PRESIDENTS MESSAGE
Hello VetPartners members! It has been a busy month for our association thanks to YOU!
First of all, I want to thank all of you who have offered words of encouragement and congratulations to me. Your support means so much. Secondly, thank the many of you who have called or emailed with ideas. GREAT IDEAS! I am soaking in all this information and sharing it with the board and our administrator, Meagan. I also appreciate the problems you have shared because this helps us get them fixed. Feel free to reach out to Meagan too. Her email is Admin@VetPartners.org. Since she now has had some time to get up to speed on our association, I have found her to be quick to respond and very efficient in getting problems solved. Don’t forget we now have a TEAM behind us at Capitol Hill so we can utilize them for help.
One of our goals is always to spread the word about how great this association is to potential new members, but also to the people who need our services. To that end we have a new “one pager” that we will be able to share. Thank you Communication Committee for this good work. It will live on our website as a member resource. You will be able to download it and send it out to anyone who wants to know about VetPartners” in a nutshell”. We are always interested in bringing in new members and new sponsors so please share. In addition, we will be working on a yearlong marketing calendar to better target our audiences.
LinkedIn continues to be our biggest social media audience with 14,715 Followers. If you are not following us, please do, and comment on the content. This helps us (and you) gain visibility. We have two Facebook pages, one for the public and the other for member networking. Since we also want to appeal to a younger audience we will soon launch an Instagram account. As all our marketing experts will tell you, interaction helps boost visibility so please post your news to our Networking page and like and share content from the LinkedIn and public facing Facebook pages. You can also “Tag” people who you think may find the content valuable. If you can spend 3 -5 minutes every few days interacting with our pages it would make a vast difference in our reach.
Membership has been busy organizing an informal “hang out” for all members attending WVC. The cost of a formal event was prohibitive but we figured putting out the word to show up at Hazel’s at 5:30 on Monday March 7th would work just as well. So, I hope you will plan to spend some time together. Also, take some pictures and share them on our social pages or with our Communications committee.
Tech SIG has been their usual creative self and are launching monthly Zoom SOCIAL events for all members who want to come for networking and great conversations in break out rooms. Also, be on the lookout for some educational webinars coming in March.
WE NEED YOUR STORIES! I know from personal experience how our members refer and collaborate together, but people outside our organization don’t know how making connections within VetPartners can help them grow their business. We need your stories to share on our social media platforms. Meagan has offered to write the stories if you will simply email or call her and recite them. Here is a personal example to get us started: I was working with a partnership and discovered some serious problems I felt needed a legal mind. I convinced the partners to go to mediation with Debra Vey-Voda Hamilton. Debra worked with them and found these people were incompatible and needed to find an exit out of their partnership. I had felt this, but having Debra confirm it helped me be more confident in guiding the next moves for this practice. Now YOUR TURN…
As President I plan to be very transparent about what is happening in our association. It is important that members are informed and involved in the mission and goals of VetPartners and I want to constantly get your ideas, issues and feedback. You will hear from me a lot through Slack so make sure you have the app and are signed up. Here is a tutorial link. https://youtu.be/m2JuAa6-ors. If you need additional help with Slack reach out to me or Meagan and we will walk you through it. For members who use Slack, you know how helpful it is. For members not yet familiar with Slack, this tool will keep all the conversations flowing in an easily read “thread” rather than using emails which are interspersed between all your other emails. We will be using the Free version since the Pro version would cost us over $2000 per year. We will use Pro for the Board of Directors where at $6.67 per person per year it is affordable. The difference is only how long the messages stay on the Slack app. The free version keeps only 10K before the oldest are delete. Pro keeps them forever. For members who have high security with your companies please “safe list” the Slack messages to make sure you are in the loop.
Cohesiveness is always a challenge in a volunteer organization so to help our committees and SIGS share a common purpose and cross-pollinate their initiatives and projects we have created a group of All Chairs. They will meet monthly to discuss their group’s work and collaborate on how to reach our strategic goals. This idea came from Kelly Baltzell and it was brilliant! I can’t wait to see what good stuff comes from this.
As always, much appreciation to our Premier sponsors CareCredit and Nationwide. Please make a point to thank their representatives personally and to share their company’s information with your clients when appropriate. We appreciate all our sponsors and wish to support them as well as they support us. If you know a company that would like to sponsor our association please connect them with our Opportunities Committee and they will be happy to present our levels and packages.
For those of you attending, enjoy WVC. I hope it is productive and successful.
Keep those ideas and feedback coming!
Deb
