The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
In last week’s column, we explored the similarities between the channels and fine-tuning of analog television and an effectively run nonprofit economic development organization. This week, I want to extend that analogy to the antenna rotor. But first …
If you are under 50, you’re likely saying, “Antenna … rotor … you’re just making this stuff up.” Work with me. If you owned a television during the 1960s or 1970s and lived outside the city, you almost certainly also owned an antenna rotor. Urban viewers could access television stations with a set of “rabbit ears” which sat atop the TV, but if you were 30, 40 or 50 miles out in the country, as my family was, those flimsy telescoping rods were insufficient. At that distance from a broadcast tower, you needed a large antenna mounted as high as possible.
For most country folk, this involved building a tower of triangular-shaped steel sections in proximity to the house. Some, like my father, alternately chose to mount the antenna to a pole attached directly to the roof. Either way, the antenna was only as good as the direction it was pointed since broadcast towers were located as far apart as possible to avoid interfering with each other’s signals. Turning the antenna to face each one directly was critical to good reception. The rotor connected to a box that sat on top of the TV. It had a dial that could be moved to north, south, east or west and several points in between, causing the antenna to point in that direction.
Now that we have all that background out of the way, let’s discuss how it relates to a nonprofit economic development organization (EDO). EDOs at the county and municipal levels are generally part of a larger regional organization. In our case, AnsonEDP belongs to an 18 – soon to be 20 – county region known as North Carolina’s Southeast (NCSE). The NCSE acts as both a marketing and attraction resource for its member counties (the antenna) and a conduit (the rotor), pointing toward state-level business recruiting efforts. Like the rotor box, the counties exert some level of influence on NCSE through the LDAG, an advisory committee comprised of economic developers from each county. As LDAG participants, we do not set policy – determine where the towers are located – but we help NCSE narrow its focus in the most beneficial direction.
Although it varies somewhat from year to year, roughly half the projects AnsonEDP works on are generated internally. The other half comes directly from NCSE or the state economic development organization, EDPNC, through NCSE, so that antenna/rotor/control box setup is critical to our overall business recruiting success.