Staffing: Hannah Kennedy has fully transitioned to Operations Director, which will result in a substantial reduction in monthly staff expenses going forward.
Freedom Fest: Chair Evan McMahon and I will be attending Freedom Fest this week. Evan was offered a speaking slot on a panel and a free sponsor package including a booth. Since this was not budgeted for, Evan and I are covering our own expenses.
LP News: The first issue of LP News has been printed and is ready to be mailed. We ran into a delay with the Post Office – we needed to register the Houston address that will be receiving returns from the mailing as a valid address for our non-profit permit. Everything requested has been submitted – we are just waiting for the local post office to receive confirmation. We anticipate that will happen Monday. We raised over $5,500 of the $6,000 cost online – the remaining $500 is being sent by check. $760 of that is in recurring monthly donations, so we have 1/8 of every issue prefunded, We have already assembled a significant portion of the content for the next issue – we plan to send that to the printer right after we return from Freedom Fest.
Direct Mail: The direct mail letter mentioned in my last report is also at the post office, held up by the same return address issue. It should also be mailed on Monday. The lapsed member letter is at the printer. A temporary renewal letter was drafted for the 1 month lapsed and 3 months in advance mailings this month – the entire renewal process is being revamped to try to boost returns.
Communications: Comms has been busy responding to GOP attacks on our candidates in Iowa, New Jersey, and Florida. The Iowa attacks have been covered by the Washington Post, CNN, the Des Moines Register, the Gazette, Radio Iowa, KGAN, Iowa Capital Dispatch, Little Village Magazine, MSN, Sioux City Journal, and The Daily Beast. The lawsuit to kick our candidate off the ballot in Florida was dismissed with predjudice. The Secretary of State in NJ overruled the state election board and ordered our candidate placed on the ballot. The GOP has said they will appeal. We sent out emails asking members to support our candidates in NJ and FL – Iowa said they did not require additional support. Comms has installed Buffer to handle our social media posts to protect against rogue posts. Volunteers can prepare and stage posts, but they have to be approved before they go live. We were not been able to send out op-eds weekly in June as planned due to competing demands on the chair’s time, but that remains our goal.
Store: We are regularly adding new items to the store, which are generating additional sales.
Ballot Access: Ballot drives are underway in Massachusetts and Maryland. Massachusetts should be completed prior to the July 28 deadline. Maryland should take 8-10 weeks at the present rate of signature gathering, so we are likely looking at completing the drive in early September. Signatures are being checked and counted by individuals with the local affiliate to avoid paying for signatures that are clearly invalid. In the case of Massachusetts where we are paying petitioners directly, petitioners who fall below established validity rates will have to collect and submit additional signatures to make up the shortfall.
Monthly Membership Report: I expect to receive this tomorrow. I will forward it to the list after I review it for errors.
Membership Cards and Pins: Iris Poole has all of the materials – we are working to get the printer software installed for the printer. Both the printer and software are old. We have a permanent license for the software, so we are hoping to get that to work. If not, the updated version requires an annual payment. We should know in the next few days if we can get the software installed and working on her computer. Matt Hudson is working with a printer to arrange for bulk printing of regular membership cards. Iris will be handling Life Member cards and replacements. We also plan to restart the Membership Card Selfie membership appeals in social media in conjunction with sending out membership cards. Those raised a significant amount of money from 2017-2021.
Weekly Active Membership Reports: I have been made aware of at least one state chair (NY) who has not been getting these reports. I will be checking to see who is currently receiving the reports and correct any known errors. We will also check to verify that all current state chairs are receiving the reports.
Unified Membership Program (UMP): Andy Buchkovich and Canyon Gargon have completed testing of the backend architecture and with a dummy affiliate. Canyon is now working with a real affiliate (Washington State) to make sure everything is working correctly. Once that is confirmed, we will open the program to other states.
CRM: Zoho is currently costing us an average of over $4600/month when you add Zoho Marketing Automation and our Zoho consultant to our base Zoho fee. Andy Buchovich has been working on a system that would eliminate the need for much of that spending. We should have more to report on that in August.
2026 Convention: Payment of the final hotel bills is on hold while the COC chair is negotiating attrition. Those bills will be paid as soon as we receive final bills and approval from the COC chair to pay them. I believe we are also awaiting a W-9 so that we can send an expense reimbursement to one of the speakers. We have also received the drive with the convention video. We will be creating videos of the individual main hall speakers and posting to our You Tube channel.
Unified Membership Program (UMP): The architecture was put in place prior to the convention and the revised unified membership program agreement has been reviewed by Evan and me. I will have one or more interested state chairs review the agreement this week to make sure we didn’t miss anything, then staff will be cleared to set up our systems to handle it. Once that is done, state chairs will be notified that the program is live.
Texting. I am not aware of any progress on texting. Andy and Canyon have been focused on other items described above.
Historical Preservation Committee: We have set up automatic forwarding of anything coming into the LPedia@lp.org group to the HPC gmail address. Email already in the inbox was manually forwarded.
Thank you for your service on the LNC. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.
Also, thank you to all our hard-working staff and volunteers.
Steve Dasbach
Executive Director
steve.dasbach@lp.org
(703) 867-4345
Be First to Comment