Greetings and happy Friday! Wow, this week sure zipped by quickly, but we managed to get quite a bit accomplished and also hit some milestones.

Here’s our update from this week –

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Suzan’s week:

* Daily/routine tasks
* Staff meeting with Paul
* Updated calendar for August & September
* Cut checks
* Tried to contact CenturyLink: sent letter, packaged modem & mailed
* Minutes for August Board meeting
* Contacted bank for more details on changing account/contacted Abbott
* Called Pacific Digital re: new business cards

 

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Paul’s week:

Logo – Thanks for shooting out your thumbs up on the logo revisions, and it looks like we’re good to go! Designer Sherry is working on the final adjustments and will get me the final logo files, color palette file and fonts on Monday. Hey guys – this is a pretty HUGE milestone – we all worked well together, shared great ideas and suggestions and nailed down an amazing logo that will be the visual cornerstone of our future branding. High fives and pats on the back all around!

Meet and Greets – Thanks to Bob, I has a great phone call with Mark Farley this week (we’ve been on each others’ “must connect” list for a few weeks). Mark is going to get me some study material to get me up to speed on the EDA Blue Economy Innovation grant he’s working on (with Racheal Maddock-Hughes and other folks) and I hope to leap in and lend a hand (“shoveling dirt” as Mark said). I also had a great Zoom meeting today with Mike Corwin from the Oregon Cascades West Council of Governments, and it looks like he’ll be an amazing ally and partner going forward. He’s already given me some feedback and my “ecosystem” mind map, and we’ll be circling back next week for another more in-depth call.

Our New Website – I spent most of Monday working on fleshing out the few remaining pages, building the menu system and getting our Contact Us page working (with working email form and Google map). I also bolted in Google Analytics in the backend and set up some early-stage tracking goals. Next week, I’ll build the first version of our front “splash” page and start bolting in the new photos an art.

FB Pixels – I completed my introductory crash course on Facebook Pixels and set up our Facebook business account (needed for pixel tracking and ads) as well as our “pixel” (it’s really just a piece of code attached to some activity on our website, such as viewing a page or clicking a button) and got it bolted into our site. It’ll let us do all those cool (and sorta creepy) marketing approaches like sneaking some content into someone’s personal Facebook feed if they happened to visit our site. I’m starting to think through what this means in terms of larger attraction marketing, such as creating Lead Generation Assets and using the technology to effectively reach remote workers. I feel a larger plan starting to come together – most EDO don’t se this type of tech for attraction marketing – we can be innovative leaders here!

Business Attraction (Lincoln City) – We had a good long call this week about business attraction in Lincoln City (myself, Ed Dreistadt, Alison Robertson and Lori Arci-Torres), reviewing their past efforts, their desires down the road and the data needed to validate perceived gaps. Soon, we’ll all take a tour of Lincoln City together so I can see the specific opportunity properties and locations (we’re trying to figure out the proper social distancing approach – I offered to throw Ed in the back of my pick-up and he could shout directions to me through the vent window – he wasn’t so hot on that idea, but suggested a limo instead). They also challenged me to do that first without them – to get a set of “new eyes” on the city, and on Thursday I spent about five hours (Susan was my driver) traversing the roadways of Lincoln City with a notebook in hand.

Mid Coast Water Planning Partnership – This week was my first as an active participate in the Coordinating Committee for the Partnership – I’m serving as the Industry/ Economic Development Chair. I’ve got a lot of studying to do, but we’re reviewing a phase three document of priorities that will get turned over to a consultant for formal planning and implementation tracking.

Future Planning with Suzan – Suzan and I sat down this week to review current short term tasks and also to layout our probable projects going forward, with an emphasis on what Suzan will be working on, both in a lead and in a support role.

Office – Suzan and I also discussed (probably for the fourth time – the the fourth time is the charm!) changes and improvements to the office workflow and layout (and also social distancing concerns). It looks like we’ve got a plan moving forward that should make the office a little more interesting, more functional and less boring (with better storage!). We’ll probably end up with two extra desks when all is said and done – so what should we do with them? Donate them locally? Sell them on the Lincoln County Buy-Sell FB page? Let me know your thoughts.

On a personal note, when we were driving around Lincoln City, we “discovered” Output, the new vinyl record store that opened up in the middle of the pandemic. We spent about 40 minutes talking with the owner, and they’ve been going great guns – way beyond their expectations. They are also a model of how that kind of small business can knock it out of the park – gorgeous, simple store design with baked-in social distancing and the “wow” factor for first timers plus a reason to become a regular (the same can be said of their web marketing). I did find an awesome, near-mint 1967 US debut of the Spencer Davis Group – it’s like finding a buried treasure! I fear it will be a black hole of disposable income!

Have a great weekend, stay safe and wear those masks!

Cheers,

-Paul 🙂