By Bruce Ross, Executive Director bruceross@wi.rr.com

This article originally appeared in Wisconsin Waterfowl Association’s February, 2021 Volunteer Newsletter edition.

WWA had its best year ever for sales of its annual conservation calendar raffle. Thanks to the efforts of over 70 active sellers, 4700 calendars was sold – a new record!  This is an important source of revenue to sustain our efforts in all of our missions, and importantly, it brings new members into the fold.  In addition to extremely robust face-to-face sales, we leveraged a growing Facebook audience to drive sales.  A big THANK YOU is due to the people who created this year’s calendar, and the people who created the sales to make it a financial success.  This is WWA’s largest fundraising effort for the year, and it takes a very large team to pull it off – especially as well as we did this year

If I tried to name them all, I would certainly miss some important folks, but I would like to especially thank Rob Monette who arranged the prizes to match the budget and create an attractive calendar raffle (he’s pretty good at it since he’s had so much practice) and all his effort through the course of the selling period to get calendars to willing buyers.  Thanks also to Kevin Banaszak and Ian Bartelmez who generated the idea for a member photo contest and then collated them into usable format.  Also thanks to Al Klug and Tom Seibert for their behind-the-scenes work to get it printed and distributed, Kelcy for her work in sales, fulfillment, and accounting, George Ermert for his Facebook efforts to reach a new WWA audience, and of course thank you to the 70+ calendar sellers we had this year – well done!!!

If you think you can help in this critical singular fundraising effort with WWA, we could use a Calendar Coordinator to work with Rob, Tom and the others to pull this thing together again in 2021. This is a big deal for the organization, and I think there are some opportunities to improve on even 2020’s stellar results.