October 2018 Update

Board Meeting Held: Tues, October 9, 2018  9am Pacific, 11am Central, 12pm Eastern

• Team welcomes back Deb Hickinbotham. Deb started off as a moderator of TN, and then GPN, and then joined the board of directors before taking some time off.
• The search for a new Director of Development and Interim Executive Director will commence early of 2019, after our year-end fundraiser.
• Team welcomes two new student interns starting this month: Arjuna, who joins student moderator group and Fareed, who works on generating PR to turbo boost fundraising efforts and moderator morale.

• The Grantwriting Team (Sinead Thornton, Christine Harmel, Angela Ryan, and Rose Andrade) made first formal attempt at applying for grants from corporate social responsibility departments and foundations. Two grants were applied with more coming.
• Sinead Thompson represented Ben’s Friends at the annual Global Genes Conference in Irvine, CA. She focused on networking with organization capable of supporting our work.
• A team is launching a pilot program “Donate your Birthday on Facebook” in which members are encouraged to pledge to donate their birthday to their patient community to raise an amount of $50-$100 from their friends and family.
• It’s almost time for our annual fundraiser. We’ll be following the familiar blueprint of a good fundraiser video, sent to a group of good friends, and ask for their support. Annual fundraiser will be launched before Thanksgiving.

• Usability issues on the current platform (Discourse) had been pointed out  as one of the reasons for lower traffic recently within our communities
• A big member survey “How are we doing?” will be sent among members to ask the community for feedback and suggestions on how we can continue to improve Ben’s Friends communities.
• The Mod support team currently experiments with Workplace at Facebook.