Hello WESTAF trustees:
Welcome to the first post-holidays bi-weekly update and Happy New Decade! I hope you managed to get in some fun and relaxation before 2020 came galloping along! So looking forward to seeing you in Nevada this week. Together in Reno we’ll be diving into a lot of WESTAF business and program areas, so just a few quick updates in this Bi-Weekly:

BOARD MEETING AND ED FORUM IN RENO THIS WEEK
It’s going to be great! By now, you should have received the complete board book. Thanks to Natalie Scherlong for all her hard work in assembling this document, as well as putting together a new trustee orientation packet that we’ll be referencing at our new member orientation meeting on Wednesday. As you know, the meeting begins on Tuesday with a convening of executive directors from the 13 western states at our ED Forum. These three days are going to be jam-packed with professional development activities, collegial networking and the sharing out of best practices and new ideas. So excited to learn! I’m especially looking forward to dinner together at the spectacular Nevada Museum of Art on Wednesday evening. Can’t wait to see you all!

NEW TREASURER ORIENTATION
Thanks to Amy Hollrah for assembling a really thorough new treasurer orientation for incoming treasurer Mike Lange, which the three of us walked through this past Friday. It was a very helpful refresher on WESTAF’s financial systems and processes with a glimpse of further improvements and refinements on the horizon. I learned and re-learned a lot. Thanks, Amy!

DISART
Through my time at ArtPrize, I became involved with a Grand Rapids-based nonprofit called DisArt , a fantastic organization that focuses on transforming society from awareness to understanding to belonging through art events, consultation and communication, creating a community that enjoys the full and equitable participation of disabled people. I was recently nominated to Vice Chair. Yay me! If you know of an organization that could benefit from better understanding of equity from a disability perspective, I would be happy to put you in touch with the leaders of DisArt.

CAFE
Training is underway with new team member Justine Chapel, and we’ve re-instituted bi-weekly team communication meetings to help Justine acclimate to her communications tasks. CaFE closed Q1 with 38 new clients, and work continues with the MarComm team to launch a Google AdWords campaign and targeted email campaign for public art prospects. 

CVSUITE
After significant discussion about the strategic priorities for CVSuite, we have decided to place the curriculum project on hold and shift our focus to more immediate sales efforts.  Launching the curriculum is still a future goal for CVSuite, but the complexity of the project and length of time it would take for the whole team to bring the current content up to a point where we’re ready to share it externally would hinder the team from focusing on other important CVSuite priorities in this fiscal year. Using the ideas and content developed within the curriculum, we’ll create webinars and materials that help raise awareness of the CVSuite tool and also help position us as thought leaders in the field.

GO SMART
GO Smart is conducting a second demonstration with City of San Antonio World Heritage Office (WHO) to administer their international chef competition grant. We’ll conduct the demo with four additional grant administrators from other departments with the possibility of leveraging GO Smart for more departments and grants. WHO was referred to us by current client City of San Antonio Department of Arts & Culture. GO Smart also continues to work with BRI developers to fix issues that are stemming from the release that took place at the end of 2019.

PUBLIC ART ARCHIVE
The Public Art Archive recently launched a new interactive mapping feature campaign for public art collections. The automated campaign was received successfully, with an open rate that was 10% higher than the national average for nonprofits. Within the next month, PAA will be following up on more than 80 leads generated from this campaign, while continuing to work on data migration for the program’s newest clients, Mural Arts Philadelphia and Santa Monica Cultural Affairs – Public Art Program.

ZAPP
January marks the start of a high-volume period in ZAPP that spans through the end of April. This is the time of ZAPP’s highest number of application submissions and deadlines. The highest number of pass through funds also flow through ZAPP during these months. We closed out Q1 with 17 new contracts/clients and 9 dropped clients. Though we are on track for our goal of 60 new clients, Q3 is typically low-volume in terms of new sales, so we should continue to push hard to attract new customers.
See you soon,
Christian