 All right, everybody, welcome to this year's Membership Seminar. I'm Doug Wells, your National Membership Director. So excited to be here with you all. By wrong applause, how was everybody enjoying the convention so far this year? Great stuff. The entire community team worked very hard to put this event on and I'm super excited about our badges, our new registration system and leveraging technology so that we can, you know, drag ourselves, keeping the streaming thing in the technical section. So far it's all been received very well. We haven't turned on all the capabilities yet. Some baking staffs take the shirt, but they seem to work great. So it's been stuff. I really appreciate you all being here. Before I get going too much further, I just want to introduce a couple of people. Robin Kagan, if you could stand up, please. The membership manager. He's the new National Networks Manager at the National Park, as well as Heather Kohnmeier, a business analyst. He's the new administration. If you have questions about my name, you know, or the membership world, or really anything membership in general, you can either get you the answer right away or you can point it in the right direction. So appreciative to have you here. Also, oh, this is, you see on the slides in front of you, my direct information. Please don't feel the need to take pictures of the slides. I'm sure you're showing them up to you, but I'd much rather you enjoy the presentation and the short information. I'll happily share this presentation with everyone. And in fact, if you stand in, my intent is to email it out that way. The only thing you won't get are the videos which are available on the YouTube channel, too. And there's only a part or two of this presentation this year. And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't introduce and thank our membership committee, who you see here to my left and right. Say your applause until the end, please. Our chair, Steve Preskwitz from Utah, Matt Kempinen from Wisconsin, Kelly Mullins from Washington, and John Washer from Minnesota. And we invite our chair, Steve Preskwitz, up to say a few words before we get off the presentation. I stole that, my stuff. I made it myself. I'm going to do it anyway. But thanks, you know, I wanted to introduce you to the committee itself. We did a great job here during the last year and we put together some ideas about to improve membership itself within the DAB organization. And couldn't have done it without the great people. Again, Kelly Mullins from Washington and John Walker from Minnesota. That's Matt Kempis. Kempis? Kempis, excuse me, was not in my self-esteem pressure. Also, I'm here in Utah for transportation service itself. If you hear a video of me, you'll see me, the old gray-haired old man, prior to the patient around in the hospital. But in many cases, what you'll see also on the slide presentation is our efforts in this endeavor. Thanks so much, folks. We appreciate you being here. So, Steve, I'm going to do the work, the great work that the intervention committee worked on over the course of a year. And essentially what we're trying to do is develop a mechanism to help improve the sales pitch, really, because that's what it is. So an elevator has taught how to help people communicate the importance of joining the community to give them all the fingers that they need to hopefully close that deal when they run into folks that are eligible. So, you know, we're just right now calling it the elevator pitch for recruiting. We've got a lot of stuff fleshed out. We're ready for primetime. The idea is that there'll be a digital version. So as we're talking to someone about joining, we will say, well, you know, what are the benefits of joining? You can share a video with them in our ticket. Why do we charge your membership? You can share a video that will articulate that as well. So, again, just trying to put another arrow or two into your pretty covers. We intend to have a digital version and a hard version. Obviously, there'll be much more robust capabilities with the digital version. It'll have links to important documents and resources. And the exciting thing that the community really wanted to ensure is that there was a place to include customizable talking place, not every chapter across the country is in the same or involved in the same degree of program as the other chapter might be. So if you're a chapter that's strong on drivers, you should highlight that. If you're a chapter that's active in the state capital, pushing for benefits, you should highlight that. So we just want to make sure that everybody has the tools to be effective recruiters. We definitely don't want you struggling for any of the answers that might come your way. So as I progress through the presentation here, there might be some stuff in here that you've seen before, as the old Japanese standing doors, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. And so we're trying to bring this out of the coat and the lace. I'll remind you all of some things. But just remember, I can't do it all from headquarters. I need all of your help and assistance in recruiting as many folks as we can. I don't want to recruit them. But embracing them and mentoring them and bringing them into the organization, you know, I can almost guarantee you that every great leader that he and we had has had that happen to them. They've been recruited personally. They've been mentoring the organization personally, had people guide them, educate them. Those are the folks that become our great leaders. It's awesome that people out there join because I put an ad in Google or something, right? That's great. You understand the need for giving, the fact that the media work very hard to protect the benefits that we have and to acquire the benefits that we may need. You know, the most prominent example right now is the recent passage of the Pack Act that we carried a guide out before. That doesn't happen without our