Greetings and happy Friday! Another busy week at the Alliance and it’s hard to believe we’re on the tail end of July – holy cow! How time flies.

Here’s our update from this week –

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Suzan’s week:

* Messages (staff, former director’s email & phone)
* Clean/disinfect office
* Post office/sort mail
* Staff meeting
* Processed membership
* Updated database & xls
* Thank-you card
* Prep for accountant visit
* Met with accountant, worked out new & revised account codes
* Sent reports to Paul & accountant
* Called bank to stop charging direct deposit fees/emailed ck signers for approval for bank to talk to me
* Updated Secretary of State business name form
* Tried to fix loss of internet, hour+ call w/CenturyLink
* Checked out Mailchimp subscription
* Worked on FDIC spreadsheet
* Cut checks
* Timecard
* Friday list

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Paul’s week:

Meet and Greets – Another week of wearing out my headphone in Zoom meetings – though now we have an official EDALC business Zoom account. In the next two weeks, we’ll be meeting with municipal leaders and some state government folks.

EDALC Internet – (“We’re Halfway There!” rings true yet again) This week, Spectrum swapped out their dysfunctional modem, but we still don’t have wireless or the ability for more than one machine to connect at a time (that’ll happen early next week – thanks to Curt!). We’re done with CenturyLink, so this week, Suzan and I shared a single connection, but we made do. But we’re close to some real broadband – next week for sure!

Our Website/Branding – By far my biggest project this week was building out our custom website theme using Avada (think of it as lego blocks to build a website). You craft different page sections (header, footer, menu area, etc.) and then can assemble them into completed, dynamic pages. I also finished a working version of our page map that looks solid. SmiesDesign submitted their first new logo drafts and they are amazing – I shot them back for a little typography work and some color palette work and we should have some solid contenders to review at our August board meeting.

Planning – Early in the week, I put together a draft “engagement plan” and shot it off to the executive committee for review. Think of it as a “plan to make a plan” to get us in sync with other stakeholders as we do planning going forward. I also spent quite a bit of time this week talking with Jalene Case on ways we can facilitate community and stakeholder visioning in this era of digital meetings and interactions (thanks to Doug Hunt for getting me brainstorming in this direction!), and we’ve got some solid initial ideas – we’ll be circling back next week to explore and try out some of those ideas. Also had an initial conversation with Greg Wolf from the Association of Oregon Counties on his ideas on the topic – we’ll dive deeper next week.

Office/QB – Suzan and I talked a bit about office rearrangement this week, and my Susan is popping in today to offer her thoughts – I think we can make that workplace more inviting, professional and fun. Also, we started the process of moving from a stand-alone version of QuickBook to QB Online, which will free up one office workstation and will allow off-site access to the books, but for myself and our accountant.

Leadership Lincoln – I signed up for the Leadership Lincoln class starting this September. It seems like that’s a great program to help me connect even more with our wonderful, innovative communities.

Word Cloud – Thanks to folks who sent me word lists for the word cloud exercise I was doing (as part of the RAINmaker marketing workshop) – it’s a pretty cool way to visualize the character of an organization. I’ve attached an image of the word cloud to this update.

Connecting in a Search for Solutions – We had a call this week with myself, Melissa Murphy (Business Oregon) and Sarah Means (the governor’s regional rep) talking with Carrie at the aquarium about both reopening and the loss of lottery bond dollars. Carrie is totally on-top of the situation, but hopefully we can offer her some support, assistance and grease for the gears as she pushes forward – and send her good vibes for her meeting with the Governor next week!

Reminder – We will have our August BoD meeting on Thursday, August 6th. Info and packets will be forthcoming.

Susan and I did our tide-pool walking on early Thursday morning as part of the Otter Crest Marine Reserve BioBlitz (which runs through this weekend) – all in all 138 observations were logged (63 species) from 11 observers to date. Walking those tide pools (the two of us were alone – so peaceful) was simply amazing – one of the coolest experiences in years!

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

Cheers,

-Paul 🙂