August 2002 President's Corner

Bob Schultz '71, USNAAA Atlanta Chapter President

This past May, I attended the annual Chapter President’s meeting that was held in Annapolis.  It was great to see the Yard and “Mother B.” again.  (Even got pictures of me and Linda pretending to climb Herndon!)  During the same weekend the Chapter Trustees meeting was held as well, which was attended by our Chapter trustee Bill Rentz ’55.  The two days of meetings were very productive and informative.

I think that some of the most important information that we can pass on to our Chapter members is the information put forth in the address by USNA Alumni Association President and CEO George P. Watt, Jr. ’73.  The information that George provided regarding membership, member services, advocacy, financial prowess, and impact and relevance is something that all alumni need to be aware of.

As such, reprinted herein is the entire transcript of President Watt’s remarks.  Though long, please take the time to read these remarks carefully and absorb their full content since, as USNA alumni, they directly affect us all.

Remarks by George P. Watt, Jr.
President/CEO, USNA Alumni Association
To the Board of Trustees
May 3, 2002

When I’m with any audience I talk about our vision, our mission, our goals, what we're trying to achieve together: Growth through partnership and synergy. This requires a partnership of the Naval Academy, the Alumni Association and Foundation, parents, Admissions, NAAA, Blue and Gold officers, grad and non-grad alums, friends of the Naval Academy . . . It’s all of us joining together synergistically providing an outcome that is far greater than the contribution would be of our individual parts. I thank this board for giving me the support in that vision.

I shared those goals with you a year and a half ago. I told you we’d have five big hairy audacious goals. Last fall, the Plan 2010 team endorsed them. These are not small goals; all of them are stretch goals. Let’s review the bidding: Growth in membership. Growth in member services—not only the number of services we provide, but the value of the services as perceived by the alums and members of the Alumni Association, and frankly by our donors, who should also expect good service. Growth in informed advocates. Growing our base of informed advocates will mean that there are more of us out there than just the alumni graduate crowd to tell the Naval Academy story. Growth in financial prowess, which not only includes sound expense management, not only includes sound investment management, and not only includes generating non-dues revenues for the Alumni Association, but also includes creating a sustaining capability for the generation of private funding for strategic needs at the Naval Academy and mission critical programs of the Alumni Association. Finally, and this was the number 1 goal as ranked by the Plan 2010 ad hoc team, growth in our impact, our import, and our relevance. That’s relevance to our constituency, relevance to our members, and especially relevance to the alma mater and the institution that our mission says we are here to support.

MEMBERSHIP

As I stand before you today, your Naval Academy Alumni Association has 46,500 total members, give or take 10 or 15. I sign, unfortunately, some 20 to 25 obituary letters about every two weeks. However, many of those widows stay on with us because their husbands were life members. They remain with us. We have widow membership, associate membership, regular membership, honorary membership, a total of 46,500. To put that in perspective, when I arrived here in April of 2000 I asked for the membership list, and it was given to me as of the end of December 1999. We were just under 38,000 members. So you know, we did a one-time activation of second class Midshipmen in 2000.  The first class obviously became members as they graduated. We did a one-time activation of second class Midshipmen so that first class and second class Midshipmen receive Shipmate. If you back out that one-time midshipman initiative, then our real net growth has been 7,500 members in two years. Am I happy with that? Delighted. Am I satisfied? Absolutely not. Our stated goal is 60,000 members by December 31, 2005. We’ve got a team aligned to it, we’ve got classes aligned to it, and we’ve got chapters aligned to it.

Two chapters got the message, took it to heart, and said they were going to do something about it, and achieved an incredible double-digit growth in 2001, each earning a seat on the new board. They are the Annapolis and Los Angeles chapters. Other chapters have grown also, and our chapter membership now is just around 11,000.

We’re also growing in the number of chapters; not just the number of folks in the chapters. We currently have 85 chapters. I don’t see why we can’t have 100 chapters or more worldwide, and a parents club sitting right alongside every one of those metropolitan areas.  This way we achieve the synergy of alumni and others vested in the Naval Academy working together as informed advocates. On the other hand, those 85 chapters only represent some 11,000 of our 46,500 members. The chapter presidents and I are not satisfied with that. As the chapters grow, in number and size, the national association grows. Growth is our lifeblood because membership is required to be a viable association.

Thank you to several classes, far more than I can mention, for holding membership drives last year. Their focus was not in only converting annual members to life members, but also in finding classmates whose memberships had lapsed and finding classmates who, for some reason, had never been afforded the privilege of membership in their Alumni Association. I want to single out two classes, ’43 and ’73. Both classes are now at 100% class membership. The class officers agreed to buy each non-member classmate a one-year annual membership. We have written each new member a letter welcoming them, and it is now our responsibility to keep them by providing them value added services and a reason to be a member of the Alumni Association.

