[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Dear ELGL members,
What a week! This week we held our first ever membership meeting and board election, tentatively firmed up details for #ELGL18 (announcement coming soon), and moved our communications and planning platforms over to Slack and Trello, exclusively. It definitely feels like ELGL is growing up, from a small start-up to a more established organization. All of these steps help us serve our members better, while maintaining our goal of being a transparent association.
Have a great week!
Kirsten
What I’m reading:
-
Do Things That Do Not Scale by Paul Graham. While this was written about tech startup companies, I find a lot of parallels to our growth as a small nonprofit.
What I’m listening to:
- How I Built This on NPR. Again, along the same theme, I love learning about how well established organizations grew from a small idea to a full fledged organization. This podcast is one of my favorites.
What I’m watching:
- House of Cards on Netflix. I’m not overly impressed with season five, but that doesn’t mean I’m not totally addicted to those Underwood shenanigans.
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We launched a new service – a weekly video about the jobs that are posted on ELGL.org. Why the move to video? We’re advocates for local governments using video to share information (if you’ve seen us present about how much we love the Round Rock vids, this won’t come as any surprise) and so we wanted to put our money where our mouth was and use video to share information for our All-In members.
All-In members receive free unlimited job postings and so adding them to videos (and also to our Friday GovLove podcasts) is another way to highlight these jobs and ensure that as many ELGL members as possible can hear about them and consider applying. Here’s a sample of this week’s video:
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I flew down to San Francisco on Wednesday to cohost a dinner with Yury Lifshits, Fred Groce, and Rebecca Woodbury. Yury and Fred invited a bunch of their friends who are venture capitalists, and Rebecca and I invited some local gov friends. We got together over dinner to talk about the trends and topics that VCs want to learn more about related to local government.
It was a fascinating discussion. It became clear that the VCs did not have very much knowledge about local government (just as the local government folks couldn’t tell you a thing about rounds of financing…). Their perspectives about the role of local government were largely focused on federal and state topics, or on the issues in major cities (like San Francisco).
We had a chance to talk about the issues that are important, whether local government is ready for tech innovation, and the topics that are most ripe for technology intervention.
I love these types of events – bringing people from different sectors together to talk about how we can find common ground and innovative solutions. This was an especially unique opportunity because our groups didn’t have much experience with each other and so it was fun to find ways that we could learn from each other. I highly recommend mimicking this dinner concept in your area (especially if you’re in a burgeoning tech region) – you’ll learn a lot and it’s a fun spin on a traditional Supper Club.[/vc_column_text][vc_text_separator title=”Elections” color=”turquoise”][vc_column_text css_animation=”none”]
Last but not least, this week we had our first ELGL annual meeting and elected two new members to the board of directors – Stacy Schweikhart and Dan Weinheimer. Growing the board is part of our efforts to professionalize and grow the organization. For a long time, Kent, Ben, and I have operated by doing whatever we want, whenever we want. We’ve been mission focused, but without a lot of structure. As our membership has surpassed the 2,000 members mark (2,214, to be exact) it’s clear that for longevity and sustainability that growing our board was important.
Stacy, Dan, Kent, Ben, and I will meet in Phoenix in July (who goes to Phoenix in July? Non-profit board members who are looking for the cheapest flight and lodging, that’s who – always keeping our eye on the bottom line and saving $$$) to plan for the year and to determine who’s doing what in our new leadership structure. You can expect a lot of pics and tweeting from that retreat, and then more information with a formalized leadership plan heading into FY18.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]