 Awesome to see so many people in here. I'm Dan Clare. I'm your National Director of Communications. We've had a great year. I'm excited, like I said, I'm really excited to see so many people in here because I think that there's a lot of excitement and a lot of chapters who are doing a lot of great things that are getting the media into your community. You're injecting yourself into your community more. You're finding out how you can use communications principles, communications tools, and resources to get yourself in the media more often, to get DAV in the media more often, and more importantly, to achieve our primary objective, which is keeping our promise to the men and women who served in their families and survivors. And that's something that I think that if we're communicating properly, we're going to do a better job of that. It's going to help us with our volunteerism. We're going to get more volunteers, more people engaged. It's going to help us make our events more successful, more efficient. It's going to help us recruit new members, make people aware of the services we offer. It's good. We're becoming more healthy because more of you are taking the initiative and going out in your communities and getting involved with the media, getting Facebook pages set up, doing the smart stuff that moved things forward. I kind of want to go over some of the stuff communications has been up to. To let you know, of course, DAV Magazine is still our primary flagship publication. It's our primary communications tool still. DAV Magazine, the print version, is not going anywhere. It's available online. But it's not going anywhere. But I would say this. Amazingly, we compile and collect clips from chapter news. We do searches on the internet. And we find out all these great stories about events you're involved in and things like that. But for some reason, you guys are doing so much better getting your own local media. And we're not always getting the content. We're not always getting. You're not submitting content for DAV. And it puts us in a position where we're going to you and trying to contact you to get some of that stuff that you probably already had and submitted to the media. So if you can, we're good on sound, guys. I think we're good. If you can, just go ahead. And when you have something happen, when you make a donation to a VA hospital, when you hold an event, when something good happens at your level, go ahead and email that stuff to feedback at DAV.org. Provide us as much information as you can about what's happening. It's especially important to our national adjutant, to Barry Jezanowski, my boss, that we are getting the stories in the magazine that encourage chapters, other chapters, to do the right thing. And if something works for you in York City, it's probably going to work for someone else in their city. And there's a lot of great ideas, a lot of great initiatives that people are putting forward all the time. So we want to take care of that. The DAV magazine is still out there. It's still very important. It reaches 1.2 million members, Congress. So we want you to keep making submissions to DAV magazine. I think it's probably still the best publication in our business. And I'm proud of all my staff who put that together. Social networking. You heard Barry. How many of you heard Barry this morning talk about social networking? Huge win for DAV, some very big wins recently. Top rated, more than 1 million likes. Did we talk about that? Yeah, here we are. July 5th, we added our millionth Facebook like. We have a million people following DAV magazine. Or DAV's Facebook page. I want to kind of talk about what that means a little bit. Facebook, we've been doing these things for, I've been doing these for five years with you guys. And sometimes I say Facebook and people kind of glaze over and they say, oh my gosh, I'm just not into that. Someone in your chapter is into that, right? Someone maybe a little too into it. Maybe they post a little too much. But those folks who are well-versed in that can help you handle this. And I don't want you to do a Facebook page because you're bragging. I don't want you to do a Facebook page if you're not gonna be engaged in it. But your Facebook page is going to help you achieve your goals. It's not just about communications, you know, within membership ranks. It's about getting new people to come to our meetings, right? It's about getting new volunteers to sign up. It's about having our voice out there and having a place where people can go and feel like they're not just a part of the national DAV community, but the local DAV community. We have a million Facebook likes and I would guarantee almost everyone I'm looking at out here, I have more people following the national page than you have following your department or state page. I'm not bragging, but I can help you. That puts me in a position where I can help you. We can do regional posts on local activities that are going on. Joe Schinelli's here. He had a great class yesterday. I don't know if any of you got to attend it. It's available online. Joe does a great job with this stuff. Joe understands engagement. Joe can give you advice. I will give out his phone number and you'll be able to reach him. But it's about meeting your goals, right? So if you're holding an event, if you have an information seminar and you really want to rally behind this, talk to Joe, talk to us and we'll see if we can do a regional post and send everyone in your area who's already on the national's like list a post about what you're doing. I guarantee if you were to do that, if you had one big meeting, I would do it as much as we can. But if you have something big going on and we promote it, I guarantee it'll pick up. At least it'll start that conversation with people and start