By Pete Krawitz
As I write this month’s column, I’ve had the live video stream of the VFW national convention in New Orleans on in the background via the VFW’s Facebook page. Even though I wasn’t able to join our Seattle delegates this year, I can still listen in and see some of the same speakers. It’s encouraging to see the VFW leveraging technology to make these conventions more accessible to folks that are unable to attend.
Hopefully, our post will be able to leverage the same technology in the future, making some of our meetings more accessible to those who have difficulties making it in each month. With that being said, I did recently attend (physically not virtually) my first department (Washington State) VFW convention down in Olympia. It was a very positive experience. We were able to meet with some of our comrades from all over Washington state. While technology is great, nothing beats the face-to-face experience of a convention. If you haven’t had a chance to attend one of the state conventions or mid-winter conferences, I highly recommend it.
For those of you who were able to attend the business meeting in July, I hope you liked the new format we are experimenting with. For those of you that weren’t able to make it; we are now meeting in the main hall and will be kicking off the first 10 minutes of each meeting with the auxiliary to give us an opportunity to announce and discuss items that impact both groups. We also started using a projector to display the meeting agenda, enabling everyone to follow along with what is going on and to make the most of the hour we get to discuss business together each month. We will still stay true to the VFW rituals and ceremonies, just with a few slight modifications. I truly value your opinions and feedback, so please feel free to reach out to me if you have any ideas or comments on how we might be able to get the most value out of our monthly meetings.
One last thing I’d like to touch on is communication. I’ve been working with Adjutant Alyson Teeter to come up with a plan on how we communicate with the post on a regular basis. The post officers are often bombarded via email with offers, solicitations for volunteers, advertisements for local veteran events, etc. While we would love to pass these items along to everyone via e-mail, we don’t want to spam our entire membership base. At this point, we will only be sending you one communication a month (the newsletter), however, we would like to allow individuals to “opt-in” to other communications if they are interested. We often put these “extra” communications out on our Facebook page, but acknowledge that not everyone is on that platform. Hopefully, we will have more information in the next month or two on how you can opt-in for these additional communications.
I look forward to seeing you at our next business meeting.