Two Presentations at Main Street NOW in Birmingham, AL 2024
Main Street America
In May 2024 we joined over 1800 Main Street colleagues in Birmingham AL at the annual Main Street NOW conference. We presented two sessions to standing-room crowds and attended other sessions which were great fun.
We presented our most requested session, Diversify Your Revenue Sources! to more than two hundred people, an overflow crowd. Here is what we said about this important presentation: Established downtown organizations need regular and predictable income to ensure a viable future. This 75-minute session explains the board’s role in fundraising and how it delegates fundraising responsibilities to committees and staff. We highlighted the seven traditional Main Street revenue sources and emphasized three -- residential membership/investor campaigns, sponsorship, and fundraising events--where the organization controls both the input and outcome. Finally, we explored ideal revenue mixes at various stages of Main Street organizational growth.
The other session focused on the recently completed Policies and Procedures Manual we completed for the Oregon Main Street program. This document is a simple PDF fill-in-the-blank manual that any downtown organization can use, especially if there are no written policies now in place. Our manual has chapters on ethics and accountability, purchasing, communications, administration, the board of directors, and committees. The final 40-page Personnel chapter discusses Oregon Law related to human resources with links to the many Oregon laws covering employees. Local Main Street organizations that wish to use the personnel section must revise this with a qualified HR professional or an attorney to mirror your state’s personnel laws. The manual is available to anyone to review at https://www.oregon.gov/oprd/OMS%20Policies%20and%20Proceedures%20-%20WEB.pdf
Next year, the conference will be held in Philly, we cannot wait!