Pride Northwest
decision-making that supports our mission |
"The mission of Pride Northwest, Inc. is to encourage and celebrate the positive diversity of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans communities, and to assist in the education of all people through the development of activities that showcase the history, accomplishments, and talents of these communities."
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Policy Development |
An ad hoc committee was established, made up of executive directors at other local non-profits. Reviewing the current by-laws and policies—many of these were undocumented—and keeping in mind our strategic plan, more than sixty policies were recommended to be added to our documentation. We assembled a 'dummy' policy manual, which the board will review and prioritize which section(s) are needed first.
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Capstone goals
Festival task planning & check List |
The Portland Pride Festival takes place every June. During Pride weekend, there is an unbelievable amount of tasks that must be done—many of them related to permits or licenses—hour-by-hour tasks interacting with police, fire marshal, and security services. Our parade is second in size (3-1/2 hours) only to the Portland Festival of Roses Parade, and involves over 8000 participants, not counting spectators and revelers.
We began by reviewing emails from prior years, identifying when topics were discussed, contracts for services were signed, and when invoices were received. These items are now listed in a database, and we are speaking with the individuals in charge of different functions—parade, festival coordination, volunteers, information, communication, and VIP—to learn the individual steps involved in each major and minor task. Our first tasks were organized on 3x5 cards, and we hope to migrate our list to automated project management software, if we can prove its benefit. First and foremost, the system has to work for the people who will use it--largely volunteers from varying and diverse backgrounds. We are integrating several components into our business plan, including our promotion schedule, an schedule of guest blog posts, volunteer activities, and development (fundraising) activities. |
business plan |
We want to integrate several components into our business plan. If we were a business, our business plan would be made up of commercial acts that would contribute to development of our business. Because our business is largely social equity, our business plan will tackle such items as a schedule of guest blog posts,
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volunteer events like picnics, promotion schedules for our varied "channels" like VIP or our Spirit of Pride Award. Corporate sponsorship, too, must be addressed, as a primary source of our operating income. Formal grant development and fundraising will also be included here.
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Case Statement |
A cast statement is the core document of a fundraising campaign, especially useful when creating grant applications. Simply put, the case statement describes the who, what, and why of one's fundraising efforts.
I am looking forward to this stage of our project, but it is the area where I have the most to learn. This task will require |
us to examine and describe ourselves in a different way. It is easy to portray us through the moving stories of meeting newcomers to the festival and parade. Something else may be needed to prove the value of our contribution to secure a sponsor for a youth program or scholarship fund.
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Reflection
at the same time |
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Re-Branding: Creating a new logo And Webpage
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Our website handles a lot of business: parade contingent registration, booths for vendors, donations, and volunteer signup. Automated processes like credit card payment processing, notifications, as well as reporting mechanisms for back-end administration. Our stock art logo also needed replaced.
www.pridenw.org |