Joe Badal's $1000 donation

• Offered during the San Diego Conference

• Our conferences are the best that he goes to

• Wants us to use the money to grow membership

• If gifting/subsidizing membership, he prefers that recipients have “skin in the game.”

  • Use for discount; i.e., new member pays $10-25, he pays $40-25

  • Maybe they write something first.

• Other possibilities

  • Use for general MWSA advertising (for new members)

  • Use to subsidize “half-off” membership sale. Problem, most new members have a book on the way—would have joined anyway.

  • Offer full-boat membership grants to active duty military (encourage younger membership).

I’d like the board to approve a plan of action during our next board meeting and run it by Joe.

Suggested Plan

○ What: Discount types run concurrently or by month to month and a half (from blast to the end of next month)

○ Types

§ Half-off to WYS

§ Half-off sale for anthology contribution* (if already a member, 6-month extension)

§ Half-off sale for Dispatches article* (")

§ 75%-off (or one-year free trial) for active duty military (verification?)

§ Recruit new at half off, get one-year extension free

§ Limited time upgrade from associate to 1-year for half off

○ How (i.e., must work in WA)

§ Create new level: 1-year special

□ Full membership benefits

□ NO auto acceptance (membership secy approves use of discount codes. Others automatic once payment clears.)

• Dispatches/anthology editors provide discount code after acceptance?

§ Keep track of total discount amount and stop at $1k--or use general funds to continue (after board vote).

2024-25 Conflict of Interest Statement

Our bylaws mandate that board members read and sign a conflict of interest statement each year. You do this via the following steps:

1. Sign in to our admin page (https://www.mwsadispatches.com/mwsa-admin)

2. Click on “Conflict of Interest” (4th line below page title—takes you to the bottom of the page)

3. Read the Conflict of Interest document

4. Click the black “Annual Conflict of Interest Statement” button to complete your annual sign-off form.

View fullsize

Click to see a larger image of this screenshot

Complete (as of 11/18/24): Bob Doerr, Val Ormond, Jim Tritten, and John Cathcart

Write Your Story (WYS)

Program Goals & Overview

• Encourage and educate veterans via face-to-face sessions

• Part of our Veterans’ Outreach Program (https://www.mwsadispatches.com/veterans-outreach)

• Primarily hosted just before our annual membership conference each year

2024 WYS in San Diego

• Val Ormond’s After Action Report

Discussion Items

• Is this program within the scope of our mission?

  • Nearly all current and former board members say, “Absolutely!”

• Cost/Benefit

  • Val mentions that it’s hard to measure but fully supports

  • John agrees with Val, and I think continued support via our budget at similar levels is justified—especially in light of our large/comfortable cash balance. Also, agree that this program would be a great target for corporate sponsorship.

2025 Anthology

Issues

• Would you like to have an entry page like Dispatches on the website?

• Are we ready to start soliciting inputs by 1 Dec (with or without the entry page)?

  • Right now, our contact page sends folks to the Dispatches page for the anthology.

Background & Details

Submission Guidelines: https://www.mwsadispatches.com/mwsa-news/2024/11/mwsa-2025-anthology-submission-guidelines

Request for Proposals: Request for Proposals: Military Writers Society of America (MWSA) 2025 Anthology — Military Writers Society of America

(Older) From Bob:

We need a title that would be relevant to the content/submissions. I am terrible at coming up with titles. Snapshots and Untold Stories are two of our past titles. Both of which were good ones. We normally want our members to write about their experiences or the experiences of someone close to them. Any thoughts on a title?

I would like to open the submission window by Dec 1 and close it by Apr 1. Getting submissions has never been a problem. Finding a publisher could be. We should be able to just cut and paste the Request for Proposals we used for the last anthology and disseminate it as widely as possible. If we can get the final draft to the publisher by Apr 15, we should be able to get it published by Aug 15.

I'll work on finding editor/reviewers to help out, but we'll stipulate the submission should be ready to go before being submitted to us. The submissions will be short so reviewing them usually doesn't take much time.

Please send me your thoughts, so I can give the board more answers than questions at our meeting. Thanks - Bob D

• Title/Content

• Editor Volunteers

• Publisher

2025 Conference

Location and Date

• UPDATE (12/9): Poll results (25 participants)

  • Click for Poll Summary

  • Location tally

    • Nashville 9 45% (Jim can’t attend here)

    • Dallas 7 35%

    • Kansas City 4 20 % (Rob lives nearby and has offered to help with planning)

• UPDATE (11/26/24). Only four board members provided input to our methodology, so we’re moving ahead with a poll to ask for input.

  • Only those who plan to attend (plus “maybes”) will be asked to vote.

  • We’ll ask for input on content, cost, and activities during the conference and MWSA programs and benefits (open to all).

  • We’ll take member input to fix and approve the location during our Dec 11 board meeting.

• San Diego, so now mid or east

  • We traditionally alternate West of Mississippi, East of MS, central US

  • Last 8 conferences:

    • San Diego, CA

    • New London, CT

    • New Orleans, LA

    • Virtual (Covid)

    • “

    • Albuquerque, NM (joint w SWW)

    • Charleston, SC

    • San Antonio, TX

• Top 3 from conf survey: Nashville, Kansas City, Dallas

  • In the conference survey spreadsheet below, click on “Location Tally” (at the bottom of the spreadsheet) to see the results from San Diego attendees.

• Vote by membership on location and/or date

  • If we’re soliciting input on the date, I’d ask for a date range: i.e., end of Sept, or mid-Oct, or early November, etc.)

  • Date range constrained by awards schedule—earlier than mid-September tough-to-impossible. December is too busy. Also, need to allow time for travel planning for awards finalists.

• We need to nail down the location and date soon to allow planning

  • My preference is to have our membership vote by the end of THIS MONTH (November), approve in our Dec 11 meeting, and announce after approval.

• Organizer? Cathcart if no one else wants to run it.

---

2024 Conference Survey

Budget

12/6 Finance Committee Meeting

We agreed to annual deficits of $2000 to as much as $4000-5000 to whittle down the current $48k cash on hand. We further agreed on a target cash cushion of between $10k and $20k. $20k target.

We also agreed to stop segregating funds into separate programs, awards, and operations accounts. While those budget categories will, in effect, be maintained via our budget spreadsheet, we’ll no longer have to transfer funds between accounts to make necessary payments. We’ll also stop keeping the running totals of each account separately. As a result, from now on, the treasurer will report overall cash on hand (not broken down by the three accounts).

Regarding the 2025 conference, we:

• Agreed to a new budget line item of “support to conferences” (paid via general funds instead of conference registration fees)

• Included under this new line item (total estimated $2699):

• Hotel subsidies to board members working during the conference from general funds (estimated at $1500).

• $250 for a videographer during the awards banquet

• A possible subsidy to conference presenters. We agreed that if we could figure out a practical way of providing a 10% subsidy of registration fees (approx. cost $413), we’d present more accurate numbers and methodology to the board for their consideration and approval.

• $500 to cover any excess conference costs not covered/anticipated by the total income from registration fees.

• The reimbursement for the hotel and conference fee to the awards director (s) was not included in the new line item because this expense is listed as part of the awards budget (and covered by awards submission fees).

• Committee members will scrub existing line items in current budget spreadsheet. Hugh will align QuickBooks with these categories.

Action Items (for the above FinComm meeting)

• Budget Spreadsheet

  • Agree to spreadsheet format

  • one for the finance committee and board, another for public/membership

• Ways to address deficit spending

• Ways to address “robust” cash on hand… i.e., deficit spending!

• Create 2025 budget plan and submit for board vote by the 11 Dec meeting.