members. It just doesn't. So I appreciate you all being shoulder to shoulder with me and doing your best to recruit folks. Just a quick update on this past year's March membership notice. For those who may not know, it's a time that we do every year for pre-interment that calculates and counts all applications that are online. The reason that's important is we know that two things happen when we sign somebody up online with a credit card, while there's a much greater proclivity for them to just pay for the membership outright and become a full-life member on the gate. Or two, if they do decide to engage in installment payments, the conversion rate to a full-life membership is much greater than if we just take 40 bucks from somebody to be. We're likely not to see from them those folks again. So if you sign up on installments for as little as 10 bucks a month with a credit card, it's fire and forgave. Okay? So please try to remember, if at all possible, we want to get folks signed up with a credit card. There's a lot of different ways that we can help you do that. We'll talk about some more in the future. The thing with the March membership notice is we understand that, well, when I got to headquarters, many, many moons ago now, one of the first things I recognized is that at the end of the membership year, for instance, July 1st through June 30th, we would get just delos with folks trying to meet their chapter for recruitment goals. And, you know, while it's, I'm happy to take memberships at any point of the year, I want people to start thinking about what we can go on recruiting earlier than year. Understanding that, you know, the pocket books take a little bit of a hit during the holidays. The more we're trying to do is plant that psychological prompt that when you start hearing things on TV about conference basketball tournaments or the NCAA tournament, that will be a trigger to say, oh, we need to start getting on our membership efforts here. This is just a fun way to kind of set up a competitive dynamic between the departments and they'll rally their chapters, you know, toward this goal. And we have two ways to win. So there's the department champion and the chapter, or part of the department that goes from bracket to bracket to bracket without being defeated. A department can have an off-week if it could be, you know, really killing that in recruitment but still having off a couple of few days there recruiting and then getting knocked out of the tournament champion race. But I don't want them to stop rallying folks to the cause or stop recruiting because if they recruit the most on a percentile basis, they can become the target in the tournament MVP. So we've had many years now where the department champion and MVP were two different departments. And this year was a great test of game versus the life. We ended up having our championship game in the department of Virginia versus the department of Wyoming. The department of Virginia did prevail. But, you know, a little while in there proved that you don't have to be a big major department in order to be successful in the tournament and did an outstanding job. So let's give both the department of Virginia and the department of Wyoming a round of applause. It's not just the departments that were rewarded. My top two individual recruiters will also get rewarded during the March membership at this tournament. And the top two recruiters, the winner and the runner-up, are not that. The trick is they got to recruit at least 25 members to be in the right. First is back up and running at full speed. Folks, this is the easiest way for you to recruit someone. When I was young, I was just having come into the BAB about like six years ago. Ken Wolf, the then service director, pounded into me always had a membership application on him. That was one of the biggest advertisements, always had a membership application on him. So when you happen to run into that person that's eligible at the checkout line, at the grocery store, or at the bar, or wherever it is that you happen to be talking to somebody, you'll have the ability to recruit them right then and there. This eliminates the need to have to carry a physical application around. And it also eliminates the need for you to have to remember what your membership number is all the time. So you've got the BAB Recruiter Warrior Program, the BAB Network Slash Warrior. All you do is pull out your membership card, the membership number for those of you that have more than one membership, that you want the credit or attributions for that recruitment to go to. So if you have a membership number or a membership number and then that bar at the bottom there when you return will highlight so that you can click it, click Verified Membership Number and if that membership number that you have put is valid, it will generate a personalized link for you to then share with any eligible member that you like. You can also share this to your Facebook page, to Twitter, wherever you want if you want to email somebody you can do that is now a clickable link that is specific to you so when somebody clicks on that link it's going to bring out an application page, they're going to sign up online and you're automatically going to get credit. The sponsor information, your membership number is hidden. I don't want them to see that, don't think just because you can't see it that you're not going to get credit for it, it's hidden. I don't want them to change that. If they're using your specialized link, you're going to get credit for that approval. You warn for those of you that if you see Joel put out on his Facebook page a member of the membership link, don't share his link because he'll be a credit share your link. If you have trouble with this, my staff at the national headquarters is fully trained on giving you up for learning with this. We'll get you squared away and make sure you got it. I've got a double check and make sure it's up and running, but I