Making changes to a blog follower's account

Good afternoon,

A couple blogger technical questions...

Is it possible for more than one person from an organization to access the SMART Growth blog? Ideally, both our Executive Director and Development Manager would like to directly follow. When I emailed the most recent blog to our Executive Director, the email he received included a link that took him to a message that denied access to the blog entry I was trying to forward.

Unfortunately, I also initially accessed this blog from my personal account (a gmail account). If it's not possible to have more than one person from each organization follow the blog, can we go back to square one and reset to a work email?

Thanks,

Denise McCracken

Development Manager

People's Music School

Now that your smARTscope process is complete, what next?

Now it’s time to start on your 3-Year SMART Growth Plan and your first year SMART Growth proposal to the Chicago Community Trust.

You’ll remember from your smARTscope final presentation and the accompanying report that there’s a page near the end titled: “Developing Your 3-Year SMART Growth Plan.”

Once you’ve completed your 3-year SMART Growth Plan, you’re ready to start on your year one proposal. Download the proposal and take a look at the format and what it’s asking. You’ll notice that it may seem slightly different then other CCT proposals you’ve completed. You’ll be working closely with your smARTscope report to think about and propose the outcomes and measures you’re planning on working on during the Smart Growth program.

Remember that your smARTscope report will NOT be shared with the Chicago Community Trust. With that in mind, once you have a draft of your proposal, you’ll be working with Andrew Micheli, Director of Programs at A&BC, to review your proposal and your 3-year SMART Growth Plan before you submit them to CCT.

The deadline for submission to CCT is September 15, 2011.

In order to review your drafts in time for the CCT’s deadline, you will need to submit your drafts to A&BC by August 15, 2011.

It will be a good idea to get started on your 3-Year SMART Growth Plan and first year report as soon as you have your final smARTscope report in hand. This will give you ample time to work with A&BC to finalize your work before submitting to CCT.

If you have any questions regarding the process, post them to the blog and the person most able to help will respond. Both A&BC and the Trust will be actively monitoring the blog.

Once you have a draft of your 3-Year SMART Growth Plan and first year report, email them to Alex at A&BC. From there, Andrew will schedule a time to work with you to review your plan and proposal.

Click here to download the proposal

Update from The Chicago Community Trust

Hello, smARTies! We are meeting with the Arts & Business Council this week to review progress on the smARTscope assessment because it looks like many of you are finished and eager to move on to the next step. This blog will remain your source of information for the SMART Growth Plan and the proposal process, rather than the Trust website, because the SMART Growth program is available only to you and it is disappointing for other organizations to see the proposal info on our website and then be told that they aren't eligible.

The SMART Growth proposal template will be posted on June 23rd and must be submitted to the Trust by Sept. 15, 2011.

We will also be posting resources from time to time. Today, I want to remind you that the Trust offers a Fellowship award to individuals who are either an emerging or experienced leader in any nonprofit. This is a personal award, so you may apply in addition to receiving a SMART Growth grant. The deadline is almost upon us, so visit our website to learn more.
Suzanne

Phase 4 underway....

Afternoon everyone,

I thought I would post another little update from the land of smARTscope. We have now officially launched all of the 31 organizations in the program, and they are all at different stages in the process.

Phase 1 org's are very close to finishing. We have completed 7 of the 8 organizations, with the final org scheduled for their final presentation meeting in the next couple of weeks. I wish all of the organizations who have completed our process the best of luck in the future; both with the SMART Growth Program and longer-term.

Phase 2 org's are in the middle of our program right now, with all completing the survey stage and Cohesion Meeting, and 4 of 8 orgs have had their final presentation meeting. The other four are scheduled for the next few weeks.

Phase 3 org's have just come to the end of the survey process, and have either completed their Cohesion Meetings or are just embarking on them. I hope the process has been interesting and I look forward to seeing their final reports before presentations happen.

Finally, Phase 4 was deployed yesterday, with just seven organizations left in the program. I am sure they will be as professional and efficient as all of the other org's, and it will be a strange feeling when their survey stage finishes and I don't have to deploy again!

All in all, I have been very impressed with how smoothly things have ran, so I want to thank all of you for making this process as successful as it has been.

One final thing; Once your organization has completed the smARTscope process (survey, Cohesion Meeting, Final Report presentation), the next stage will be the SMART Growth program, which is administered by the Chicago Community Trust and not myself. If you have any specific queries regarding what happens after smARTscope, please contact Karen Mensch (mensch@cct.org) or Suzanne Connor (sconnor@cct.org) at CCT.

That's all for now!!

smARTscope Program - Update

Hi all,

It has been a while since I posted a status update on the program, so I thought I would tell you all how things are going.

Phase 1 organizations have now almost completed the smARTscope program, with some reports having already been presented, and the others scheduled for the upcoming weeks. May I extend my gratitude to the survey takers and especially the lead contacts in this phase for their extremely helpful assistance.

For our phase 2 organizations, we have now reached the point where all of our cohesion meetings are scheduled, and many of them are complete. The survey taking stage was mostly problem free, and every organization completed the survey process within the deadlines, at a near 100% completion rate. The cohesion meetings have gone well (so I hear), and our consultants are busy preparing the final reports for the presentation meetings.

Our 3rd phase organizations are busy in the middle of the survey taking process, and so I hope that by next Tuesday we have a similar situation to past phases, with timely results and a similar completion rate.

Finally, if you are reading this thinking none of the above has happened for you yet, never fear; it only means your are in our 4th and final phase of the rollout, which is scheduled to start with survey taking at the end of May/start of June. I will be in touch with the lead contacts of the remaining seven organizations in the next couple of weeks to obtain survey taker lists, contracts and all that fun stuff!

So that's where we are at; thank you to everyone for their professional attitude to the process, and I look forward to finishing off phases 1,2 & 3, and starting our final phase!

Invitation from DanceWorks Chicago

DanceWorks Chicago was recently selected to participate in a nation-wide beta test of Audience Engagement Platform's service developed to help us stay connected with our audiences! Our first event integrated with the AEP platform is Dance Bytes coming up at 12:30pm this Friday, April 29.

We would like to invite you, our fellow Smarth Growth participants, to join us for this event. If you are interested to attend, please RSVP today. And if there are people with whom you would like to share this experience, by all means, invite them by forwarding / sharing / tweeting so that they can attend as well. We'd love to hear your thoughts about our new work and AEP, so sign up to join us.

Thank you for taking the time to help DanceWorks Chicago plant the seeds of growth!

Andreas

smARTscope Program - Phase 2

Good afternoon all,

As per my recent post, today is deployment day for the surveys for our 2nd phase organizations. Here's hoping that all runs as smoothly as the 1st phase, and we can continue to be successful.

I'll keep you all posted on the success of the end of phase 1, and how phase 2 is moving along in the upcoming weeks. And organizations that have not heard about their survey dates - don't worry. We will be in touch in the next month or two to get you fully prepared for the survey stage of the program.

Thanks everyone!!