the branding that tells people DAV in this community is doing a good job. So I want you guys to take advantage of that. I want you to use it. I want you to contact us because we have a lot of things that we can do together. And if I can find out, like I said before, if I can find out that it's going to work in Des Moines, then it's gonna probably work in Lincoln, right? So I want to duplicate success wherever I can find it. One of the things that's a very big deal for us is we know that DAV is not a household name. It is for everyone in this room, but for the public, by and large, we don't get the recognition we deserve. We have a lot of great resources. I have great people, phenomenal people who are doing a lot of different jobs and I'll get into some of their tasks. But I also have what's important to me is ROI, right? Return on investment. If I'm going to dedicate my time to something, I want to make sure it works. And that's why when we're doing something to reach out to you and engage you and get you involved to be a part of something or support you, whatever we're doing, I want to make sure that it's working. And if something doesn't have great ROI, we're probably gonna move to something else that does. It's tactics, it's moving as fast as we can because we know that we have a, I mean, we feel like now is an urgent time where we need to be getting as much mind-share as DAV possibly can get. So it's a big thing for us, let's see. On the same day that we did that, we've got 30,000 Twitter followers, a very different community. Joe Cinelli's contact information is up here. We're not that hard to reach. If you don't write down that phone number, you can give us a call at National Headquarters and Joe's case, National Service and Legislative Headquarters. And we can get you on the line with Joe to get some help. Public service announcements. When I talk about engaging and supporting you, how many of you have seen a DAV billboard, a DAV ad somewhere? Now, we're up at least 50% from where we were last year based on the room count and that's great. We're taking, we have some folks, some very smart people who are helping us with this and we are rocking and rolling because we've become so much more aggressive and we've become so much more creative in how we approach the public service announcement game. Stations, network stations in your community have an obligation to, because of the FCC, they have an obligation to cover a certain amount of public service announcements. They have an obligation to your community. How good we do in your community will determine how they decide to run our stuff, how good our stuff is and how active you are. How many of you received a letter from the National Organization or many of you probably have. It came out to chapters and departments that said, here's how you can go out and pitch PSAs. Did you guys get that? And I know that's new, that's just though at the last couple of weeks. If you don't have it, you can contact us and we'll hook you up with the information on how to do it. It's not that hard, but for me from the National Organization to go to a radio station or a television station in your community and say, hey look, we do a lot of great things for veterans, please support us, please run our PSA. They look at the PSA and fortunately for us, a lot of people are loving our PSA and they're running it. Unfortunately, and we're not getting as much as we can because I'm not happy until 100% of every station's PSA time is dedicated to DAV, right? I wouldn't be up here if that wasn't what I wanted. But if you in your town go to your media and you say to them, look, I'm here. This is what DAV means here in town. This is what we're doing. Here's the PSA package for DAV. Here's some contacts if you need some help downloading this stuff, but we would really be grateful if you ran it. You don't wanna, you know, we can be veterans or sometimes a little bit more aggressive than some other folks you don't wanna be too aggressive. But if you're assertive and you say, I would really appreciate it if you could support us on this and we're doing stuff right here in town, they're much more likely to run it. We've done a lot of national stuff where we will go to New York and we'll run around town and ask major networks or not networks, major affiliates to pick up and run our PSAs and it's worked. This year, I'll tell you this, this is actually, I mean, this is kind of crazy to think about. I mean, we've seen this step, step, step, right? We're getting a little better all the time. This year by June, DAV had achieved as much as any year on record in terms of donated media, public service announcements, value donated to DAV. It's more than $11 million of donated media value. Thank you. We did that, we did that because we're not just going after television stations and sending out a thing and saying, good luck. We did that because you're in your community doing the right thing. We're packaging things I think the right way and we're going after a lot of different ways to do it, right? We're outside, we've got your billboards. We're working on partnerships with folks who have billboard space. We have the radio, public service announcements. Has anyone in here heard the man and woman veteran PSA? I don't know that we, it wasn't ran this morning but Ashley Burns here on staff was one of the voices and it's a PSA that's run a lot. I know it's run a lot because it turns out some people in America don't like Rush Limbaugh because they call us and they say, why are you buying time on this network that runs the Rush Limbaugh show? And I said, well, I didn't pay for that but thank you Rush. If you want to run our PSAs, you go ahead. I mean, I'm not behind everything you're for but I'll take it. It's also digital outreach. It's going out there