Dear Andre:

As the year draws to an end, I wanted to thank you for all that you do on behalf of your state park or forest. We recently compiled all of the data you submitted to us in your 2022 annual reports, combining it with PPFF data. As the attached report demonstrates, our individual as well as collective work had an incredible impact. 

And speaking of annual reports, the 2023 form is available online in both fillable pdf and Excel forms in the Resources section of the website. There you will also find the conflict of interest policy and the annual form for signature by each member of your chapter's board (as well as a link to a Google form you can complete online).

The inventories of your sale items were very helpful during the auditing process. More importantly, we heard from several groups how informative doing the inventory has been for them to better manage the items that they are selling.

Yours in the Outdoors,

Marci J. Mowery, President

TRAINING 

As you know, the in-person retreat had to be shifted to an online event due to Marci's illness. We sincerely appreciate everyone's willingness to work through the challenges with us.

Video recordings of the Friday session with Walt Remmert of the Department of Agriculture on the Commonwealth's hayride policy and a recording of the Saturday morning session are both available on the YouTube channel and linked through Chapter Resources under the Chapter Training/Videos accordion.

Unfortunately, Pam forgot to click "record" when we came back from lunch break so the afternoon session wasn't kept. 

TRAINING TOO

We are beginning to schedule trainings for 2024 (I can’t believe we are thinking of 2024!). While there will be meetings for all officers, the first training on the books will take place at 6:30 PM on March 7, 2024.

Best Practices for Membership Recruitment & Retention

Join master trainer, Chad Barger, CFRE, ACNP for a webinar on marketing and growing a thriving membership program.  Chad will provide specific, actionable steps that you can take to expand your membership program by both recruiting new members and improving your renewal rate.  Templates and resources will be provided to help attendees implement the recommendations.

Stay tuned as time draws near for registration.

KNOW

Chapters who have been around a long time know that once upon a time we had a relationship with the nonprofit Grassroots and its off-shoot Doodlekit for the creation and hosting of free websites. That relationship has become increasingly shaky over the last few years as Grassroots apparently lost its funding and closed down. 

Word has officially been received from Doodlekit that they will be ceasing operations as of 12/31. I think most of you who had a Doodlekit/Grassroots site know this already because we had a bit of a crisis earlier this year when their servers crashed and folks were unable to access their sites.

If you still have a Doodlekit site, you'll need to take the action suggested by Doodlekit Ben and get your website transitioned to another provider soon. 

In terms of ease of use and low cost, Pam has used Weebly (now a part of SquareSpace) to build a few small simple sites; GoDaddy is also reasonably inexpensive and a one stop shop where you can buy/renew your domain and build a simple site. Strikingly offers a "forever free" plan and some kind of sponsorship for nonprofits. We don't have any experience with it but it does seem to offer some very attractive templates. 

We are exploring the idea of developing a base website that groups can customize, knowing that not every group has a means by which to develop a website. Let us know if this is of interest, so that we know if we want to continue to explore this option.

Know that you all have a page on our website—and that it affords the opportunity for online fundraising and membership recruitment. This page, along with a social media presence, might be enough. While NEON is admittedly limited in terms of content and layout we have worked with a few chapters to customize the information gathered from a donor/member to maximize what might be your initial contact with a new volunteer. Check out how the Friends of Pinchot have added information and links to their base form to garner volunteer interest. 

Get in touch with Pam to explore opportunities for boosting the use of your form in the same (or another) way.

SHARE

Our latest infographic came from several requests that we received. It can be found on the Publications page, along with all of our other infographics. If you have an idea for topic, let us know.

There is still time (deadline: 11/30) to weigh in on the planning for Susquehanna Riverlands State Park at DCNR's survey site.