Any Wing level Recruiting and Retention Officers?
Many wing PAO's double as the R&R officer. Personally, I do not. In a smaller wing, I can see that working, as the 2 are somewhat related. In larger wings, it''s just not realistic to have the same person doing both because of time requirements.
I had that job several years ago.
It really came in handy when there were prospective members who access the NHQ or wing website for information about CAP. I just simply contacted them with information on their local units and cc'd the unit commander who (if they did their job) would also contact them. This kind of centeralized the whole process and took the load off those who were already working hard at their jobs.
It was easy work but really helped in an area that was needed...Recruiting!
Anybody have any ideas on large scale recruiting events?
Quote from: stillamarine on May 21, 2012, 07:37:43 PM
Anybody have any ideas on large scale recruiting events?
Like an air show/military base open house provides the largest recruiting opportunity for a group that likely is interested in aviation and the military.
Our squadron for many years had an exhibit at the largest New England Fair "The Big E" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_E (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_E) and this was in the Youth/Crafts building. The requirement was that it had to be staffed from 1000 to 2200 hrs local daily for two weeks, with at least two people in the information booth, and our recruiting results over the years just didn't justify that amount of volunteer time. This fair has over 1 million visitors during its' 14 day run.
Probably public safety type open house/information events would be another good recruiting venue.
RM
When you say "large scale recruiting event" do you mean a large-scale single event, or a large-scale recruiting campaign?
Airshows, etc are probably going to be the largest event you can realistically do. I've never seen a wing do a large-scale campaign that included advertising, coordination to hit all the airshows, mass mailings, targeted recruiting at middle-schools, airports, Chambers of Commerce, etc.
However, I see the R&R Officer to be responsible for establishing some sort of program that exercises all those options.
From what I've observed after some research, many Wing R&R positions are just people filling a slot. There has been no real effort by National since about 2002 to provide tools for the R&R staff. The last major Wing R&R effort was in Florida Wing in the mid-1960's, later a Southeast Region effort. It was very successful providing a 17% increase in membership on the Region level and a 22% increase in Florida Wing. I believe Arizona Wing followed that up in the early 1970's as a Wing level R&R program.
In 2002 National produced a CD that was valuable for recruiting. It ran 11 minutes than repeated. Ideal for a laptop on a recruiting table at events or in middle school recruiting efforts. But nothing has been produced by National since then other than the short PSA type videos. During the 1950's CAP was lucky in that the USAF Film Production unit produced sevela one hour films on various aspects of CAP such as "Accent on Youth". LCol. Jim Shaw has collected several of them and is in the process of getting the 16mm films transferred to DVD.