and find folks, Walmart, other people who are willing to pick up our stuff. I think too, we're dealing with the qualities better, right? Our messages are, they're more universal. They capture your heart when you see them, listen to them, experience them. They also do a true community service because they make people aware of what DAV does that we're out there to help veterans and they also tell the public that veterans are not just the kid next door who lost his leg and you saw him in the newspaper. They're not just uncle who was in World War II. Veterans comprise every era. Veterans are males, veterans are females, veterans, caregivers and there's a huge audience of people who make up the veteran community. Like I said, they're inclusive. I mean, this stuff's great. If you know someone in your community who has any resource to run our PSAs, if you know an outdoor advertiser, if you have a contact at a radio station, contact us. We're happy to do it on your behalf or to give you the tools that you need to contact the media or contact that media outlet and see if they'll donate space to us. At the same time that you're doing that, you're doing another important thing. You're making contact with the media and building a relationship. That's a very important part of what we're trying to do. DAV on the national level, I mean, DAV's in national news all the time. And not only that, we're getting better at how we are on the news. We're getting our messages across, I think a little bit better. Did anyone see the Denver Post this morning? Did anyone see it? You should look into it. It's about what Mark I think said. It was a four page article starting on the front page about it was almost as if you took our messaging and packaged it, put it in the newspaper and they print it but I didn't have to pay for ink or paper or any of that stuff like I do with our magazine. It was fantastic. Great coverage, it was our message, us getting out there, us defending the things that are important to us. And you'll see that too. I'm sure tomorrow with Chairman Miller and the secretary when they talk, we're gonna do everything we can to get as much news coverage for that as we can. But it doesn't, it's not just national news that moves the wheel. I mean, the stuff that you're able to do, if you're able to build a relationship with a local media personality, it doesn't, you don't have to go nuts and carry them flowers on Valentine's Day or anything crazy like that. But if you're going in and talking to them or if you see an article in the newspaper or see a broadcast segment on TV news by someone who shows the propensity to love veterans, well, you're a DAV subject matter expert. You're a member of DAV, you're an active leader in DAV. You can call that person up representing DAV and say, look, I really love that segment that you ran. And I just want you to know, if there's everything you wanna do to cover DAV, we got a lot of great stuff going on. We wanna support it. More donated media than it costs to support all outreach combined. I mean, we've gone from being a little bit of a very important function, but a function that costs DAV a lot of money to a function within DAV where we're actually getting more and donated value than it costs to run our department. So that's pretty cool, I'd say. More in the area, like I said about the PSAs before, ask not what your DAV can do for you, but what you can do for your DAV. Did you know that John F. Kennedy was a member and he said that? Yeah, I just made it up. He really said that. But seriously, I don't think people realize you can take the gloves off now. We're giving you permission. Go contact the media. You know we're not doling out a partisan message. You can go talk to your media and build a relationship with them as a representative of DAV. You should be doing that. We should be doing that. We're gonna give you some more resources to do that too. We have to think of that program. That's something that we would absolutely love it if you went to the media and said, hey, look at this great thing that DAV's doing. If you ever wanna do a story on that or anything DAV related, please let me know. If you're out there, putting yourself out there, building that relationship, it leads to things. We've seen it lead to things. We've seen it lead to big things. Steve Wilson's works a lot with chapters. We have our chapter in Branson, Missouri who just went nuts. I mean they just started building these relationships with media and it was kind of, we were kind of like, wow, I didn't even think that we could do that well in terms of earned media, but you can do it. The Think of That program is something we showed this morning. We're gonna get some more communication to you out there about that. We think this year we're gonna have some partners history channel now. They saw Think of That. They experienced it on the kind of the small scale last year. They wanna get involved and push it to their outlets, to students, to people who can influence and get more involved. This thing we believe could be a prairie fire. I mean it could really take hold in the coming, in the Veteran's Day period this year. So we're excited about it. We want you to get excited about it and you'd be amazed. Social networking and digital media, it's like it's very web-like, right? Spiderwebs, once you start having success, it just builds momentum. Media training. Steve's right here. Steve's doing media training tomorrow. What time is it again, Steve? Three o'clock. Three o'clock in here? Is it in here? I will look it up. We'll find that out and tell you before we go. But Steve's media training has worked. I mean we've seen Steve go places, do things with chapters and departments and all of a sudden they're making a name for DAV in the community. It's one thing to sit