'Marching orders' from the members

This monthly feature explores ways in which local American Legion posts have increased membership in recent years.

Think of it this way: our members are our shareholders. They may not earn monetary dividends from the post’s efforts, but there should be some type of benefit coming to them. As you develop a strategic business plan for your post, you should be able to link every effort back to members and potential members in the community.

Our post started out by conducting a membership survey to find out what internal and external efforts were most important to our members. We distilled that information into our “marching orders” that we now use to guide all of our efforts so we can report back to our members in an annual teport about how we did at advancing their own objectives.

Here are a few initiatives we worked after listening to our members:

Clean up the post: They love the history of the post, but effort was needed to clean it up. We worked diligently on clearing out stuff that had accumulated over the years and adding fresh coats of paint. This also told us we need to budget more for cleaning and janitorial service.
More weekly events: Members wanted movie nights, yoga and NFL football. We partnered with a yoga instructor to do weekly, free yoga, and marketed on social media that we’ll have the NFL games. Also, because football comes on at 9 a.m. in Alaska, we recruited volunteers to cook brunch and brought our bartenders in early on Sundays during football season.
Advocate for better VA and suicide prevention: Luckily, National Headquarters is making this one easy for us to achieve with passage of the PACT Act and the Be the One program to prevent suicide. We’re also working on resolutions to put on paper any specific issues our members are having with VA. For suicide prevention, we looked at our community to see what others are already doing on this front and then supported them in those efforts. (An opportunity we found is using video games to help prevent suicide, as noted in the January 2023 American Legion Magazine, so now we’re working to make that’s a reality at our post.)

- Laura Dean, adjutant and public relations chairperson at Jack Henry Post 1 in Anchorage, Alaska, which has more than doubled its membership, to over 800, in the last four years