MEMBER SERVICES

Remember the goal was not just more services, but also value added service and increasing the perceived added value. If you look at great institutions, the way they bind their alumni to the institution is by taking care of their own, making sure that their own get a first step in a career or an opportunity for an open door. I got the opportunity to work for IBM because a class of ’64 graduate took an interest in me when I was a Lieutenant in the Navy and knew I was going to resign my active duty commission. He not only got me an interview at IBM, he got me an interview in a reserve squadron, which wasn’t taking anybody at the time. I got into IBM and into the reserve squadron because a Naval Academy graduate felt very strongly about taking care of our own. Now we’ve systematized it.

Dave Church and Sally Fletcher are running an organization called career programs. This is not an early out opportunity.  This is an opportunity to take care of our grads whether they’re at their five-year point out of the Academy, their 15-year point, 30-year point or in mid-career transition. As an example of the success of the program, we just held the Service Academy Career Conference in Arlington, VA.  We sponsor the conference along with West Point, Air Force and Merchant Marine Academy.  We had 50 companies pay to come and be a part of this and to talk to service academy graduates. The Naval Academy had the most candidates there, over 500. That’s the most we’ve had in over four years. To put it in perspective, our last big conference was in April of ’01, which included 65 companies and 498 candidates. The soft market in 2001, and then the events of September 11 caused us to cancel two conferences last year. That program is back.  It’s greatly appreciated; it’s considered value added, and it provides essential non-dues revenues to the Alumni Association.

We have made tremendous progress in information management.  What pays for information management, what pays for the web, what pays for our Internet service, for that matter, what pays for Shipmate? Not dues. Dues don’t even cover the cost of shipping each member 10 issues a year. We’re paying for this with the gift of unrestricted funds. So we’re very, very conscious that unrestricted dollars go toward those mission critical programs that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Electronic information is one such program. We just announced a brand new service called ClassMail. The generic name for it is e-mail forwarding. It allows every one of us who is a life member to have lifetime e-mail here at the Alumni Association. You set up your e-mail one time, then all your classmates, all your friends, anyone who knows that e-mail address will find you wherever you go in life as long as you remember to put the forwarding address behind it. That means we don’t have to change our distribution every time you change from AOL to Compaq or IBM.net or att.net, etc.

Alumni Profile is now live on www.usna.com. We have over 12,000 registrants, and we’re getting hundreds more every day. In March 2002 we had 23,000 unique visitors to the web site. That’s one of our highest numbers of visitors, which means people are coming to it and coming back, because we’re providing more and more of our information through that web site. Shipmate is always going to be available to you, but it is not a news magazine, so we’re using the web for the timely distribution of news. We also use Flashnet to over 24,000 constituents to broadcast announcements. We now have online reunion services. We tested that capability in 2001 with the class of ’96. They did their entire reunion online. All the payments, everything, were conducted in a secure environment. Five more classes are going to do it in 2002. We’re now testing chapter and classes for what we call online community. The class of ’80 and the Philadelphia chapter are helping us with that. In short, information management has web-enabled the Alumni Association. It is up to all of us to take advantage of it

INFORMED ADVOCATES

Informed advocates are informed members, informed graduates, informed parents, informed blue and gold officers, informed leadership in the yard. I envision 60,000;  70,000;  80,000—in fact there is no ceiling on how many informed advocates we can have across the country for the Naval Academy. But we ought to start with our 50,000 living graduates. When the class of 2002 graduates on May 24, for the first time in Naval Academy history we will have over 50,000 living graduates. Along with the folks at Leahy Hall, along with the Superintendent, through our chapters, and through our classes we have been able to be part of an incredible positive trend over the last four years in increasing the number of candidates, more importantly the number of qualified candidates, and most importantly the quality of the incoming class. We’re doing this through a program called candidate awareness representative (CAR). Terry Murray intends to hire a full-time staff member, the first net addition to staff since I’ve come here, whose primary responsibility will be keeping with the recommendations of the admission standing committee led by Brad Mooney.