back and say, oh gosh, it sure would be nice if DAV got the credit it deserved. But you know what? If you're not out there pushing, we're not gonna get the credit that we earned. Governor Square 14. Governor Square 14, tomorrow at? Three o'clock. Three p.m. 1500 for you military types. Where is it at? That's a good question. Governor Square 14, I said. Refer to your maps. I failed land nav in the Marine Corps. Plaza of Concourse Level. Plaza of Concourse Level. Thank God I just follow these guys wherever they go. Media training, American Pickers. Did you guys like that segment of American Pickers? I thought it was great. Yeah. We're gonna, we've already actually, what it was, eight days ago, nine days ago, the days go pretty quick when you're moving fast. But less than two weeks ago, we went out to the memorial in D.C., the art memorial, and we filmed another segment. Does anyone in here know Past National Commander Jim Sersley? Jim represented us and we kinda did an important thing this year that you'll see when it airs. We have Jim Sersley, the Vietnam era veteran. It was important in this case that we have a visibly disabled veteran because it's a lot easier. It's a lot more efficient in the short timeframe that we have to connect with our audience. We have Jim Sersley, the Vietnam era veteran, and we had an Afghanistan war veteran who'd lost his arm and his leg as an EOD tech who's a proud DAV member. We had them together and we were able to talk about something that I think is incredibly important, mentorship. Vietnam veterans have a lot that they can teach younger veterans about the experience of being a veteran, what comes next, what you need to do, what resources are available for you. But that's kind of a little teaser on what that segment's going to look like. I want you to check it out when it comes around. There were a couple of things that happened last year that happened very quickly. One of them was the DAV 200. The history channel thing kind of snuck up on us a little bit too. We're going to make a much more concerted effort and it's important to our leadership that we do this, a much more concerted effort of making you aware of the DAV 200, of the history channel project so that you can get more involved and more engaged in it. And we want you to do it. So we want you to get more involved. And so we're gonna be more proactive about getting the information out there. It helps too, if you're following DAV on Facebook, if you're following along with DAV Magazine, because we're gonna try and hit you more than once on all these things. But we need to know that when you get the email or get the letter or whatever that you're paying attention to. But this will be on November 14th. The history channel thing came up. We're gonna try and do a little bit more to promote that this year also. And think of that also, because we definitely want to get you involved in that. There's another thing that we're involved in that I think also we want to engage you on to help you have a resource so you can go to the media for a reason, right? Every Veteran's Day, what happens? If you're watching the TV news, if you're watching whatever, cable, digital media, if you're on the internet, wherever you're at, you're finding that people want to do a good story on Veterans. They wanna say something about Veterans. Someone out there always wants to bash Veteran service organizations. That's a little surprise we get every year. Someone wants to do something, but it's topical now. We're in the news, we're hot. We've just kind of been midway through our Veteran's Pulse Survey. We have a survey sample, a legit survey sample of Veterans and we've asked them some important questions. One of the questions is a continuing resolution for DAV. Do you think that Congress should be required to use the VA healthcare system? How do you think Veterans are gonna respond to that question? But now you can go, we're going to make this survey available to you. You're gonna be able to take it to the media and say to them, here's some interesting statistics about women Veterans, some of our legislative priorities, how Veterans feel about recognition. Some of it's softball stuff, but it can get us in the door, get more people aware of our services. The Veterans Pulse Survey, folks, in November, it's going to be a big deal. And Ashley's going to talk about it in a minute, but the long journey home, the women Veterans study that we did, did you see that in the media? It got a ton of media attention. We think the Veterans Pulse Survey has the same or better potential to really get DAV out there. And you as a local person in your local area, providing a local service, being a subject matter expert and having this national survey to refer to, you got a huge tool on your hands. We're gonna try and get you some information to help you with that. We also did a brand survey this year, big deal for us because we're taking another look. We're not gonna be happy saying these are our messages, this is, and we just go from here and march in the same direction. We're going back and seeing what's working, what's not working, but the publicity guide and brand style book, which will help you with your logo needs when you're promoting events, doing billboards or not billboards, but doing banners or whatever you need to do, t-shirts, whatever you're working on. The brand style book will help you with that. The publicity guide, look for probably within the next, at least within the next year. It's going to get a pretty good size update. I'm sorry, I'm talking about the language guide book when I say that. The publicity guide is also a great resource. It's available online. All of you have this stuff at your fingertips, really, if you have an internet connection, but you can get that publicity guide and