Thank you to all who attended and especially those that helped put on the events and organize the meetings. A special thank you to National Director Region 3 Karen Mulera and the entire Valley of the Sun #1028 Club for helping organize and shuttle all of the visitors and thank you to the Scottsdale #547 Club for being such gracious hosts.  

One of the many goals we have this term is to try to utilize the intellectual capital we already have to further our mission. There is a tremendous amount of information residing between the ears of our members. The biggest strength we have as an organization will be derived from leverage. By aggregating our accomplishments we will elevate our standing in the community to generate quality members and increase the scope and frequency of sponsorships which will allow us to help exponentially more children.

One of the purposes of our conventions and meetings is to share our best practices.  To that end, we were lucky to have Kurt Merschmann (Scottsdale #547) share some of the reasons for their recent successes. Raising over $600,000, being at their membership cap with 35 on the waiting list was due to some of the leadership decisions he had made. Their success is due in part to determining what type of member they wish to have, creating an environment to attract those members and actively seeking those members out. By emphasizing equal parts social and philanthropic, they have created a tight knit group and their success is a great model. The basic message, "begin with the end in mind." Think about what your are looking for and then figure out how to accomplish it. Efforts without measurable goals are much less successful and less efficient.  

This led into our open discussions on recruiting, fundraising and sponsorships. Open dialogue such as this will be a focus of the remaining meetings of the term as it is the best way to pick the brains of our peers to see where they have found success and where they could improve. We always seem to be inclined to reinvent the wheel to do things our own way. Success follows success so we should open our minds to the ideas of others and adapt them if applicable. This is how efficient organizations grow.  

Mike Doss (VP of Membership, Phoenix #99) gave some information on how they recruit, their membership points system. Running the risk of having him receive 500 emails, please contact him or current Phoenix President Barry Culhane to get information on where they have found their recent successes as well.  

National Impact
Our first task has been to try to gather what it is we actually do as a group. To date we have about 25% of the data we need. If we extrapolate that over the number of clubs we have, we probably generate about $4,000,000 and donate around 10,000 hours to help approximately 115,000 children. That is a compelling story, which we are trying to get out more effectively to the community.  

Public Relations Effort
Some of what we have accomplished so far this term is to purchase a public relations database with millions of media contacts for you to approach to get media exposure (radio, print, internet, TV). This increased exposure should make your club more attractive to sponsors and recruits. Please provide us with information either by contacting your director or by using the input sheet which will be available shortly to send your press releases out via this media database. If you choose, you can have us send press releases you have created, which is he best option as some of the passion behind your message may be lost in translation if another person writes it for you. Karen Mulera has a document with some cues on how to write press releases so please contact her or PR Chair Keith Engle (Eugene #920) for more information or if you wish to help shape this marketing and PR campaign.  

The next step was to "hire" a public relations firm to help us create a marketing plan for our association and try to promote the "20-30 Brand" as we would want, not as we often times are in the media. The first step of this is to use the anniversary of the organization (85 years) as a starting point for our plan. This has also provided us with some great marketing plans that can be used on an individual club level to further promote your brand. Due to time constraints, I was not able to present the PowerPoint presentation I had prepared for this. Who wouldn't have wanted a long-winded 45 minute (minimum) power point presentation on the finer points of all things marketing? For the next meeting, I will have to set aside an hour and half for this to make it up to all of you. We can film it and provide it to you as sleep aides or you can use it to punish your children. "Eat your broccoli Johnny or its Frank's PowerPoint again"!  

Grant Opportunities
We discussed in brief a new grant writing initiative for both the individual clubs and the national association. Dottie Johnson attended a grant writing class. We will be having breakout sessions at the regional and national meetings this year to help those interested in applying for grants. There are grants available for recruiting, public relations or to help fund your projects. There are several databases to choose from to search for potential grant matches. Hopefully, we can use grant funds from other firms to reduce the need for our membership dues to fund initiatives that will help strengthen our organization. The hope is to be able to provide some rebates for dues paid if we find alternate sources for the associations programs and initiatives.  

Sponsorship
We are still in the information gathering stage for our sponsorship efforts. The first step is to find out what donations we are receiving and from whom. Then we can approach the organizations and see if they are willing to be a national sponsor, by providing sponsorship dollars or "in kind" donations to the individual clubs. It is our hope to provide a database of potential sponsors to help your sponsorship efforts.

An idea from National Director Region 2 Evan Hershey (Santa Rosa #50) is to check with your employers to see if they provide "reimbursement" for service. He has generated thousands of dollars for his clubs efforts by tracking some of the service work done by a few of his members. Please contact him if you would like more information about this. It is a great way to raise money doing what you already do, helping improve the lives of children in your communities. Contact Sponsorship Chair Corey Arashiro (Indianapolis #1036) or National Director Region 1 Rick Janson (Denver #390) your Region One dude.  

Next Meeting
The next meeting is planned for April 19, 2008 in Sacramento, CA . We will be having some break out sessions on grant writing, how to write press releases for dissemination using our media database, planning giving for building of your club's foundations and a few others that will be determined later based on what clubs are interested in learning about or would like to share.

