Our plan for PlanningAlerts

USS Enterprise – hopefully our plans are simpler. Image used with thanks under Creative Commons

Today we’re excited to welcome Hisayo Horie to our team. Over the next 3 months they will be working with us to make updating councillor data for Ask Your Local Councillors a breeze. This will breath new life into this important part of PlanningAlerts and will give thousands and thousands more people the opportunity to discuss what’s being built and knocked down in their community with their elected officials. Hisayo will be blogging throughout the project and we’ll be sharing some of those updates here soon.

Recently we’ve also been thinking about other projects we should be focussing on. Our very successful maintenance quarter reminded us that we have a lot of unfinished projects, big and small. This is work that we’ve already decided to do, we just need to get on and do it.

Unusually, an important consideration for us at the moment is revenue-generating work. This is important because we’ve known since the end of the last financial year that we’ll need to find a replacement for a major donation that we’ve been told not to expect this year. We’re also aiming to generate enough additional new revenue for our long-standing goal of hiring a new person.

The two projects that fit these criteria are helpfully also related to PlanningAlerts. We started PlanningAlerts Backers last year as a way for passionate PlanningAlerts supporters to financially back the project. We’ve long been planning some changes to PlanningAlerts commercial API access.

There is just over a month until the new financial year. Around that time we’re planning to review this approach and our plan for the next quarter of 2017. We’ve already had some early success with PlanningAlerts Backers and we’re hoping to get a lot further in the next few weeks with this and our other two PlanningAlerts projects.