it can give you more in-depth instructions on how you can do stuff. And then guess what? If you have a question, call us. Call Steve, call me, call Joe. If it's social networking, we wanna help. So we got a lot of exciting things going on. I'm gonna turn it over to Ashley Burns, Deputy National Director of Communications to cover some more stuff. And then if we have time, we'll do more questions and things like that. But thanks, I'll get Ashley up here. I'm a little bit shorter than Dan, clearly. So as you mentioned, I'm Ashley Burns, the Deputy National Director of Communications in Washington, DC. I am not nearly as charismatic off the cuff as my boss, so please forgive me. I will be going off some notes here. So we better looking though. So I see a lot of very familiar faces out there. I've known some of you for years. For those of you who don't know me, I'm a Marine Veteran of Afghanistan. I worked as a combat correspondent for my eight years in the Marine Corps. Had a great time doing it. Thank you, thank you. Thank you. So and as Ian mentioned, I work alongside some of these very talented staff members that we have here. Joe is alongside us in DC, as well as Todd Hunter, here down front and center with the camera, as well as Charity Edgar, who you saw earlier yesterday is currently downrange in Afghanistan in our thoughts and in our prayers, and Mary Dever, who is our newest Air Force employee. She just joined us last week, so we weren't going to subject her to convention just yet, but you'll meet her soon enough. So what I wanna do a little bit is talk about what we do to support communications and public affairs efforts in Washington. Of course, we support all of DAV's departments as needed, but our primary focus in DC is to highlight what our service and legislative departments do day in and day out on behalf of veterans and their families. Our job, essentially, when you boil it down is to take your stories and the stories of other ill and injured veterans and relate them to the issues at hand so we can help move legislation that affects virtually every single one of us in this room. No, that's not it, sorry. Go back up one. So between pushes for advanced appropriations, equalized caregiver benefits, DA healthcare and benefits reform, and better support for women veterans, I'm sure you all realize we've been very busy over the past year, helping to produce op-eds, social media posts, videos, photos, infographics, news releases, news stories, as well as working with members of the media to get the message out. In DC, particularly, we're working to make sure we have very close relationships with reporters at the Washington Post, at the Wall Street Journal, at the New York Times to make sure that we're able to connect with them and get that message out on a national basis. One piece in particular I'd like to talk about and highlight is, last year, and many of you are probably familiar with this, was our Change.org petition. So in early December last year, we launched the Change.org petition to promote passage of the Putting Veterans Funding First Act to guarantee veterans would receive their disability compensation, pension, education and rehabilitation benefits on time without delay, even in the event of government shutdowns. So something DAV was very, very strongly behind that was our Push for Advanced Appropriations last year with Operation Keep the Promise. But the Change.org petition within a very short timeframe just I think was within two weeks, two weeks, we had 43,000 signatures of support for this petition. So that's thanks in large part to the members of this audience, to the members of DAV who are helpful in getting that message out, pushing it out on social, signing the petition, getting their friends and family to sign the petition as well. And then in late December, thanks to that support and support to the Commander's Action Network, the President signed the omnibus spending bill with influence from DAV's Putting Funding First Act. So it was a huge victory for us and we're very proud of that and very, very thankful for the work that you did to help us achieve that. But I think this is a really great illustration of the kind of victory that we can achieve when we rally together and get our members and supporters behind a variety of different communications tools and platforms. So operation, keep the promise. Again, many familiar faces, I'm sure I've seen a number of you in DC for our midwinter conference. And this is something that, this was right in our backyard, so this is something we support and we push out, keep the promise campaign this particular year. It was an interesting time. I mean, VA has its struggles and so we ended up kind of combining some of our efforts, our two legislative priorities, women, veterans and caregivers, but also bringing in the issue of VA reform. So that was definitely an added focus that we had and I'm sure you've seen that in many of our different communications. So we've been pleased to see a lot of success with this campaign. And going forward, I know this is something, we're gonna face some more pretty tough policy battles. I think this is operation, keep the promise is a great kind of unifying banner that we can get behind. It's something that we can approach every year, maybe apply it to a different policy issue, but kind of make it our own. And go forward with this every year when we're at midwinter. So this is something we continue, or we look forward to continuing to do. So caregivers and women veterans, as I mentioned, are two legislative priorities for the year. One thing that communications department in Washington has done has worked with the legislative department to put together two new unique landing pages for women, veterans and caregivers. The first step here, the