Clarifying for folks, I use that "crazy" term a lot in my talks, and it's definitely meant light-heartedly. It's a term of endearment. Without all you crazy people, our schools would suffer immensely.

Tim

It's nice to know that you think I'm crazy, but you're not alone everyone thinks I am.

I guess, since we all get along as a group, are open to all new ideas(and act on them), have all of our programs sell out and have 97% of our families signed up as members, I really can't complain can I. Maybe I just don't like talking to the same 9 people month after month. I want to see just 1 new face every now & then. It's not too much to ask is it?

We'll keep Craig around a while longer, I guess. He's our editor-in-chief of the magazine, too. Does a great job.

Hear ya on A& E vendors. We always put the invites out there. The booths are sold basically first-come, first-served. We've got to get those A&E folks answering more quickly.

Now.... on to your meeting question. Honestly, I think it's the wrong question. If you have great events and more volunteers than you know what to do with, then why do you care if they're not coming to your meetings? I talked about this quite a bit yesterday.

Find other ways to make sure folks feel empowered and make sure folks' opinions and input are valued, but my basic point was: if you're measuring your success based on the attendance at your meetings, then you're measuring the wrong things.

Folks who attend meetings by-and-large are the crazy people (like you) who get really, really engaged with your group and move up to (or are heading toward) leadership. If you want to increase meeting attendance, increase the number of people who are truly, deeply engaged with your group. It's not going to be 75 people at your meetings. But if you have 10 attendees now, and you get to 15 -- that's a 50% increase in top-level leadership. Huge.

Good luck,

Tim

Hey Tim, I have to tell you that the conference was very enlightening. The only thing that I was a little disappointed in was that while you had a good number of fundraising companies there, you didn't have many assembly/program type vendors there. You may need to have someone work on that for next year.

Now for the good stuff- while all of the breakout sessions that I attended were informative the best one was the newsletter one. Even though Craig is Mr. Mellow, he is THE NEWSLETTER KING. Ask him a question and be ready because he tells all! On that one session alone I gotmore than my monies worth!You might want to keep him around he really knows his stuff!

Being that I am the Nancy Healy of our group(although you may not believe it but I am) and I don't have a volunteer problem at all(in fact I have too many volunteers and they complain I don't use them enough)my only problem (which I am grateful it's my only one)is how do I get people to my meetings? You really didn't tell me how to go about sucking them in. I'm just going to go outside and drag their sorry butts into my meetings!!! Or since all of our programs are always sold out I can pretend its a program and then surprise them with a meeting instead.

Anyway, you and your staff did a wonderful job!!pats on the back for everybody!!