This week, I focused on drafting website information and graphics and researching business concierge programs and websites in other cities. I began this week by writing out the content our office would send to the City Clerk to be added to the City of Irvine website. This content involved information about the various benefits Irvine offers to business owners, links to the one-pager and the full-length guide, and further information about the business concierge. This section about the business concierge would only be posted if the memo I am writing gets added to the agenda and is approved by the Council.
By drafting the text and graphics to go on the website, I hope to help the City Clerk create this page. He has been unable to do so these past months as his team has been busy, so Councilwoman Kim hopes that this draft will allow him to make this long-term vision of hers a reality. If there is still resistance from the Clerk's office, we will post this site to the Councilwoman's personal website.
Secondly, I researched business concierge programs available throughout the United States, focusing especially on California and the Southern Californian region. There are no other cities in Orange County yet to establish a dedicated staff to support business owners, so I focused mainly on Los Angeles County (one of our closest neighboring counties) and other cities in the United States.
Through my research, I discovered how wide-ranging the services offered by the different cities could be. This gave me some new insight into how I should structure the memo and what services would be ideal for a city of the size and population of Irvine.
The biggest challenge this week was balancing this project with other important duties of the Councilmember's office. For example, I had two several-hour-long training to complete, tours of the various facilities in Irvine to attend, interns to help manage, and other administrative, marketing, and social media tasks to accomplish. As such, I decided to create a system: if a task takes less than 30 minutes to complete it, I completed it on the spot. If I knew it would take longer and it was something that could wait until the next day, I built it into my work schedule for the day to ensure I would have enough time to complete everything for my LiA project and my role in general.