The Januaries

Rich Beckermeyer — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:43:45 +0000

This Month's Work
Another full month of projects and programs. We had our annual staff retreat where Colleen did a training on how to enter data into CiviCRM (which we used for our holiday mailing of 5700+ addresses between our two offices) among other marketing, communication and organization specific activities. We laid the groundwork to begin two seminar series in Sacramento (an interactive youth centric one and another that's technology focused). Furthermore, we are working on connecting our two youth run business initiatives (which we will be meeting with the other office in February to discuss and action plan) and making it a more prominent aspect of our organization's website.

Challenges
Challenges up until now have been project related. Knowing what expectations, goals and who my counterparts are as well as who has the ultimate say. What I created was an internal Work Order Form so people can know who is in charge of what and the steps that need to happen to get a product finished as well as a way to focus projects into more manageable tasks.

Coming Months
I am in charge of several projects in the coming months: creating a sponsorship packet and raising funds for our upcoming annual Premiere in May, designing an annual report and creating a video about our afterschool program California Voices to be used for marketing and enrollment purposes.

Premieres, Premieres, Premieres

Rich Beckermeyer — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:07:18 +0000

We have been working on premieres for our summer programming, among other things, for California Voices. My specific role was to create the promotional flyers and postcards. A byproduct was putting the new design for the programs on T-Shirts we ended up giving out to the students who participated in the program.

Our biggest challenge we ran into was we wanted to do a six hour premiere with 2 hours going to each of the three parts of the CA Voices Initiative. We didn't schedule a venue soon enough to hold all three programs so we ended up having to split up into separate venues, dates and times. This afforded us to have more targeted marketing though, with our Hmong Voices Film Premiere being promoted on a Hmong language heavy TV channel, newspaper and making the front page of the online edition of the city newspaper. We filled up the venue and it was a great success with over 100 people for the first film premiere we've done in the Sacramento area. Our Latino Voices Film Premiere will be at a local latino club and will have cultural performances and our Native Voices Film Premiere will be the featured entertainment at a regionally and culturally prestigious banquet in December.

I have also been working with the youth entrepreneurship aspect of our organization, the Youth Empowerment Studio. Using a youth development model to create a safe place for teens to learn we have about 30 youth between our two offices. A planning meeting this weekend helped flesh out what the students in our office would like to learn and provide to clients throughout this next year: media conversion, trainings for other non-profits and businesses, videos and some graphic design/web design.

The biggest challenge I've faced with the organization is getting them to use industry standard software. Its a big expense, but its all about the perceived expertise of the youth and us. If we are using Adobe software and are Adobe or Apple certified, other organizations and businesses will perceive us as more qualified and more able to provide technical support, which seems to be the direction they want to go.

Finally, I am creating a communication survey to understand how we as an organization process information flow and creation. From this I will be better able to recommend equipment purchases and further training/ certification we need to undergo.

That's it for now. Attached is a postcard for our Latino Voices Film Premiere.

Digital Arts Service Corps - cmc

The Januaries

Premieres, Premieres, Premieres