Greetings and happy Friday! Thanks to all who attended yesterday’s Board of Directors meeting – great discussions and energy. Thanks for all the time you all put in for the good of Lincoln County!

Here’s our update for this week –

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Suzan’s week:

* Daily/ weekly routine tasks
* Staff meeting
* Payroll – post QuickBooks
* Budget
* Financial report
* Search for & scan documents
* Compile, distribute Board packet & message
* Process membership payment
* Cut checks
* Met w/Tracy
* Expenses
* Board meeting
* Take board minutes
* Communicate w/BOC office re: room tax

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Paul’s week:

Website Project – Today I walked through our in-development site and created a punch-list of all the tasks left to do. I also did more research on the Indeed publisher program, but it doesn’t look like our site will have enough traffic to qualify to post Lincoln County Indeed jobs directly on the site – I’m exploring both an iFrame approach or just a highly visible link with on our “Working Here” page that will take folks to the site with a pre-defined search criteria. For some stats, the News-Times lists 14 local jobs, ZipRecruiter lists 123, Monster.com lists 304 and Indeed list 673 local jobs.

Social Media – I updated our Facebook page with our new logo and some new imagery. I continue to post regularly, but I’m not doing a huge push to drive folks to that communication platform until we launch our new website.

Digital Marketing – As part of the RAIN digital marketing accelerator, we had an intense masterclass in Search Engine Optimization as well as best practices using Google Ads as part of an online engagement funnel. One of the takeaways from this course will be a three hour consulting session with Anvil Media out of Portland (they do online marketing for folks like Nike and Zappos) that will be the first steps to launching our digital marketing campaign – looking so forward to getting that rolling!

Remote Worker Recruitment – Video will certainly play a role in our recruitment pages on our website. This week I wrote and test-shot a one minute “pitch video” to engage folks to learn more about working remotely in Lincoln County. I’ll reshoot it more professionally at one of the OCCC media rooms soon. I also met with Amy Leer, the QuickBooks trainer I mentioned during our meeting yesterday. She’ll be our first “Why I chose to move to Lincoln County when I can work anywhere” video guinea pig – which will hopefully become a compelling video series.

Regional Equity in Recovery Councils – The state is moving ahead with these councils – they will function very similarly to the Economic Recovery Teams that are in place throughout the state in that they will help to provide some regional context and feedback to the work of the Racial Justice Council and other pandemic response and operations work. These groups are appointed by the governor, and I shot my bio off to Sarah Means so she can provide information to the governor about the folks who look to be part of our regional council.

Water Planning Partnership – I spent a little time studying a proposal to create a professional graphic of our mid-coast water system, and offered up some suggestions and thoughts to the Planning Partnership on how to most effectively convey some of the key information in this format.

Childcare – Lots of activity out there on the childcare front, from the article in the News-Times (https://newportnewstimes.com/article/lincoln-county-becoming-a-child-care-desert) to some truly Herculean work done by the school district to address childcare for their teachers and staff (including utilizing unused space for stop-gap childcare). This week, I heard two messages – the News-Times article says there are no openings, only waiting lists, while other folks are saying there are vacancies not yet filled. What I have not seen (and I need to do some noodling on this) is any kind of intentional push towards child-care entrepreneurship – there might be an opportunity there, since the state has greatly streamlined the certification process.

QuickBooks – I worked with Suzan on Tuesday to get the budget values into QB for the new fiscal year. Along the way, I discovered a few accounts that were combined (that shouldn’t be) and one that needs to be created – doesn’t affect the budget at all. Shot that info off to our accountants to get tweaked. Keri is scheduled to be in the office on September 23 & 24 to formally move us to QuickBooks online.

Commercial Landlord Project – Finished the address and email spreadsheet data cleaning and got them off to Dave Price. Got the update from Dave today that the postcards have been printed and addressed and he tossed on the stamps and sent them off – they drive landlords to an online survey we designed together, both via a short billy link and a QR code.

Attached is the “funding triggers” section of a doc I sent out a few weeks ago – just to get folks thinking on the “when’s” of any upcoming funding asks.

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

Cheers,

-Paul 🙂