September Highlights at MCNW

October is almost upon us, but we’ve kept ourselves pretty busy this September at Mercy Corps Northwest.

The biggest event was our move into our new building on September 14th. We’re now sharing a space with the rest of Mercy Corps in the old Skidmore Fountain building at 43 SW Naito in downtown Portland. One of the most exciting things about the move is our new and improved classroom space.

An artist rendering of the space... we'll have our own pictures up soon! http://www.mercycorps.org/centerforchange/

We kicked off the move with a seminar on using social media for marketing, presented by Peter Korchnak of Semiosis Communications. We got a little blurb in the Oregonian’s business calendar, and had a full class with 19 participants. Despite it being the very first day in the classroom and few technical issues, it was a productive class. Peter went over some of the different social media forms – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, and talked about how to be effective on those sites as a busy small business owner. The class did make us realize that the topic of social media is a huge one, and people are coming at from all different levels and for different purposes, and so for the future, we’re going to try to break it down a little more and be more specific about what the seminar will be covering.

Our second seminar of the month was with Susan Rich of RichWriting Inc, who did a concise hour-long workshop on how to write effectively on the Internet called Write it Rich!. We had 15 people attend this class, and I saw a lot of participants writing down notes on the handout she gave, and we got some good feedback afterward:

“I have been to many seminars, and Susan was very, very, very good!” – a participant.

All in all we’ve started off our educational programs in the new building with some great seminars, and we’re looking forward to more soon in October as well.