asked our wonderful IT team when you get your link here you'll now also be able to get a QR code that somebody can scan with their phone. You can put it copy and paste it to a bag with business card, whatever you want to do but it will take it again to a specialized, personalized joint page just for you that has your attribution in there. So either on the link or a QR code whatever you want to rock with, you'll be able to do. So look for that coming to your pretty quick if it's not already on the page. I just want to remind everybody about the recruitment points. So as you see you can have you can gain one to three recruitment points for every new member recruiting. Why one to three? So if you sign up a member using a paper application if they become a part-life member you get one point and then if they convert to a full-life member there's another point given. If they become a full-life member obligated it's two points. If you sign them up online initially when they become a part-life member with installment you get two points and then when you convert you get another point for a couple of three points. So again we're trying to incentivize you to sign folks up online. And we've reminded folks of this for the past couple of years but I would please share with you counterparts especially those people that are prolific recruiters. I don't want them to lose points but a few years back we had to make the decision to start acquiring points just like Delta or whoever else has points programs. They don't act correctly. That ends up one point essentially is a lot. You've got a thousand people that are a three-year-old one member that adds up. We've got to make sure that we're expiring these points on a three-year-old average. We always use your oldest points first if you buy some swag in the store or whatever but remember you don't have to wait to come to convention to use your points. You can use them at DMETropeaWords.com you can call the store at National Headquarters. There's all sorts of ways that you can redeem these points and just do a fantastic job helping us to reward you for all your hard work there. But the big thing is just reminding people that to get points for every recruitment that you inspire. So once they go beyond three years old we'll start knocking them off there. And also going back to the recruiter warrior we have a lookout every year we do a recruiter warrior challenge and you have to use the app to the link to recruit folks but every time you recruit a member you get one entry into a drawing so if you recruit ten members you get ten entries and we've been pretty regular doing a thousand bucks for that so if we get a hundred, fifty, two hundred members that come into that that's just a cost of about three members so that's a deal I'll take all day long. So a thousand bucks we'll work really good doing some other fun type of stuff but we'll probably do we will do it again this fall so we have a lookout for that and Felicia Graver's in here she was my first winner she donated a bunch of us back to D&D and to the chapter department and took her kids to the other business or something like that so it's awesome stuff and it's a nice way to help pay off those expenses, right? I want to talk about goals and hopeless again a lot of this stuff is born out of conversations that I've had since I've been here with folks so as we're alive new memberships count towards your chapter's goal paying off a membership no longer counts towards goal going back to that conversation I was having about pay to lose with members a lot of that were member payoffs that were happy to be here just so the chapter can be a goal that's not what I want y'all to do we have those resources donated to us by a generous American public and let's spend that money on service not memberships as far as payoffs go it's great to do like an incentivization and you know like the chapter will pay up 20 to pay the first 20 something like that that's all terrific so once you pay off memberships in that style we want to make sure there's members have to spend them, right? I want you to proselytize the good work of E&E to the masses to the people that I haven't communicated with yet once you get them into the door if you can get them into the doors of full life member awesome, that is the perfect scenario, right? but if you're only able to close the deal on part-life membership that's perfect too, I don't want you shying away from assigning people up as part-life members get into the door and let me work on getting them converted okay that's the deal I'm able to get so new part-life and new full-life memberships coming forwards, you're making your goal for a long, long time the National Membership Director will use kind of an arbitrary formula to establish goals and it did penalize chapters that had a lot of part-life members in it and so I did like that because it made people shy away from assigning part-life members up that's all that the member can afford at the time right? chapters that would actively just focus on recruiting full-life membership you know, out of the gate and to keep their part-life members low so neither one of those scenarios part-life members so we eliminated that through changing the goal standard but how do we want to establish goal, right? We want to make sure that we're using some kind of real world metric so we developed what's called a holless so I get a roster of names of people that I know are like 99.99% all eligible for membership in GED they got a service-related inferior disease that they suffered they got a wartime service that are being treated at the VA medical center for something that we gathered data from our disaster relief efforts there's all sorts of places so people on this holless are you know, the viable level prospects that's what I want you to tap into they those lists are available for you to request from the membership department of National Employment you give us a specific list of codes we can