There are hundreds of members in the area so home hosting is not a problem. The meetings will be followed by the annual Spring Party where a few thousand of your closest friends get together for some music, activities, food and drinks. More details on this event will be available soon.  

The planned giving session(s) will be presented by Susan Peters who is an expert in this field and has helped organizations such as Big Brothers & Big Sisters use these same techniques to build their foundations. These techniques can be used to generate future dollars as well as current dollars from businesses, retirees, past actives and our own companies.  

Please try to send a delegate to these meetings and events and please let us know what you are interested in hearing about. A typical meeting, we do monotonous club reports which are the equivalent of eating glass, not very nutritious and quite painful at times. As a group, we have determined that more interactivity will lead to better information being disseminated and gathered and better retention as you help determine what is valuable to you. The themes we have heard and will try to address are membership (growth and retention), sponsorship, fundraising & event planning and public relations.  

You have a very dedicated and competent board of directors so please contact your regional representative and let them know what you wish to see addressed or what we can do to provide value to you. Our website is continually being updated so please let us know what tools and functions you wish to see there will be of value to you. Sorry for the length…actually I am not; I cut a page already so this is the short version.  

Thanks for all you do every day to help make the world better one child at a time!  
Frank Cockrell
National President, Active 20-30 US & Canada

As you know, our year started off with a bang in New Orleans, thanks to the wonderful ladies from the Sierra Nevada and Great Basin clubs who put on a convention for the ages. The members who attended have started off the term with a great deal of energy and desire to have a meaningful role in shaping the future of the organization. Our job now, is to harness that energy and focus it into the goals set forth by the clubs that make up the organization.

Our Directors have hit the ground running to visit their respective clubs, and determine which path, the clubs want the organization to take. This coupled with some of the goals expressed to me over the past 2 ½ years will establish the organizations short-term and long-term goals. By having the clubs take part in the goal setting, they are more likely to assist with the realization of those goals.

Membership growth is going to be a major focus, as always but more importantly, we are going to introduce initiatives to help clubs focus on retention. Our current membership roles total 1198. Our goal for membership as of 6/30/2008 is 1400 members or a 17% growth rate. We are hoping to charter 6 of the clubs we have in the pipeline with an average of 15 members for each club for the first 90 members. The remaining members will hopefully come from our retention efforts and efforts to strengthen the existing clubs that make up the organization.

Our National Project figures show participation from 19 clubs for a total of $176,105 that have been donated from benevolent funds to provide clothing, Christmas presents, and school supplies for over 2,200 children in need. The new National Project Chair will also be helping us to track all dollars, donations and children assisted on a national basis to use in our public relations efforts and to track our effectiveness as an organization. By tracking these numbers, we will see where we are effecting the most change and allow the clubs to concentrate their efforts to improve where necessary and focus their efforts.

We are continuing our public relations plans on a number of fronts. We have produced some printed materials that our top notch which will help to “brand” our organization. Our next efforts will be to help the clubs use these tools to promote our brand. The materials, if used correctly should help to introduce our organization to the community in a professional manner. This introduction should help us gather members, potential sponsors and partners and promote our name to increase awareness of our fundraising events allowing us to better service the youth in our communities.

Another stage of this effort is to possibly employ a public relations database to locate the best recipients of press releases to get media exposure for our clubs meetings and sites, upcoming events, membership drives, additional exposure to our sponsors and partners and again, increase community awareness to assist with sponsorship, current club growth and new club charters. We were able to negotiate a rate to allow the international association to also utilize the database to promote the activities of their various national associations.

Our various efforts should help us fulfill our national objectives of service to youth and training the leaders of tomorrow.

Travel and Visitations

Visits to our member clubs is a valuable way to determine the needs and wants of our member clubs. This year, visits are being planned to the clubs in the organization that we have lost touch with such as Albequerque, NM, Topeka, KS and Brentwood, NY who attended their first convention in New Orleans and have done a tremendous job helping children in their native countries as well as their new community in New York. The Directors will be relied upon to visit as many of their clubs as possible to determine our future path.

National Meetings and Locations

a. National Midterm Meeting #1
Scottsdale, AZ
November 10, 2007
b. National Midterm Meeting #2
Sacramento, CA
April 19, 2008 (tentative date)
c. National Convention
Las Vegas, NV
August 6-9, 2008

Name of the person representing Active 20-30 US & Canada at WOCO Cyprus 2007
Richard O. Middlebrook, International President ~ CivilLit@aol.com

Association Goals and Accomplishments

1. Copyright and Trademark - We are in the final stages of this filing. We should have this completed before the end of this term.

2. Active 20-30 US & Canada Website - The national website has been completely revamped again using a tool called Canvas Toolbox. One of the issues we constantly have is being limited by the web knowledge of those updating the site. Much effort had to be expended and the timeliness of the changes left much to be desired as we would rely on the skills of one person, who like us, is a volunteer. It was unfair to put the pressure on one individual so we purchased the tool to allow our National Staff to complete content updates freeing our web artists to focus their creative energies on keeping the site looking sharp. The new tool also provides additional functionality such as volunteer recruitment packages.

