Greetings and happy Friday! Also, welcome to August – which means time isn’t slowing down at all – if anything, it’s accelerating! Also, a huge thanks to the Board for a very productive board meeting yesterday – we’ve got a lot of exciting and important work ahead of us!

Also attached to this email is my Executive Director report from yesterday’s meeting – I didn’t have it part of the packet because it’s pretty much and up-to-the-minute set of notes, but there are some of my thoughts on funding ask triggers I’d like you to look at. Also, it’ll give you a glimpse of what I’ll be working on over the next few weeks.

Here’s our update from this week –

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Suzan’s week:

* Standing weekly office tasks
* Got landlord to repair broken grout in bathroom
* Created member list for import into MailChimp
* Constructed new database directory for review
* Phone meeting w/accountant re: new banking options
* Board meeting and minutes

 

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Paul’s week:

Our New Website – This week, I finished up our county profile page (demographics and other info for businesses, site selectors and folks who want to get a snapshot of our county) and stubbed in most of the other pages. I figure the site should be ready for review in two-three weeks.

Analytics – This week, I took and completed the first course on Google Analytics from the Google Academy (and earned myself a swanky certificate to boot!). It’s the tool that will help us analyze the efficacy of our website as well as any of our digital marketing efforts. In a similar vein, I’ll be setting up Facebook Pixels next week to track interactions on our website.

New Logo – Thanks to all for your feedback on the logo designs from Sherry at SmiesDesign. I’ve shot off our comments for several revisions on the first logo. I’m very eager to get that nailed down and I think we’ll certainly have something memorable and visually impactful.

Email Communication and Marketing – This week, I got our MailChimp account set up (it’s what we’ll use for newsletters, invites and large mailing going forward). I also bolted in the signup into our website and created an automated “welcome” message for new signups. Caroline over at OregonRAIN verified that the signup and welcome email are all working well (she was our first new sign up!).

Broadband Action Team – We had our bi-weekly meeting this week and learned that we’re still waiting to hear back on the EDA grant application (CARES Act funds) for the feasibility/planning grant – sounds like they are still reviewing June applications and haven’t got to the July ones yet.

Economic Development Planning – I finished up an initial draft plan for virtual stakeholder visioning related to economic development. I shot that off to Greg Wolf at the Association of Oregon Counties today, and will hopefully get some feedback from him early next week.

Landlord Project – As I mentioned in the board meeting, we’ve almost got the survey instrument completed to go out to Lincoln County commercial landlords to get a sense of where their businesses are on rents. Both Dave Price and I have requested assistance from the municipalities to pull together an email and/or mailing list to get this out to the landlords. I’ll keep you posted.

QuickBooks – With the budget approved yesterday, I gave Keri over at Bryan’s office the thumbs up today to start the process of moving us over to QuickBooks online – should streamline and future-proof us in that realm.

Have a great weekend, stay safe and wear those masks! Get thee to the aquarium next week!

Cheers,

-Paul 🙂