Downtown Design Guidelines Having strong design guidelines should be a part of your organization's historic preservation efforts. As a Main Street organization, Design plays a critical role for our organization. We are often home to the most important buildings in our community, and need to ensure that those properties are preserved properly. Design Guidelines help… Read More →
Politics Downtown It’s 2024 which means two things are for certain: we get a bonus day and an election! Ironically, by the time our bonus day rolls around, most of us will have already had our fill of talking heads and doomsday commercials surrounding the political campaigns. As for Leap Year, there are always fun… Read More →
Main Street Conferences Are Continuing Education As we turn the calendar to 2024 many of us are already planning our year. We’re blocking out vacations, scheduling our signature events, and lining up key dates. For those of us in the Main Street program, an event that should be on everyone’s calendar is the Main Street… Read More →
Legislative Advocacy: Making the case for Main Street & Main Street Issues Hang around any group of Main Streeters (or any community revitalization professionals) long enough and you will inevitably start to hear about some form of legislative roadblock or some new bill that is going to make it harder to do their job. I’ve… Read More →
Events are coming back.....so now what? We’re all done with the terms, “new normal”, “pandemic”, “unprecedented” and about 724 others that have dominated our vocabulary over the past year and a half. Last year, we watched as very quickly everyone went from having events to being locked away from one another. Not surprising, this was… Read More →
Having a social media policy for your organization Alright, how many of you saw social media and your organization and clicked the link without seeing “policy”? That’s okay. So this isn’t going to be the post where you find all the latest trends, get tips or how to get more followers, or find tools that… Read More →
Downtown Chart of Accounts Recently I saw a discussion thread on “The Point”, the National Main Street Center’s discussion board. This particular post was about a downtown chart of accounts and reading some of the comments took me right back to my first few weeks as an Executive Director. When I first got the position,… Read More →
Are your events on-brand? There’s no denying that events are a large component of downtown life. Whether your organization is dependent on events for fundraising, or you are holding them to increase attendance and build atmosphere, events are a critical aspect of nearly every downtown. While these events are frequently essential for the health of… Read More →
Your Downtown Website I think we would all agree that a website is not an option for any organization, it’s a requirement. Your website can be one of the most effective communication tools that you have. Since we deal with technology, we get asked about websites a lot. Most of those questions revolve around what… Read More →
Why Reporting Matters For over a decade now, I’ve had the good fortune to be a part of the Main Street movement. When I started I was told by our State Coordinator that I needed to fill out our monthly reporting, so I did. I didn’t think much about it at the time, I just… Read More →