3. Mercy School Project in Kenya - Active 20-30 US & Canada was asked again to continue prior efforts to move this project to newer heights. Under the leadership of Jennifer Norman, we donated our first $4,000 to this effort with an additional $4,000 to be raised this term. Thank you again to Stefan Bugler of Round Table Germany for inviting us to take part in such a valuable project.

4. National Project Children’s Shopping Spree ~ August 4, 2007 - The National Project has two separate iterations, a shopping spree for disadvantaged children is completed in most cases and our Denver club has the children themselves make shopping lists for their families teaching them valuable lessons in sharing and giving, promoting the ideals of Active 20-30 to the next generation. We expect our National Project, a children’s shopping spree to continue its increased success providing valuable clothes, supplies and lessons for the children in our communities.

5. International Project ~ 2008 - National Project Chair, Jacquie Manoukian will be charged with promoting this at a regional and national level. Instructions will be forthcoming from new International President Richard Middlebrook.

6. Convener of National Convention 2008 - Active 20-30 United States & Canada Convention 2008 will be held in conjunction with the International and WOCO conventions in Las Vegas, NV August 4-10, 2008. The convention hosts will be the Active 20-30 US & Canada National Association but is being run entirely by Co-Convenors Richard Middlebrook and James Koch, both National Past Presidents of Active 20-30 US & Canada.

7. New Club Charters - This term, we have retained Trish Sweeney as Chairman. With a long list of current interest, our goal is to charter 5-6 clubs this term, if they are ready to do so. The Association’s goal is to increase our membership by 17% for the 2007-08 term or 202 members. We are currently at 1198 member as of 6-30-2007.

8. Operation Happy Kid - Operation Happy Kid is a grassroots effort to bring clothing and toys to needy children wherever our Active 20-30 travels take us. It has been an enormous success. To date we have donated clothing, toys, shoes, and necessities to the needy children of Ensenada, Mexico twice, Costa Rica, Colombia, and the Domincan Republic.

9. National Dues Increase - The national board voted two years ago to increase dues by $5 for 4 years until dues reach $100 per member. While this number is still well short of the inflation adjusted value of the dues as of the last increase in 1986, the inflow of cash will be sufficient to implement and continue with several new programs to assist with growth, retention, public relations, communication and enhanced youth services. We are currently investigating the effects of discounts based on membership numbers and proper reporting as of September 1 of each year. Additional programs to find alternative funding vehicles may allow us to keep dues at these levels, provide scholarships for members who can not afford dues or roll them back to previous levels.

10. Grant Program - Wendy Gaines, National Treasurer and member of the Budget and Finance Committee continues to revamp the grant program to make sure we are funding initiatives in the best interests of the organization. This year the National Board has $20,000 to distribute to its clubs. We have available copies of a brochure created by Sacramento #1 Club with grant funds as well as new member packets funded through these efforts as well that will be adopted by our national association.

11. New Committees - We have established two new committees and expanded the scope and membership of others to assist our growing network of clubs with various issues. The Membership Education and Retention Committee was recently established and will be headed by past National & International President Dallas Sweeney. This committee will be charged with using education as a means to enhance retention. By educating newer members what our organization has done, can do and will do at the same time encouraging new members to take the reigns of projects, retention should improve. One of our objectives is to grow the leaders of tomorrow and that can only happen if we make way for them by teaching them, challenging them and stepping aside to let them learn through failure as well as success. This committee will also interview clubs with superior retention to see how these procedures can be implemented in other organizations to help retention.

The second new committee is the National Sponsorship Committee. This committee will be charged with identifying where clubs are receiving their sponsorships, determining the ability to leverage those sponsorships to other clubs regionally and nationally and seeing if the national association would provide a good sponsorship opportunity for them. The committee will also create a database to provide to other clubs to assist with their fundraising efforts.

12. Grant Writing - We are going to invest into a grant writing initiative for the organization and its member clubs by sending National Treasurer, Wendy Gaines, and Dottie Johnson from the national office. They will learn the basics of grant writing and begin writing them to fund our national organization, as well as the national foundation. Seminars will be held to educate the various member clubs about the process so they can adopt these processes to increase their fundraising effectiveness.

13. National Foundation - There has been serious interest in making the national foundation an endowment entity. Fundraising efforts are to be reviewed using grant writing initiatives and possibly national sponsors.

14. Public Relations - As stated earlier, efforts are being researched and implemented to increase community awareness of our organization and our charitable efforts. We feel that this will increase our standing in the community to allow us to continue to draft successful and high caliber members, assist with sponsorships and create more partnership opportunities with the local governments. One such endeavor being reviewed is the use of the Cision database (copies of the proposal are attached) to assist with press awareness using press releases and other media contact techniques.

15. WOCO Foundation 501(c)3 and Constitution - Richard Middlebrook, Immediate Past National President, has continued to work with Stefan Buegler to be the Active 20-30 representative to finish drafting the WOCO Bylaws and Constitution. In addition, Richard has formed the WOCO Foundation 501 (c)3 in the United States. The process continues, but the corporate structure has been registered in the state of California. Updates on these endeavors should begin shortly to educate our members to generate more interest.