caregiversDAV.org slash caregiver provides a look at some of the current legislation regarding caregiver benefits. It has DAV issue brief on the topic, as well as a locator tool that, yes? I'm sorry, I'm a very fast talker. I'm so sorry, I'm a midwesterner. We talk very quickly. I'll try and slow down. Yes, as well as a tool that Adrian Adizato had put together to help link veterans and their caregivers to an interactive map that displays veteran directed home community-based services in their area. So if you have a chance to check out this website, it's a very helpful tool and we hope to continue to expand on this and make it a really valuable resource. The second one that we did, of course, was the women veterans page, DAV.org slash women hyphen veterans. Has a lot of the same information available, but we've also added something a little different, a little new, and this was just in the past couple of weeks that we did this. This is the department women veterans committee toolkit. So lots of very helpful information about outreach for local, to reach out to local women veterans, a lot of resources in here, some pamphlets, some brochures, and ideas to help engage local women veterans. We helped Joy and her team create this new toolkit along with help from the members of the women veterans interim committee. Thank you very much for all your help and assistance on that. But again, tools in here will be gender specific programs and services that are available for healthcare, employment, homelessness, substance abuse, education, and other earned benefits. So right there. How to get the toolkit. We have a limited supply of these right now, so the final printed copies as we have them here will be available to designated department representatives in the communications office. We've got a list, so commanders and agitants can come pick it up. There's four per department at this point. Communications office, governor's square 11. So feel free to stop by and pick up your copies. You can also download it online right here under toolkit. You can download it and print as many copies as your heart desires. So onto service. I'm sure those of you who saw Gary's presentation earlier saw some of the videos that we've helped put together. It's something that's a little bit new, a little bit different that we're trying to kind of provide a different sort of support for them. It's a little bit more shareable, a little bit more easy to understand and some complex content. The VA doesn't want your napkins video, very humorous. Everybody seemed to enjoy that real crowd pleaser. That was the brainchild of our very own Todd Hunter who got up here was one of our highest shared videos for a point in time, wasn't it? Yes. Yeah, I mean it was very highly shared, very highly viewed, picked up by a number of different online sites and blogs. It was picked up by VA. It was picked up by task and purpose. It was picked up by text vet among many, many others. I mean just to give you an idea of the impact of our video content between June and August of this year where our Facebook videos were viewed more than 2.1 million times. So having that real accessible content right there in front of your faces, it's a very valuable tool. This is the other video that we're just kind of getting into this series. We just, you just saw it yesterday for the first time anywhere, or I'm sorry, this morning in Gary's speech. It's a new series we're looking at to produce again kind of those complex ideas and benefits-based topics into short 60 to 90 second segments. We're looking at other topics. So this was who should file a VA claim, but we're looking at other topics to include things like how to file a VA claim and how the VA calculates disability ratings, things that real kind of out there concepts that might not be easily grasped, but make them short and easily digestible and very shareable just so we can get more people to watch all the way through and get our message. And lastly, and this kind of follows up with everything that we do here. Share your story is something we've been doing for a while, but we kind of put a little bit more focus on it at the Shares Midwinter Conference. We had a video sharing booth outside some of the conference areas. So we could have veterans and caregivers come up, sit down and share their experiences, share their stories. Again, particularly focusing on caregivers and women veterans for this point in time because those were our two legislative priorities. But sharing your stories helps to drive positive change in both service and legislation. This tool helps us better illustrate the personal impact that these specific issues have on veterans and their families and we're able to take your testimonials and make them into communications that are more relatable and then in that, in turn makes them more impactful. So we also have day in and day out, we get reporters that call looking for specific veterans to speak with. If they wanna speak with a woman veteran who's used maternity care at the VA, if they wanna speak with an amputee who also has developed diabetes, something like that, just very specific requests and it's very helpful for us to have database collected of your stories, of your information because we know that you're gonna go and talk to these reporters and you're gonna share the DAB message as well as your own story. That's a very valuable thing to have. So certainly, if you or someone you know has a story to tell, feel free to come see us or route through the website. And we're looking to incorporate more video testimonials so hopefully over the next year we can incorporate this into some different areas but it would be great to allow you to do a quick webcam video, quick cell phone video, something like that. So it's easy for you to produce, it's easy for