crank out the holless for you I welcome the departments to do it when you're in the whole department you can share that with the district meetings or however you want to go about doing it but certainly I don't want to put you in this scenario where I establish a goal and it would require you to recruit so many members but they're not telling you where to live that's what we're trying to do we're trying to merit the two goals are based on the holless now not every chapter is going to be created equal as it obtains the holless you're going to have a lot more people on the holless like the respective members in Colleen, Texas than Eastern Rhode Island just by shared population so the chapter in Colleen, Texas is going to have a much bigger circle than that chapter in Rhode Island if you're a chapter that falls into that category where you don't have a ton of prospective members then you'll have a minimum of 10 that you need to recruit to attain the goal for that so if you have questions about the goal for your chapter how we're establishing that stuff, please just give me a call or shoot an email and we'll help you figure it out but how that's all generated is through the department we send out a zip code spreadsheet they tell us what zip codes belong to what chapter and that we put it through the algorithm and that's how we generate the goal I have a little bit of a sliding scale we look at how many folks we're losing over the year we want to make sure we finish our ranks and grow a little bit that's how you're seeing those goals be established on populations only you can request those from us a couple of different ways unfortunately the department of chapter still has a new chapter for us I'm looking at the way to automate this it's probably a little bit over the horizon as you resolve some other technologies but you can just give us a call shoot us an email or use the membership list request form that's available on the resources tab of AUD.org so I hope everybody appreciates this news when you went to the members only section you can do this with a boo who hated putting in your membership number to get to the members only section I like it it's gone so all of those resources now that were in the members only section whether it's the forms the AFR kits the officer election reports all that stuff is now just a couple of clicks away you go to AUD.org it's a membership you can click on member resources you're in business if something needs validation like with our DEV membership program we have a specific validation protocol for that so it's nothing you're going to get to in our member resources section that you're going to have to worry about all of our videos are there everything is going to go right there so if you have any questions about that don't hesitate to reach out so we can get to the members when you get it so again the hot list reflects the most viable prospects in your chapter as a jurisdiction I don't want to give you prospective members who might have solicited 15 or 20 times for whatever reason they never decided to pull the trigger on membership in either I'll give you the newest which you see on your hot list I've been reached out to them once that's typically twice at the most but we've actually had folks thinking outside the box tackling things from a different angle and they can't see success around the country but you can of course mail or call prospects to invite them now calling will take a little bit of work because I don't typically have phone numbers you're going to have names and addresses but google other resources there's ways that you can figure out phone numbers for folks but shoot them a postcard don't spend a ton of money on postage but sending a postcard inviting people out to a chapter function or a meeting or whatever the case may be you know that works wonders this one people look at me like their best eyeball in the middle of my forehead I've seen some success with them visiting prospective members at their homes there's a reason the security system guy or the pool salesman or whoever comes around on Sundays knocking on doors they might get 10 doors sliding into their faces but two or three people who talk to them invited them that's a success so having a quick chapter meeting suspending all the business once and quarter or something like that giving each of your members how often giving each of them two or three to go visit saying hey how's your claim work from below how's your claim are you doing from your medical appointment you have a volunteer opportunity for us projecting these programs and services opportunity at the same time that you're recruiting I guarantee you that when people see and recognize the value of the 80 they're going to be much more available to give you that credit card or write me that check for 300 bucks to become a member he has always been and will always be a service first organization that's what we're about that's the cornerstone of the 80 so when you demonstrate that to folks they're going to have to be talking a bit to join and so obviously we want to be either visiting people in their homes wanting to be respectful of the COVID scenario but certainly I want to make sure that you all have the tools that you need to be successful out there or in the www.mykdm.org www.mykdm.org so if you weren't here by Friday afternoon you probably missed this but I don't want you to miss out on the info feel free to shoot me up an email and say hey I got your slide down from www.mykdm.org seminar I'm happy to send it to you but I am going to cover a couple of pieces of information just for everybody's applications since we have a larger audience here if you haven't already done it you can go to www.mykdm.org slash member the actual registration and register to get access so if you see over there where it says log in there's a new user registration piece you fill out a basic application this is basic information once you're done doing that you'll get an email