not be an initial cost. The website service we plan to use is free. As the membership grows, part of the membership fee which will be discussed at a later time, will go to pay for upgrades and improvements on this website. This will be a non-profit organization. The plan, somewhere between October 2015 and January 1, 2016 is to have this organization registered as a 501, 3c non-profit organization. Its financial records will be available to membership upon request.
All funds raised from membership dues, convention booth payments, and other advertisements will go to pay for costs incurred such as for website maintenance, to pay headline artists during convention, pay for awards, and for venue costs. There will be no monetary gains from serving on the board for SERGMA. This effort is intended to be a ministry in and of itself. The sole purpose of this ministry is to assist like-minded ministries expand their footprint while reaching souls for Christ.
In the initial start-up phase of SERGMA will be one of transition and change. This is a new endeavor so developing a constant SOP will take some time. We should have the initial board of directors in place by March 31, 2016. Until that time, the leadership of SERGMA will have to be a collaborative effort of its charter members based on prayer and open communication with the rest of us.