Greetings! Looks like we’ve got a super-wet weekend in store, but it’ll be a great time to cook some long-form dishes and read a good book.
Here’s our update for the week –
====
Suzan’s week:
* Daily/ weekly routine tasks
* Staff meeting
* Start year end record shifting process
* Search for hard copy documents/info in minutes
* QBO issues
* Timecard
* Update calendar
* Pay bills
* Scan docs to Fitzsimmons
====
Paul’s week:
Newsletter – We’ve got our first “COVID-era” EDALC newsletter nearly ready to go – one more proofreading run and then it’ll go out to our members early next week via MailChimp. Thanks to Tracy for the holiday message! During the process, I was able to build a solid template in MailChimp along with some great reusable section header art – that’ll make pulling together future newsletters a breeze.
Social Media – This week, I created an EDALC organizational page on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/edalc). I see this page working in concert with our Facebook page to allow us to communicate to larger local and regional audiences than our more targeted MailChimp publications. FB will mostly be used to share timely information and news for a local audience. LinkedIn posts will most likely be more regional in nature, as well as using it as a means to connect with other PNW EDOs and practitioners.
Digital Marketing Test – On Wednesday, we officially launched our one-month test digital marketing campaign on Google Ads. We’re targeting several Nielson Media regions for this test, including Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, Kansas City and St. Louis. When the campaign wraps up near the end of January, we should have some hard data on the effectiveness of our ads and keywords. The whole goal here is to get remote workers to “discover” Lincoln County and then dive deeper into researching what living and working here might be like.
The campaign utilizes three similar Google Ads (data will show us the efficacy of each) and 11 keywords (again, data will help us analyze what’s working). It takes those who click through to a landing page (https://businesslincolncounty.com/think-lincoln-county/), which then takes folks to the website to learn more. I’ll need to re-shoot the video on the landing page, but it works for this initial test – right now, it’s about pulling in data so we can develop a more effective campaign. As of this afternoon, we’ve had just under 2,000 impressions with just over 30 clickthroughs to the landing page.
Lincoln City – We worked through some major changes to the verbiage for the Taft District sizzle sheet and are now working with the Bay Area Merchants Association to modify their “Haunted Taft” map into something we can use for the publication. My wife Susan and I had a meeting today with Sharyn Jasmer of the Outlet Mall to talk through some more aspects of the retail concept they are exploring for the SW corner of the mall (where the temporary FEMA office was). I also received an email from Ed Dreistadt – in the Lincoln City region, thirteen new businesses have opened up during the pandemic and nearly all of them are doing quite well. That’s AWESOME news!
Toledo – This week, I completed the letter going out to Main Street landlords which the city should be sending out in the next week or so. I also finished up editing a SurveyMonkey survey that will go out to the landlords as well – all as part of the first stages of their arts-based revitalization of Main Street. I’ve also been working with Dahl Disposal on an Enterprise Zone application and exploring potential workforce training options offered through the Workforce Investment Board.
Community and Economic Development Grant – We’ll be presenting our grant reconditions to the County Board of Commissioners at their virtual Monday meeting. I also had a very productive call with Kristi Peter this week to discuss the SmartSheet method for grant submissions. We discussed adding a short executive summary, limiting the word count on the narrative and exploring alternate ways to present the budget via SmartSheet.
Blue Economy – One thing I’d like to add to our website is a page focusing on the blue economy, and I’d love some ideas on things to highlight on that page. Bob – can you do a little gentle nagging to your Hatfield folks – I’m still waiting on images for the website and some sexy drone footage. We also had a general Maritime Innovation Center meeting this morning.
QuickBooks – Suzan and I are still getting used to processing transactions into the system, since they now come in automatically via Columbia Bank – we have some different steps than in the past – we now must confirm incoming transactions before they officially enter the workbook (once we get through several months of doing this, QBO learns the categories, reducing the task down to just a few minutes a week to do non-payroll transactions). I’ve also scheduled some time on Dec. 29th for Dorothy from Bryan’s office to properly set up our EDALC CC in the system, allowing us to more easily process payments and also upload CC transactions directly from Columbia.
Legacy Accounts – With Curt’s help, I was able to connect with Peak Internet about our various hosting products: coastbusiness.info, lincolnco.info and orcoast.com. I was able to get ftp (file transfer protocol) access to coastbusiness.info and pulled a complete backup of the legacy site. Lincolnco.info appears to just be a forwarder (anyone have more info on this? – it was news to me). For the legacy emails – we can either do an autoresponder that replies with the updated address or look at the legacy accounts and see who should be notified of the newer emails (Suzan and I are still discussing). What that means is that soon we can mothball those accounts and eliminate that ongoing expense.
Thanks for all that you are doing out there! Please reach out to me if you need anything at all. Have a wonderful weekend. We’ll put out a short update next week because of the Christmas holiday.
Cheers,
-Paul 🙂