Business Resources: Documenting What We Do

Co-written by Talia Young (Executive Director) and Bitter Kalli (Director of Communications and Storytelling).

Let’s be honest. Those of us who run programs are typically terrible at documenting them. We’re always too busy running around actually doing stuff to record what we’re doing. And then when the time comes to report to people - stakeholders, customers, funders, donors - how awesome we are, we are left scrambling.  

Over the last few years we’ve implemented a number of systems to help us document as we go; maybe some of these systems will be helpful for you.  

Guidelines for photos and videos at events.

• Our Director of Communications developed guidelines for what we need from events:
• • Try to take at least five photos and two videos at each event.
• • Share your documentation labeled with event title and date.
• • For documenting brief moments like picking up seafood, try to take at least one photo!

The guidelines are quite modest, which makes the responsibility of documenting a lot less overwhelming. We don’t have to take a hundred photos; we only need to take a few.  

System for uploading and organizing photos/videos.

We decided on a system to organize our photos and videos. In our case, we use Google Photos albums but there are obviously plenty of options. We create an album for each event (or whatever) and upload photos into it, ideally as promptly as possible. We also have themed albums (e.g., we’ve got one for oysters, and one for youth activities). Sometimes we have interns who work with us and one of their responsibilities has been to organize our photos.  

Running record of what we’ve done + designated monthly time to add to it.  

• We keep a running document by month of “Things We’ve Done.”  (This doc was an idea of our former Director of Operations, Victoria.) This doc makes it easy to go back over the last year when doing things like writing grant reports.
• We designate a short meeting each month (in our case, it’s 20 minutes right after our staff meeting) when we all work quietly to update the “Things We’ve Done” document.  

We still scramble a little bit when we need to pull together a presentation or report, but it’s a lot easier now to get the information we need.