I have been tasked by my Squadron Commander to come up with ideas for recruiting. Currently, we have a good handful of SM's, but our Cadet membership is not as promising. So, my Commander suggested doing an Open House/Recruiting Day where we can have prospective members come and see what CAP is about. What suggestions or advice does anyone have to help me in planning this for a successful drive?
Might I add: the day is supposed to be in early September, hopefully we have enough time!
Semper Vigilans,
Lt. Provost
My squadron usually does three sections AE, ES, and CP. This year we are going to have some activities in each section to interest prospective cadets and also have someone to talk to the parents about how great CAP is and how it benefits their children. This year we are going to try and get advertisments in local papers. For ES we have some gear the prospectives can check out and try on and maybe do some demonstrations. For cadet programs we do a type of team building activity they participate can participate in. Their is plenty of interesting things you can do for AE activities. You should have plenty of time to plan for an open house. You can also try to get a recruiting booth into a local school. If you want to I can let you know exactly what we plan to do this year at my squadron, I'm sure you can figure out how to contact me.
Although this doesn't address your immediate question, I recommend that you make sure that you have a viable program to plug your new recruits in to. If you don't, you'll lose them AND have to deal with the effects of any poor reports they might happen to spread among future potential recruits.
Good advice, I'll make sure we plan accordingly.
Lt. Provost
There is an excellent guide to running an open house on CadetStuff, here (http://www.cadetstuff.org/archives/000113.html#000113).