Forgive me if this report seems a bit disjointed. I am trying to get out our next e-newsletter this afternoon, update the news website to match the newsletter, and prepare the ground rules for the first meeting of our blog team next week. In other words, we are hard at work building the community news voice that J-Lab hoped we might become when you awarded our New Voices grant way back in May 2010.
We have made major progress since our last report. Here are some high points:
- Name evolution — We have decided that Catawba RiverViews better represents what we are about. The play on the word “Views” is intentional, of course. Living along the river, we spend a lot of time enjoying the many views of water and wildlife. On the other hand, this is a highly diverse community with tree-huggers, retired textile mill workers, descendants of pioneers and newcomers from up North and south of the border. Our goal is to represent those many views as our community leaders and the River District work to protect the Catawba and build an environmentally sustainable future.
- News site in operation — We now have a robust though still crude news website in operation, with an extensive community calendar, mixture of local community and environmental news, links to national and global information and a growing database of community groups. Our goal has always been to update the site at least weekly and we are finally at that point. With parts of three cities, two counties, arguably America’s most threatened river, America’s only manmade whitewater rapids and the crossroads of an emerging 200-plus-mile long greenway trail network all within our 16,000-acre district, we have plenty of news to report. Add in the continued decline of local print, radio and TV news reporting (the one weekly paper covering part of our district just switched back to monthly), and you can see that there is a need here for community journalism.
- E-newsletter publishing at least twice monthly — The newsletter going out today, God willing and the Mac don’t die, will actually be just a week since our last one. News stories range from “Green Christmas” (how to celebrate the holidays AND protect the environment) to reports on both the relaunch of an old train line that could one day carry commuters to Charlotte, and the Rail-Trail greenway that planners hope to build in the same corridor. The newsletter is one way to drive readers to the website.
- First freelance reporter — We have begun working with a young journalist who attends college within our district, lives in a restored mill home nearby and just finished an internship with the Charlotte Observer. Chris Lux will generate regular profiles on people helping to protect our environment and also help us increase our social-media efforts. Chris set up our Facebook page several months ago, facebook.com/CatawbaRiverDistrict.
- Launch of YouTube channel — We shot, edited and posted our first community-news videos in October on our YouTube channel,http://www.youtube.com/user/CatawbaRiverDistrict. The videos cover an event staged by our parent organization to promote science and math learning among our largely low-income schools. The videos also gave us our first experience in amateur recording and editing for publication. Apple’s imovie software makes this a snap. We will move forward with more frequent community news videos with help from the Canon digital camcorder we purchased a few weeks ago with New Voices grant funds. The device has some great pro-sumer features such as the ability to take external mikes and shoot well in low light. It also can be fully automatic so that team members with limited training will still be able to make usable recordings.
- Progress on database functionality with website — We hired a freelance programmer to build and test a database-driven way to easily update our news website. We have had the first trial of that work ready for us to build upon for more than a month. I had hoped to incorporate that improvement into the site in November but lost several weeks of time to care for my mom, who passed away in late October. We should be able to get back to this improvement in December. Meanwhile, the news site functions OK in its more limited format.
Among activities about to take off:
- Adding Facebook feeds to website — This is actually a simple improvement to make, once I find the time. With our increased emphasis on social media we will be able to provide Facebook updates daily AND have the newest ones appear on our homepage.
- Adding newsletter feeds to Facebook — Another step that will happen over the next couple of weeks is driving our e-newsletter audience by promoting much more extensively on Facebook, both when the newsletter publishes and with daily teases to recently posted news.
- Launching a blog team — CatawbaRiverViewss.org‘s website will add a daily blog post sometime in the next month. Our initial team will have its first meeting next week. Members include a former business writer for the region’s main business paper, the Business Journal, plus people involved in urban farming, wellness, small-business promotion, green construction, STEM school programming and wildlife. Our plan is to have each person write weekly, giving us a fresh topic to promote daily via website and social media.
- Increasing marketing and audience-building efforts — We have done this throughout the year informally, after holding community meetings last winter. We will become much more intentional in the next two months. Chris Lux will begin calling key civic, church and business leaders to enlist their support in sharing our news with their members, and vice versa. We also will use New Voices funds to hold several community meetings in January-February.
Expenses & Budget
We have continued to preserve much of the original grant money while we sorted out larger issues regarding the mission and funding of our parent group, the Catawba River District. More detail on that follows. We are now at the point where the news operation can move forward at the level envisioned in the New Voices grant.
We have consumed most of the $6,000 we allocated in grant funds to get our website up and running and to buy some basic equipment.
We now are beginning to tap the operational funds we allocated for freelance reporting, photography and editing, plus some basic expenses such as phone service, web hosting, community meetings and marketing materials. We have about $5,600 remaining of the $11,000 initially budgeted here and will spend that over then next couple of months on news gathering, editing and posting.
Matching-Grant Funds
Thanks again for recognizing our fund-raising efforts by awarding us the final $8,000 matching funds under the New Voices grant. Catawba River District is beginning to attract community support in the form of sponsorships, including funding related to our first RiverTime three-day series of activities in mid-October. We since have added two more substantial River District sponsorships totaling $35,000 over the next three years and have two more under discussion.
We have allocated $8,000 of that sponsorship money over the next six months to cover part of the costs of generating, editing and posting content, along with providing tools including cell-phones and service.
Spending Matching-Grant Funds
We originally proposed using the final $8,000 from the New Voices grant for a laptop, software and monitor for the publisher ($4,000); office rent ($2,000); content and design related to a printed newsletter ($1,500); and two community classes on video shooting and editing ($500).
We now see better uses for $6,500 of that funding.
- NO RENT — We do not need help with rent, thanks to a local business that has offered us free office space for at least the next year or two, if we choose to use it. Truthfully, we have operated well in a virtual-office environment and have convenient community spaces that can host our meetings, when needed.
- NO COMPUTER — The publisher (me) has determined that he can make do without a new computer, monitor and software, at least for the next year. I will continue to use personal equipment and software at least for the next year, so that these funds can go for more immediate needs.
- NO VIDEO TRAINING — While helping civic and neighborhood groups shoot video for publication will be useful down the road, our more immediate need is reaching out to the many communities that have no groups at all. We greatly overestimated the number of neighborhood groups actually functioning in the River District. We have come up with a plan to contact residents in these neighborhoods via mail and/or flyers and hold multi-neighborhood events. The $500 currently budgeted for video-training classes would help with that effort.
USES FOR REMAINING $6,000 — We understand that you do not require a line-item budget for how we will spend every dollar, and we appreciate that flexibility.
- Our best estimate now is that we will spend $5,000 on generating, editing and posting news content.
- We will spend the remaining $1,000 (plus $500 not spent on video training) on meetings and materials needed to build awareness of the Catawba RiverViews among our 16,000 residents.
Ongoing Financial Outlook
The final New Voices funding match seeks to reward groups that have found ways to sustain themselves long term. Catawba RiverViews and its parent group, the Catawba River District, appear headed toward a funding model similar to public television and radio. We see the River District’s future revenue coming from a mix of corporate sponsors and individual members.
The River District’s first major sponsor, a local hospital, is helping underwrite programs to encourage healthy living. The district’s second major sponsor, a high-tech manufacturer, supports our programs pushing science and math learning among lower-income children. Two local utilities are helping the River District launch a regional campaign for family memberships based on protecting the Catawba River, our region’s primary source of water. Catawba RiverViews funding over the next year will come almost exclusively from its parent group, the Catawba River District.
