This April and May are busier than usual at CBA Headquarters. We are celebrating 40 years with a bang and a leap into the electronic world. We have come a long way since the first mimeographed Bluegrass Breakdown and first festival four decades ago.
The new cbaontheweb.org site is set to roll out June 1st. This is a HUGE project and much of the work will not be seen by anyone without Administrative Access. We will have new archives and new databases. Two teams are working on this project: a team to program and a team to design the public site. We owe thanks to Rick Cornish for putting the site together 15 years ago and for almost single handedly keeping it up and running all these years. Our new site will be mobile friendly as well.
Our switch over to tix.com for our Father’s Day ticket sales seems to have happened without a hitch. This year we are merging our old ticket sale process with this new application and expect the Father’s Day gate to be easier to manage and be a lot less work going forward. We have noticed that our members are much more comfortable purchasing tickets on line and this move made sense this year. We probably will sell most of our registrations via a third party site going forward.
Our Treasurer, Montie Elston, has some changes in the works for our e-Commerce and our banking to make bookkeep – ing, accounting and communication easier and more efficient with a new interface to our QuickBooks system.
San Francisco Regional Area VP Ted Kuster has been busy get – ting the JD Bluegrass Cookbook and CD project ready to roll out by Father’s Day. I understand that Ted is now putting the final touches on the CD and printing the book. I am excited to see and hear the final results. All profit from this project will go to benefit our Youth Programs in the future. I cannot wait to see JD Rhynes holding a copy of this book, which honors him.
Bruce Long, our Lending Librarian, is hard at work on the Lending Library inventory. We have multiple instruments that sit on the shelf because they sim – ply aren’t playable enough to lend to beginners. Please, when donating instruments, make certain the instrument is playable and has good action and can stay in tune. Bruce has had some experts look at many of the instruments and we simply must dispose of them because we cannot lend them. We are able to make minor repairs and adjustments but some of the instruments must go. We will be updating our con – tracts and our data bases and will contact those with a borrowed instrument to see if the child is still playing the instrument. We want to photograph each instrument for our inventory as well. Remember, a current CBA membership is required to borrow an instrument. This is a very successful program and one that we are proud of.
We also have lots of new social media projects on board. Jacob Groopman has taken on our Facebook California Blue – grass Association page and it is now active and exciting and has lots of new “likes”. Our Twitter account is about to get busy and tweet. Ted Kuster has registered a new California Bluegrass Association You Tube channel and has started a Google + account. Stay up to date with the Association and music in California by interacting on these sites. There is a lot of fun stuff and outreach happening.
We hope to see all of you at the 40th Annual Gala in Grass Valley. We have come a long way in four decades.
