BRATTLEBORO — When I heard that the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation (BDCC), a regional development nonprofit that brokers investment money to local startups and artisans, was on the verge of signing a $500,000 deal for a Colorado-based company to market Brattleboro, I couldn't restrain myself any longer.
Here I've been as the founder of Brattleborology, laboring nights and weekends to do my little part to promote Brattleboro, and the BDCC allocates a half-million dollars to a company half a world away!
I'm honestly not sure what my sense of outrage would be if I hadn't had my own negative experience with the organization myself.
Last September, I was contacted directly by the BDCC for a RFP to overhaul the organization's website. I was excited by the opportunity, because it would have represented a good deal of billable hours while improving the marketing of an organization that had funded several of my friends' fledgling enterprises.
What actually happened went something more like this.
The BDCC asked me personally to write a proposal to spec out a new website for them that they hoped to have online by Dec. 15, 2012. I poured about 40 hours of time into crafting a beautiful proposal and sent it to them earlier than their deadline.
I was asked at 4:45 p.m. if I could drive to BDCC for a emergency meeting at 2 p.m. the next day. I made up a lousy excuse to ditch work, drove down from my day job, and gave a two-hour presentation detailing the WordPress installation I proposed. I even built a complete mock site.
I received an email about a week or so later saying that BDCC would be using a firm (not a nights/weekend freelancer like me, which I understood), and a different content-management system because they weren't convinced that WordPress could meet its needs. I thought the latter was weird, but I said to myself, “I get it. These guys are legit and want a full-time agency.”
I would expect that given the rush on my time, the organization would have at least had some kind of new website online by their target date.
I kept checking in every week or so. As of mid-May, nothing has been changed. The website is outdated, looks terrible, and is basically an embarrassment to the BDCC.
What grinds my gears is that, like I've experienced with so many people I've worked with in Brattleboro, they had no problem taking my time and wasting it for their perceived critical need, without yielding any visible outcome whatsoever even nine months later.
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As the original founder of Brattleborology, this is the same reason I can't wait to quit this project at the end of the month.
I've found that the way I was treated by BDCC is absolutely typical of trying to work with many Brattleboroians. It's a lot of take, with no give.
This kind of non-thinking is pretty typical of a lot of Brattleboro's self-perceived vanguard and has meaningful impacts. If Brattleboro was doing OK economically, perhaps none of this criticism would even be happening, or necessary.
At Brattleborology, we had the same exact experience with Building a Better Brattleboro (BaBB), which requested a meeting, then wasted two hours talking about unspecific plans with no concrete outcome.
I believe BaBB actually stole our work to a point and slapped it onto a crappy website at a time when I didn't think my respect for that organization could sink any lower.
BDCC and BaBB both lack serious leadership and, as a result, are ineffective time-wasters. Their terrible websites reflect that problem, not some kind of outstanding anomaly due to their resources, which are generally considerable.
It's too bad, because these organizations have a lot of potential to either lift or sink Brattleboro. The town continues to sink, if you're taking notes.
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I wish Brattleborology had been given a real chance to market Brattleboro. We would do awesome things with $500,000, not just cobbling the site together in our nights/weekends as we've done with our own site, for free.
We begged for advertising dollars, oftentimes dickering with folks about $10 classified ads. But organizations like BDCC, BaBB, and the Brattleboro Area Chamber of Commerce never wanted to do anything with us and viewed us as adversaries.
It's been incredibly disappointing working within a context of abject mediocrity. I don't owe Brattleboro this great, beautiful resource - although the town certainly deserves one.
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The BDCC's mission doesn't necessitate the organization to spend all its dollars in Brattleboro, or even with Vermont-based businesses. However, there are myriad opportunities to hire marketers in the area, or at least proactively include them in the conversation.
When the BDCC “needed” a website, they had no qualms misappropriating my time for a non-result. They could have also asked me for an RFP for this $500,000 marketing mandate, but I suppose they had already decided that I'm a local nobody who doesn't need to be taken seriously.
I don't understand how an organization that was founded on a commitment to growing the regional economy can justify mistreating the creative class it proclaims to serve while pouring funds into fledgling vendors thousands of miles away.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but who to better market Brattleboro than Brattleboro?