us to collect and then it's easy for us to share. So in short, I think we're all here for the exact same reason to achieve the same mission and that's to help make life better for veterans and their families. And when it comes to something like Share Your Story you really have no idea the impact that sharing your story can have not only on members of Congress, on John Doe American, but most importantly on your fellow veterans. It means a great deal to them and I think that that's, if you take nothing else away from this you know that sharing your story and it's a very personal experience but it helps them connect, it helps them realize that resources are available, helps them know that they're not alone and that DAB is here for them. So I highly encourage you to look for those opportunities to share your stories and help our communications team better tell them. So our lines are always open, feel free to call or email with any questions you may have. And yeah, turn it back to me. Yeah, come on. You know, it's awesome for, it was what it's been four or five years I think and we had a Commanders and Agitents Association meeting and someone said, well, you know, you're talking about there's never enough women veterans content in DAV magazine and I sat there and I said, well, we're trying to do a better job of that. They said, well, you don't even have any women on your staff and I'm glad that we have three women veterans on our staff who are extremely strong, proficient people along with all of our staff. We're, we're, we have just a great team. Steve Wilson, like I said before, Steve's retired Air Force, Steve trained public affairs officers for a living, teaching officers how to talk is a very amazing skill. You know, if you can, and Steve, Steve does a great job, great job with his classes. If you, if you get a chance to go, please go tomorrow. Joe Cinelli, combat veteran, amazing, one of the brightest minds in all the social networking, especially on the charity space. Joe is, Joe, we're, it's awesome to have so many people who are too very versatile and Joe's incredibly versatile. He contributes in so many different ways, but truly DAV's top status as the number one in veteran service organizations, the number one page is due to Steve's diligence. I mean, or Steve Joe's diligence. We're adding a new staff member in Cold Spring. His name is Brian Let. He'll be joining the team shortly after we get back from convention, but we're a little bit stronger now than we have been in a long time, which is great because we've been taking on so much more all the time. How many of you enjoyed our convention presentation this year? The way it went. I'm glad. I want you to know if you have feedback on anything we do at any time, please, please let us know. I had a couple other things to say. We did the videos to support service in particular. Services, of course, are flagship function. That's why we exist. But getting people to volunteer for DAV and getting people to join DAV as a service also, and we'll be doing more to support your volunteer efforts. I would say to look in, I don't know, probably the next six or eight months for a letter and a press release template that you can use to engage volunteers. The media doesn't want to hear veterans, well, I don't want to hear veterans whining. If it sounds like we're whining, we're not doing our job. We do, though, want to say that volunteerism is down. It's a fact. We're dealing with retirees, folks who are of retirement age in the Vietnam generation who aren't retiring. Baby boomers aren't retiring like on time to become volunteers and contribute. So we need to do everything we can to boost our support of John Klein-Dietz and his team. And so getting HSCs who recognize that you have a shortage of volunteers and giving you the tool so that you can send out a release and talk to people and say, look how rewarding it is to get veterans to and from their medical appointments, to make veterans smile in a hospital when you're helping them out. We want to get those stories out too. We don't want to sound like we're whining, but we want to make people aware of the opportunity and that there's a shortage. Same thing for membership. I think the Veterans Pulse Survey is a great thing in terms of boosting awareness of DAV, the better our awareness is, the better our membership's going to be. These web resources that Ashley talked about, it's a huge thing, it's a hugely important to us that you are well-versed in the subjects in which we are experts. So we're trying to get more of this kind of stuff out there. A lot of it's going to be digital because it's so doggone expensive to print and mail something. A lot of it's digital. If you have a super hard time with that, I'll help you out. I'll try and help you out. Maybe I'll fax it to you or something, but we'll figure something out and we'll get the information out there. Telling your stories, part of that, just in case, so you know, we're trying to maintain a database of people that we can call on when we need them for different media stories. And so that's really why that tool was developed. It'll help us with service stories as well, but you can encourage people to do that anytime you're doing all your great media stuff. So we've spoken as fast as auctioneers today, but we want, if any of you have questions, we would really like to talk. I know some of you probably have some specific things that you want to address and we'll stay up here head out to the hallway for Doug's sake and talk a little bit more coming out of this. I know Joe's got to go in a little bit for a thing that he's working on, but Joe's contact information is right here. He loves it. Every time I give his cell phone out. I have some cards up here as well. Joe has some cards that'll leave up here too.