YEAR OF THE CHAPTER; IT’S ABOUT YOU

At this year’s Council Presidents’ Seminar, we spent several hours discussing the Year of the Chapter with our council and chapter leaders. MOAA chairman Gen. Michael P.C. Carns,
USAF-Ret., announced the launch of the Year of the Chapter in the February 2008 issue of Military Officer. This important effort now has been extended to include 2008 and 2009 to allow
us to accomplish even more in strengthening our chapter system.

The most important goal during the Year of the Chapter is recruiting new members for our chapter system. In our view, the biggest single group of potential chapter members is the more
than 290,000 MOAA non-chapter members. National MOAA will focus on “pushing” these members toward joining a chapter, and we’ll take actions to better complement your own recruiting efforts to “pull” them into chapters - with the end result being a significant increase in new chapter members.

Important to this effort will be refocusing the Give Me 10! program to emphasize new chapter members. Key to this will be incentives to get non-chapter members to join chapters and keep
current chapter members in chapters.

The first incentive has just been approved by our board of directors and will be implemented April 1. MOAA now is offeringa 10 percent discount to all chapter members who convert their
memberships to Life Memberships after April 1, 2008, by calling MOAA’s Member Service Center (1-800-234-6622). Better still, the chapter gets Give Me 10! credit for each conversion.

This same discount will be available to MOAA members who join your chapter after April 1 and call the Member Service Center. More details on the implementation of this exciting new
incentive will be published shortly.

We’ve planned and executed the Council Presidents’ Seminar here in Alexandria, Va., in April, and the Chapter Presidents’ Symposium in Grapevine, Texas, in October. Both events were very
successful. Our council and chapter leaders know how important they are to the association, and we gave them the latest information and tools to help them manage their councils and
chapters.

We’ve also heard a lot from you after visiting many councils and chapters across the country. Now we’re looking at all these inputs as we plan our actions for next year. So stay tuned.

Col. Lee Lange II, USMC-Ret.
Director, MOAA Council and Chapter Affairs

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