Announcer [over music, Live the Life You Want]: The following message is brought to you by Mark Riccobono, President, National Federation of the Blind. Live the life you want.
Mark Riccobono: Greetings, fellow Federationists. Today is Friday, December 27, 2024, and this is Presidential Release Number 545, but this is the first Presidential Release intended for the New Year, so Happy New Year to the Federation. I hope your holidays were filled with joy and that you had an opportunity to reflect on 2024, what a great year it was, and to prepare for 2025 and all of the great things we will do together.
Before I jump into a few topics for the first month of the year, I do want to remind you that our first Presidential Release Live for 2025 will be on January 7 in honor of World Braille Day. Now, if you're hearing this after January 7 at your chapter meeting, you can still catch the replay of the Presidential Release Live on YouTube.
And I also want to remind you that our February live event will of course be the Great Gathering-In of the 2025 Washington Seminar, which will take place on February 3rd at 5:00 PM Eastern Time. Why 5:00 PM? Well, because the Great Gathering-In has always been at 5:00 PM, at least as long as I've been around. So I know for some of you, if you're not at Washington Seminar, it will be a little earlier there in other time zones. Sorry for that, but I do hope that you can tune in to both of those events.
I would like to cover two very important topics here on this, the first release of the year. January 1st is the beginning of the Federation's membership year, and thus dues are collected in January and going forward for 2025. Dues are collected on a yearly basis. If you have not already paid your dues for 2025, I know I paid mine all the way back in October or maybe November at our chapter meeting. We collect dues ahead of time for the new year. But if you haven't paid your dues, you will want to do so this month so you don't miss any opportunities to participate in membership-driven activities of the Federation, voting at local meetings, and that sort of thing.
This is a great time for chapters to be certain that all membership information is up to date in our member management module, and so I wanted to remind you about that. That is our centralized database at the national office for assisting chapters and affiliates with tracking membership. You should take this month to make sure everybody is in the member management module, and that'll make the rest of your year easy because you can focus on new members.
If you do need help with the member management module, you haven't spent enough time with it or the process, trust me, once you get in there and start spending time with it, you will get familiar with it. But if your chapter needs to designate a new person, you need help, please reach out to [email protected] or call Danielle McCann at our national office at extension 2401.
This is also a great time for members to make sure that the national office has correct information for you in your member profile, which you can get to online. Go to nfb.org, select the members link on the home page, and when you get to that page, you can enter your username and password. If you have forgotten your password or you've never gone into your profile, go to the reset your password link at the top and enter the email address that you most commonly use for Federation business, and hopefully that's the one we have in our database and we will send you a reset email. Again, if you need assistance, please write to [email protected].
The member profile is the best way to keep your contact information up to date with the national organization. For those of you who do not have email and therefore do not have a log on, please just call our national office if you'd like to update your information. You do need a unique email address to use the member profile online for obvious reasons.
So January is a great time to remind ourselves and each other why we are members of this great movement, why we make the commitment to work together. And so, this might be a very appropriate topic for the January meeting. Frankly, it's a great topic for any month of the year, so I encourage you to have conversations about why we are members of the National Federation of the Blind and what it means to us.
The other topic that I'd like to discuss on this release has to do with the finances of the organization and some steps we're taking this year to strengthen the financial position of our movement. Last year, I told you that the board of directors approved a deficit budget for 2024 and that we would be working on improving the financial health of the organization to close that gap.
I don't want to jinx anything because we haven't quite gotten to the end of the year, but I have some confidence that the Federation actually will show black numbers, that our income is more than our expenses, for 2024. And that has been through some good fortune and some hard work. However, we still have a need to figure out how to strengthen our financial position and tighten our belts for 2025, and we are now undertaking that work.
We know that our primary source of discretionary income has been raising money through our mail program, our mass mail program, and that has continued to decline year after year. I won't spend a lot of time talking about that here, except that many of you probably haven't looked at your mail much except for throwing it into the wastebasket. So you know some of the reason why that is true. We still do get some good income in the mass mail program, but the numbers are clearly declining.
And we do have an urgent need to find new long-term sources of discretionary funding, discretionary meaning we can spend it on what we need to for the Federation. A lot of grants and other programs that might give us support will do so for specific work. And so, we need those discretionary dollars just like the dollars that we all can contribute in the PAC program, because that allows us the flexibility to do any and all of the things that we need to do.
Because of our decline in our income streams, we are taking some significant steps to reduce our expenditures and make our operations tighter and smarter here at the National Office as tight as possible in 2025. Our intent is to continue to focus on the core mission and programs that we have and the support that we provide to our affiliates and chapters in carrying out the day-to-day work of the organization.
