Planning – Looking Ahead

We’re working our plan 

The Problem: Our group has steadily expanded. We have focused on improving the relevance of our meetings while trying to help all those who contact us via phone or email. We’ve had more speakers and better information. We would like to be better at what we do, but it’s been hard to know where we should focus our efforts.

The Treatment: Our support group was examined by some project management specialists. Member David Bush, an experienced Project Manager and really-focused-guy, got us an invitation to the January 2019 Project Management Day of Service (PMDoS). This service project by professional project managers is designed to examine local non profit organizations and help them improve their results. 

Their Recommendations for Our Near Future Focus:

  • Develop a plan to become better at what we do.
  • Recruit more volunteers. This is a big project. Our current team is too small.
  • Create a core management team and organize volunteers with assigned jobs.
  • Improve our contact information. This is key to better and expanded services
  • Improve Marketing via free newspapers and (most frightening) “Social Media“
  • Improve our Web site to work better on smartphones & tablets (60% rely on them). 

Status of our efforts (as of 7/6/19)

  • A Plan: 

– Plans? Yes. see below for results of planning by our small groups of volunteers.- A grand plan? A wide vision for the future? Not so much. Lots of ideas. As team expands and gels, opportunities open and confidence grows. A plan will emerge. We’ll talk at this year’s Potluck. May get to do PMDoS again. We may devote a monthly meeting to it.
– Meanwhile, David has helped keep our focus on the tasks at hand. 

  • Volunteers: 

– Many responded at the March and subsequent meetings.

– A year ago we were 2, the “Steve & Mike show”. Currently: 17 
   * 9 busy at tasks. 
   * the 8 others? They are helping but we’re still trying to organize clear tasks.
– We’ve identified a dozen others who may be willing to help once we get better organized.

  • Core Team: We have a group who are frequently engaged via email 
  • Email & Contact Data: David & Steve have “cleaned up” our contact data and begun “live” tests of a new email system. 
  • Marketing: Lynn Mobley and Tom Pasko are working on local newspapers and magazines
  • Speaker Coordination: Steve, Susan Tipton and Pat Gualtieri are sharing the load. Lou Mazawey has helped.
  • Web site: Judson Vaughn and Walt Carlson are building a new “smartphone-friendly” web site.  Mike is still maintaining this one.
  • Hospitality: Peter is hosting our party.  

Organizational Gaps

  • Administrative coordination:As our teams get started, it’s a challenge to handle “Who’s on First” type questions.Many issues are still being handled directly by Steve, Mike and (to a lesser degree) David Bush.
  • Hospitality coordination:

–  Food donations- Greeting and sign-in at meetings.
– Setup/put-away (especially when we have speakers).- Sign-Up software and email are helpful tools that reduce the time required for this.

  • Treasurer– we have one volunteer but need more help with this.  The kindest description of current practices would be “informal”. Not good.  
  • Legal – Anyone know a lawyer? 501c3 status would help in many ways, not just fund-raising.
  • Marketing – a logo & snappy acronym are critical for Web use, esp. smartphones
  • Social Media team – We need a concept & someone to push it. There are several general-purpose groups – what should our role be?
  • Transportation coordination – Our contact cleanup has yielded better data on member’s location. Car-pooling should now be practical. And fun.
  • AV support coordination

– Get & return equipment (some rented)
– Meeting setup/put-away 
– Audio and video recording is practical and easy but has privacy cautions.
– Video recording with speakers may be better when we have a “camera operator” 
– Remote access to our meetings via Zoom or Skype will take some experimenting 

  • Writing – We have been recording our meetings but the recordings only help when used. That means someone listening and extracting info. With that, we could 

– Create a Frequently-Asked-Questions section 
– Systematically follow-up (publicly or privately) on questions or proposals or issues raised in meetings. For now, we rely too heavily on leader memory

  • New group coordination – one of our biggest requests is for closer (and smaller) groups. While not a goal for 2019, “planting” and “growing” new groups sounds like a worthy part of a “grand plan”.  We have already seen a couple of new groups formed in senior centers – maybe we have a role to play. 
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