address it says hey we got your registration however you're not ready you're rocking a roll yet gives a couple of days to validate you to the system so my team has to go in and confirm that you are the commander or if you are a commander this stuff is roles based so a department officer has more access than a chapter officer has more access than Joe Manow okay as every member in your organization has access to www.mykdm.org if you're just a regular member you know you'll have access to your own information if you have outstanding payments in your membership you'll be able to make payments if you want to fill out a transfer form you'll be able to do that you'll be able to update your service record if we've got your name wrong you'll be able to edit that stuff incorrectly okay so look at that service record update all that good stuff let us know when you have something that's wrong and we'll be able to figure it out and it's all a lot of data it's a cell service site so if you forget your password you can put your email address you can use the login with it and you can reset your password you don't have to call the membership department to do that so if you're trying to use more kind of a weekend if you forgot your password you can get it reset you can lock in and roll in so as I mentioned there's the first first email you get and then you'll get a second email and you'll get it off so this is the replacement for our members and members leaders into what used to be the membership system so the old legacy membership system is no more we've combined many legacy members our legacy system is the one system so we're attacking some of that transitional growth so please continue to be patient with us you can combine membership and volunteer services and fundraising there's a case you have to work through with the data and our team is doing an amazing job overcoming those hurdles but if you see something out there that just looks a little great tuning in a little bit of your call so when you get into into might be this is essentially what you'll see these tiles here so again the username and password that you created whenever you sign up you just plug those in and that'll take you in there you can either favorite that web page you can also just go to dv.org and that will be resources scroll down a little bit but you can see all the different tiles access to the one that our members leaders are usually most interested in is there a bottom right what's your commentary so right now you've got the population summary these membership lists a couple of other reports today that are useful to you and we've got a few more coming here these days so very soon you're going to have all of the capabilities that you had in the legacy membership system through might be so you know teach a man or woman to finish right it's worth trying to do I want to make sure you're all as self-sufficient as possible not that I don't like you calling us Robin doesn't like you calling us but I I'm teasing he loves you but yeah we're at the age of young and you should have every single capability ultimately that you have if there's something if there's something that we're not going to do for a particular reason security issues or something but again I continue to appreciate your patience finishing up here I want to remind everybody about deep member advantages so for those of you who have looked at our member page in the past there's dozens or so companies that we align with to offer team members special discounts wasn't a ton of folks and those relationships took a lot of time and can be financed and maintained and frankly just our members for whatever reason were attracted to some of that stuff we had a terrific deal from identity bar the identity theft protection company they gave us the world for their stuff and hardly would we have a relationship to go a lot to bring information so it was we made a decision about your map of your show to go to what we call the white lane program so literally through the member advantage program you all have access to thousands of benefits not just a dozen or so what's great about this is the app is available to both the majority and the average school so if you go to dme.org dme.joinmydeals.com you sign up you plug in your email address and your membership number and create a password that's all you need to do once they validate that you are a member of the DAV you just go ahead download the app to your phone or cat use that email address and username that you signed up with you no longer need your membership number at that point you'll then see the dme.org dme.joinmydeals.com within years of your phone and it is still awesome I've tried this two or three times around my place not only do you have access to accounts from local or from national and regional vendors but you also could have access to local vendors if they kind of deal with with access so access to the company and the army you know we're working with for this but literally within three miles of my own there are two or three shops you know a couple of eateries and a drug store so everything retail we call it eat play more right and it's awesome it's mostly the the travel stuff, hotel reservations flight reservations all that stuff we have affinity agreements with them where if you book your trip through dme.deals.com you'll get the discount but then also PEV gets paid a portion of that proceeds to then run back to PEV's programs and services so it is a double trip benefit so it's pretty stuff if you have any questions on this let me know just be where we want you to use this this should be one of those arrows in your recruiting program just make sure you're explaining to folks that it could take a week or two for us to use your membership application process if you have a lot of online can you get that information to access so that it uploads you for a little bit more in the system so if they have an issue again just have them be sure to get it to work