Our national infrastructure for advocacy; legal work; supporting affiliates with materials, membership, and finances; various membership-building programs and tools; our multiple communication channels which are essential for getting out our message and our advocacy work; various support and infrastructure for our national events and meetings, including what I'm confident will be our best convention ever coming up in New Orleans in 2025; these are just some of the things that we undertake from the national organization to support the work of the movement. Our staff here at the national office is discussing on a daily basis how we best use every dollar that comes from a donor and where we can save those dollars to meet our needs in the future. We need you to do the same at the local level and to be thinking about what you can do as an individual, as your chapter, and in your affiliate to make a difference.
I could give you a few examples, but one might be, are you getting the Braille Monitor on a flash drive? If so, have you sent back your flash drive in a while or are you piling them up somewhere? Maybe you have moved to listening to the Monitor via podcast, but you're still getting the flash drive because you just haven't gotten around to letting us know that you don't want the flash drive anymore. Well, those flash drives represent dollars that we've spent and could save if we don't need to send them or if you send them back, we can reuse them.
Now, if you want the Monitor on flash drive, don't get me wrong, we want you to have it. But we also want to make sure that we're cutting out any waste in what we're doing. We want every member to have the Monitor in the format that makes sense for them, and that's our commitment. But sometimes our preferences, our needs change, and we should evaluate that. So we will be finding ways to ask people, as an example, whether you still want the Monitor in the form that we're delivering it to you so that we can make sure, again, we're using every dollar as effectively as possible.
Are there programs that you feel the Federation could not live without, or for that matter maybe should live without and that we should be focusing our energy in other directions? I would love to hear from each and every one of you about which programs and services that we provide at the national level are most critical to achieve our mission at the local level.
You may think of other ways that we can save dollars and be smarter in the organization with our dollars. Please share those ideas with me.
And on the income side, of course, I do want you to consider what you can do for the organization here in 2025. If you are not already on the Pre-Authorized Contribution program, please do that, and I would encourage our chapters to talk about that; another great opportunity to thank all of the chapters across the country who are as a chapter contributing to the PAC plan, but we as individuals can also do so.
However, we do know that there are many more dollars outside the Federation than inside. And so, I would ask each of you, have you explored ways that you can ask more people in your community to support the organization? Have you explored whether your employer has a matching gifts program that can match the contributions that you're making to the Federation so that you can double your impact? Have you gone to find some local foundations that might be a good fit for supporting Federation programs and ask them for money? Have you found new people to ask to support the state affiliate? Because the state affiliate also should be making a regular yearly grant to the national organization.
And if we get more dollars into the local organization, that's an opportunity for the affiliate to increase its contribution to the national movement. Every dollar matters, and especially in 2025, we're really focused on the fact that every dollar does matter because we do need to tighten our belts. These things go in cycles, and this is one of those. I have a lot of confidence about where we're going, what we're doing, and that we are using our dollars in an effective way. But we have to continue to do that. In the same way that we do that in our personal lives, we need to do that for the organization.
Another great topic for a chapter meeting would be about the boost that our chapters get by being part of this great national organization that we've created and the infrastructure that's here and the costs that are associated with our work at the national level. From our advocacy work to our legal work to our communications work, great topics for discussion at our local chapter meetings and also discussing what we can do to increase efforts to get money into the organization.
I do want to remind you also that our communications channels and sharing our communications is a great way to spread the word and invite people to donate to the organization. The more that people know what we're doing, the more that they feel and understand the impact, the more that they are likely to give.
So please do what you can to help out. I and the national board will be working hard on this during 2025. I'm sure we will be talking about it at the Washington Seminar and at the convention, but please know that you can make a difference at the local level. And I want to thank you in advance for the difference that you make.
As we close this first release of the year, I want to emphasize that membership is the most important resource we have in this organization. It is the thing that mobilizes our efforts. I have a deep trust of the membership to guide us through any situation, any difficult situation. And the membership truly is something that makes us unique amongst really any other organization anywhere in the world working on behalf of blind people.
We have a lot of great things ahead for 2025, a lot to be excited about. We also have some work to do, and so I want to get to work and invite you all to join me in what will be one of the best years yet for the National Federation of the Blind.
Thank you. Happy New Year. And I must bring back to this release by popular demand, the customary endings. So before I close, let me ask you, what do you call it when Dracula passes out on New Year's Eve? Well, a countdown, of course. They say New York City has the best New Year's celebration, but as far as I can tell, they always are dropping the ball. Why did the woman start making breakfast at 11:59 PM on
December 31st? Well, she wanted a New Year's toast.
Happy New Year. Let's go build the National Federation of the Blind.
Announcer [over music, Live the Life You Want instrumental]: The preceding message was brought to you by Mark Riccobono, President, National Federation of the Blind, 410-659-9314, [email protected]. Follow President Riccobono on Mastodon. Just search for @[email protected]. Let's go build the National Federation of the Blind.