The Cedar (also known as the Cedar Cultural Center) is a highly eclectic music venue located in the vibrant West Bank district of Minneapolis. Renowned for hosting some of the best acts in folk, blues, jazz, indie rock and world music in an intimate space, the Cedar is a 501(c)3 non-profit, largely volunteer-driven organization.

Mission

The Cedar's mission is to promote inter-cultural appreciation and understanding through the presentation of global music and dance. The Cedar is committed to artistic excellence and integrity, diversity of programming, support for emerging artists, and community outreach. Music is a universal language, and The Cedar brings performers from around the world to the Midwest, improving our understanding of other cultures inside and outside of the United States.

The Cedar has used its web site to provide more information on upcoming concerts and to provide an educational outreach on different performers and genres of music throughout the world. We are currently using several different technologies for this, and hope to expand their use:

1. We collect monthly recordings of upcoming performers and feature them in a flash player on the site that lets people hear who is coming in the next month (and to review previous performances).
2. We aggregate news on world, folk, and jazz music from different sources around the Internet and present them on the site.
3. We invite comments from our audience on the site, and requests for performers who should come in the future.
4. We are beginning to make blogs available to The Cedar's staff, and we collect these in a news blog on the site.
5. We send a monthly newsletter from the site to members who sign up for it on the web site. We also allow people to sign up on the site for our monthly paper newsletter.
6. The calendar of upcoming performers is available as an RSS feed from the site, as well as in ical format so that people may subscribe to upcoming events. These events are also now exported to a public calendar on Google Calendar.
7. Part of our proposed improvements to the site will include starting an on-line discussion forum, and increasing user interaction with the site.

WHAT WE NEED:

The Cedar would like to fund several tech-based improvements:

1. Improvements for design and delivery of our monthly events newsletter.
2. Integration of CiviCRM to our Drupal-based web site, allowing us to track potential donors, and donations more easily than we do currently in an external database and integrate our tracking of donors and ticket sales.
3. Moving our ticket sales completely in-house, and selling tickets on-line on our newly redesigned web site.
4. A re-designed volunteer tracking system that is integrated in to the current web site. This would allow us to more accurately track volunteer hours, and which volunteers will be working at which performances. Volunteer management is very important to The Cedar, and we need a more effective way of handling volunteering. The Cedar has a very active group of several hundred volunteers.

Location