The other part of informed advocacy is communications. Communications starts with us. We should be your source for the content and the context that you require to be informed advocates. It is my intention to bombard the airways with the positive, to bombard the airways with the facts, and help you, help me, help Admiral Smith, help the Superintendent, debunk the mythology and debunk those who only dwell on the negatives. The story of the Naval Academy is a great story to tell. Whether you’re a graduate or a parent or a Congressman or school superintendent, there’s a great story to tell here and you should take immense pride in telling it. Those of you who live in other communities outside of Annapolis, you are our spokespeople; you are the informed advocates we’re counting on. We need to get you more information, we need to get it to you in a more timely manner, and we need to attack the issues. We know what the issues are, and we know what the facts are surrounding those issues. Skid and I and the Naval Academy are committed to working together in giving you that content and context. We’ll get it to you electronically, through fax, Shipmate, and we’ll post it on the web site.  But I intend to continue to use a collective called alumni leadership. So rather than try to communicate to 46,500 members, I intend to communicate to you, board members; to you, class presidents; to you, chapter presidents; to parent club presidents. We intend to copy the class scribes; we intend to copy the chapter secretaries. So there’s no excuse. You can’t say you didn’t get the word. You can say we didn’t do our job in getting you timely context and content, but when we do get it out to you, we need you to help us to create a more informed advocacy for the Naval Academy frankly, for this Alumni Association and Foundation, and, to be very candid, to be advocates for the most comprehensive campaign in Naval Academy history.

FINANCIAL PROWESS

I am a fiscal conservative. I’m very excited about what we’ve done in the financial area to create interdependency and strength for a consolidated Alumni Association and Foundation. We’ve realized double digit growth in revenue in the last year and double digit growth in our net assets. Despite modest gains in our total annual donor base, total giving has increased significantly over 2000 and 1999 levels. Additionally, those funds that we hold for the Naval Academy—to fund program initiatives—have doubled in the last year. This is unprecedented growth. Our proposed budget going forward will show a flat expense budget. We have remained flat for at least the two years I’ve been here. The only dollars that have been added were to the Foundation for professional staff members that were approved two years ago by the board, and we’re finally getting a full complement on the Foundation development staff.

If we had finished our year in 2001 in December as originally planned when we budgeted it, you would have seen a $785,000 reserve on a consolidated basis, a surplus of over $400,000 beyond what we budgeted in the toughest financial year of the last eight years.  This was a year where we had to take out about $1 million of expenses with six months to go. We pulled it off because your management team focused on expense, knowing the revenues were at risk due to all of the events of 2001.

IMPACT, IMPORT AND RELEVANCE

And finally, we come to impact, import and relevance to our constituency and to the Naval Academy. At the last Superintendent’s strategic offsite session for his leadership team, he left three of his direct staff members at home to provide a seat at the table for four members of the Alumni Association and Foundation leadership team. That has never happened before. Four of us sat with the Superintendent and his direct reports at an Eastern Shore offsite and discussed how to maintain excellence and maintain the margin of excellence at the Naval Academy and find the appropriate goal for alumni and donors and friends and graduates. So we are relevant to the Naval Academy. We’re becoming more relevant to the members.  I believe that’s why we’re seeing membership growth, and why we’re retaining our members. However, we must do more to achieve 60,000 members by 2005.

Leaders to Serve the Nation

This campaign is the most audacious, the largest, and the most comprehensive campaign in Naval Academy history. The largest campaign before this one was to build Alumni Hall. $17.5 million was collected from alumni, from friends, and from a few corporations. It took us over six years to collect that $17.5 million. We quietly and thoughtfully launched the current campaign on July 1, 1999, coincident with the Superintendent’s Strategic Plan. We approached leadership givers, asked them what could they do to get us to a point where we could go public. We decided to make our goal $175 million by December of 2005. We launched on June 9, 2001, with exactly $70.25 million in hand in commitments. I’m proud to announce that as of April 30th, 2002, not even a year after going public, we have $103.7 million in total commitments. Over half of that has already been received in cash. There is a myth out there that we cannot raise private dollars for the Naval Academy; there is a myth that Naval Academy graduates would not give to the Naval Academy; there is a myth that a federally funded organization didn’t need private dollars and couldn’t get it. We’ve shattered those myths. We’re well above our power curve, still climbing, still flying straight.

Thank You!

That’s my report on our goals. I hope you agree that the decision to “amalgamate” two years ago was a wise one. Had we not come together I don’t think we could have the focus, this relentless focus on mission. Had we not amalgamated, had we not gotten rid of the diffusion of our efforts, had we not gotten rid of the confusion of our constituency, we would not be dramatically increasing our fundraising capability at the Foundation and we would not be serving our members nor the Naval Academy.

Our collective challenge remains one of communication. I will accept my role in that; I will ask you as board members and leaders of our alumni to accept yours. Thanks again for the support you’ve given us in mission and vision and goals. I ask you to continue that support. I believe that enthusiasm is a force multiplier. With enthusiastic support we will create over 70,000 informed advocates, we will exceed our 60,000 membership goal and we will far exceed $175 million in the Naval Academy Campaign.

Go Navy!

George P. Watt, Jr.

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