Nonprofit Meeting

Today I had my first hands-on experience of my SCORE project by observing the annual seARTS sponsored semi-annual cultural organization partners meeting. Most of these groups were based in Cape Ann and in surrounding areas. The meeting was held in a room in the lower part of the Sawyer Free Library in Gloucester. I was seated next to Deborah Eliason, the member of the board of directors whom I sent the survey information to the night before. Before I made myself comfortable, my dad told me to pass out the the meeting's schedule and also a paper listing the organizations present, their email addresses, events they were sponsoring and the dates, and the contact info of the organization presidents.

The meeting began a little after 12 in the afternoon. It commenced with everyone at the table sharing their name, organization they represented, and briefly summarized the purpose and mission of that group. I was the last to speak. I briefly summarized why I was there and what exactly what SCORE was all about. After this was done, Deborah beside me began reading the survey report I had sent her the night before. It is a strange sensation to listen to words you had written the night before be delivered by another person. I felt at that moment like a speechwriter, which I technically was.

For the next two hours, I listened silently to people from different backgrounds but with a similar goal: to bring cultural spotlight onto Cape Ann. The atmosphere of the meeting was positive and optimistic. People were constantly pitching new ideas and projecting more could be done. I won't go into extreme detail about what was discussed, but it left me with a good understanding and estimate about how meetings such as these occur.

Eventful Week Ahead

Today has been, I have to admit, one of the most strenuous, stress-filled days of my project. This was due to having to balance my schoolwork and the pressing needs of my SCORE assignment. While I have had difficulties in fitting time in for my SCORE project because of classroom requirements, today seemed almost unbearable. I spent the whole morning looking for sources for an English essay I'm already behind on, staring at a computer all day and feeling like my mind would turn completely numb with exhaustion, and then having to work non-stop ALL afternoon on SCORE, which I had been already working on already this morning.

But I digress. Today has also been a very important day in regards to my SCORE project. Tomorrow, seARTS will be sponsoring the Semi-annual Cultural Organization Partners Meeting. My work on the surveys for the past two weeks has been gathering the data that will be presented for this event. This afternoon, I have been in contact via email with a member of the seARTS board of directors, Deborah Eliason, whom I had met last week and discussed my work with seARTS. I originally sent her an email asking how she would like me to categorize the data that I was preparing for the meeting. Deborah responded by asking me to fill out questions that she would need by tomorrow. Using the data from the surveys and notes I have taken during this time. I managed to complete this in good time. Tomorrow, I plan on attending the event and watching the data I scrutinized over be presented to seARTS and to the nonprofit community. 

The 3rd post

Last week, I had planned to do the required three post; plans that were soon dashed out of my mind by my trip to the University of New Hampshire in Durham. As you may expect, I soon forgot about my blog post, and only remembered today that I had not completed the third post. So be that as it may, I am now completing my third blog that should have been done last week.

This week is a school holiday, meaning that SCORE, being a school project, is officially put on hold for the time being. However, I plan to continue with my project, due to the nature of the work I am doing. As I was doing last week, I will be copying down surveys that were filled out at seARTS events. Completing the surveys this week will  be important because of the upcoming Nonprofit meeting being held in Gloucester on April 27. It is my hope that the data that I am abstracting will be of use to seARTS. Using this data, seARTS can plan ahead for regional strategies to help promote the organization and to formulate new fund-raising events. As I commented on before, I want to attend this meeting and observe firsthand how nonprofits collaborate together and function as a whole.

So I will continue to hammer at at the mound of surveys that lie placidly on the right side of my working desk. Most of these surveys are in vanilla folders, making them hard to distinguish unless the contents are closely inspected. Never the less, they will be my constant companions for the rest of this projected murky week.

And the work goes on...

On this rainy Wednesday, I continued to pour over seARTS surveys and write down the info I could obtain from it. To fully abstract the data, I had to carefully examine the parts of the surveys that I needed to copy down. I begin this process by selecting a stack of surveys that came from a particular seARTS related event. I next write down the questions asked on the survey on separate sheets of paper. The questions that I write down are the multiple choice questions that make up most of a survey. After recording the number of surveys in that stack. I go through each survey and tally up the responses for each individual question asked on the survey.

 This can be a very, very, long process. If is often very time consuming, for a number of reasons. The number of surveys can range from about 13 to 54 (actual numbers). As a result, much time is spent having to look through each one, a problem that is compounded by accidentally overlooking questions and having to count through the stack again. Deciphering the handwriting of the surveyed can also be quite the task. For as many legible surveys, there is twice the amount of illegible ones. Often someone will have misinterpreted a question and either will write an unhelpful comment on it or add what appears at first to be some sort of ink graffiti but is really just unreadable gibberish.

An important word is that tomorrow, I am having a meeting with a women who has a law office in Gloucester. She and I will discuss data and statistical analysis, which I hope will be beneficial toward my SCORE project.

April 11- Day #1

Today was the first official day of of my SCORE assignment. For my project, I am working at a non-profit organization in Gloucester called seARTS (Society for the Advancement of the Arts), which helps to support local artists and promote cultural activities across Cape Anne. My own connection to seARTS is through my dad, who was a member of this organization and, a while ago, became president of seARTS. I have previously been to seARTS events, but the main focus of my project is obtaining a greater understanding of how a non-profit organization runs and functions.

Since it was the first day on the job, I spent some considerable time organizing a project that I will be working on for the rest of the week. My work place for the time being is pretty convenient; around 500 yards away from the school at my dad's house. From there I have been working at abstracting the data on filled out seARTS surveys that were collected from participants in seARTS-sponsored events. The work is very time-consuming: the survey that I spent today doing was 53 pages long. At the longest, completing a whole page took about a minute long. This was the only survey that I completed today, but it was mostly because of the other preoccupation's that I had with school and other aspects of the assignment.

Beside the surveys, I also planned ahead for the rest of April. One my aims for this project is to involved in seARTS events. Later this month, I learned from my dad, there is going to be conference among nonprofit organizations, a meeting which seARTS will be a part of. A contribution I can make to this could be through my data collection. Another detail to this assignment will be learning how to operate an Excel software program, which has a spreadsheet application. Using a spreadsheet, I can organize the extracted date more clearly than writing it down and also make pattern arranges to it that can categorize every part of the survey.