This is part one of a two part series exploring the reasons why telling our Auxiliary story is important, looking at trends in telling our  story and finally demonstrating how telling our story at the local level will directly impact recruiting, retention and mission execution.

According to Coast Guard statistics the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary lost 7,433 of its members or one out of every five volunteers between the years 2003 and 2007!  This withering trend is especially disturbing when one considers that, during the same time frame, The Corporation for National and Community Service report significant demographic increases in volunteerism... 

"...a greater percentage of Americans adults are volunteering today than at any other time in the past 30 years. These include late teens, Baby Boomers, and those ages 65 and older. In addition, more and more young people are becoming involved in their communities through school based service-learning and volunteering."

To put this Auxiliary trend into perspective, the Government Accounting Office issued a report to the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services  which identified dangerous attrition levels in U. S. Army and Marine Corps reserve components. Specifically U.S. Army Reserve Human Intelligence Collectors and U.S. Marine Corps Reserve Field Artillery Cannoneers [sic] -- both very dangerous specialties -- had unusually high deployment days in Iraq and Afghanistan and, subsequently, experienced Auxiliary-like attrition rates of 21% in 2006. Yes, Auxiliarists have left the service (from 2003 to 2007) at approximately the same rates as DOD service members who had routinely served in hostile and deadly conditions.

This report, and several like it, has sounded the national alarm that our deployed armed forces retention rates represent a clear and present danger to the sustainability of waging a Global War on Terror. Similarly, our own Auxiliary attrition rate (and its corresponding mission degradation)  should be one of the most important issues our Auxiliary and active duty membership need to consider.  Clearly we can do something about this dangerous drop in membership while simultaneously working towards reaching our customers with interesting and vital information that will ultimately save lives.  The good news is, exercising better recruiting and retention communications will also support our customer communications as this collective approach shares theory, applications and delivery methods.

Telling your story to reach both internal and external audiences

Clearly each and every Auxiliarist can and must do their part to tell their Auxiliary story. Nothing can happen at a strategic communications level without tactical input and this is where your input is so necessary. Tell your story to your neighbors, your friends and family but, more importantly, you must use the tools made available to you to reach the widest audience possible (there will be more on this in part two). As Auxiliarists with a story, you compete in a very crowded "communications" domain where our citizens are already bombarded by messages from commercial advertisers, political pundits or celebrity causes who combine to impact the average citizen at the rate of approximately 3,000 messages a day!  

When we communicate, we have to keep in mind there are two distinct audiences.   We need to reach prospective and current Auxiliary or active duty members (internal) as well as our boating public, public safety and other interested or invested constituencies (external).  In most cases the science and approach to either our internal or external audiences will be the same - your input into a communications system is like raw material into a factory where wholesalers and retailers (our Auxiliary leadership and the CG PA staffs) will ultimately deliver the "goods" to the right consumer.  This effort is not easy but it's a war of ideas that must be waged aggressively and waged daily.

Our Revolutionary War leaders also had to engage in a war of ideas - bold communications which would compel revolutionaries to keep fighting and dying while enlisting more warriors into the often tenuous ranks of the Continental Army. In 1776 author Thomas Paine published the popular pamphlet Common Sense which advocated American independence and is widely cited as one of the fundamental documents which fomented the fight for independence.  Paine did this by reaching the Right Audience with the Right Message at the Right Time - something called the 3 R's. 

The Right Message to the Right Audience at the Right Time

Building off of the concept of the 3 R's, we have to craft and deliver messaging that transcends individual attitudes, cuts through opinions and gets at a person's core beliefs. Psychologists write that a belief is the most basic building block that influences everything we do; it's that which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true or false. To affect change (outside of a near death experience) or generate "buy in" our information must be delivered in a manner that is accessible, catches the attention of the individual so as to reach and support a good belief (reinforce wearing a life jacket for instance or shifting member interests from boat crewing to COMCEN augmentation, for instance, makes better sense than just retiring) or completely change a dangerous belief (PFDs are only for tourists or I'm frustrated so I will quit!). 

Finally, if a message is going to change a person's core beliefs it must be delivered several times; it must be delivered several times; it must be delivered several times!  Paine's brochure Common Sense, for instance, is reported to have generated upwards of 600,000 copies in 1776 - that's quite a few copies in an age where printing presses and a broad ability to read were both rare amongst a population of only 2.5 million. That's message saturation!

Budgets - the lifeblood of our program

One of the outcomes of Common Sense's messaging was the design of our constitution and its democracy based budget system.  In our representative system the Coast Guard's ability to bolster, maintain or defend its share of tax-based funding depends to a large extent on how well we tell our story to our citizens and our elected representatives - we must continually convince the American people that our services are vital, important and clearly add value to the daily lives via a well managed and secure maritime domain which, ultimately, translates into a healthy economy. 

On a smaller scale, area and district budgets are fluid and funds can shift from program to program to a fair extent based not necessarily on how well a program is doing but by how well that program documents its activities and tells its story.  Fallout funds are a good example of this budget phenomenon where positive mission articulation can directly lead to increased funding whereas poorly documented or misunderstood options fall off of the table. 

Back in 1790 our own Coast Guard story included showcasing our ability to successfully collect what had been typically lost revenues via unscrupulous seaborne tax evasion. In 2008 our agency's story involves a much more complex plot.  As national service providers, we not only face stiffer competition in the public messaging realm from more federal agencies than we did 217 years ago but are also challenged with defining and advertising our value added nature in often-murky or overlapping post 9/11 missions.  (see Admiral Allen's State of the Coast Guard address: http://www.uscg.mil/comdt/speeches/docs/Allen.State%20of%20the%20Coast%20Guard_.pdf)

To make telling our story even more difficult, consider the fact that we have entered a mass media era insistent on "sound bite" communications. Televised presidential candidate messaging, for instance, dropped from an average delivery of 42.3 seconds in 1968, to 9.8 in 1988 and finally 7.8 seconds in 2000.   It's quite difficult to define, organize and deliver easy-to-understand messaging when our sister agencies such as Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement share much of the same compelling mission and story line. Finally, we are operating in a period of federal deficits where agency messaging becomes even more aggressive as competing agencies vie to hold or protect against the prospect of declining funds.

To this end consider the Coast Guard's recent launch of a multi-media and interactive message delivery website http://www.uscg.mil/ designed to satisfy an elusive and discerning information consumer. The public information site includes video and image banking and even allows viewers to sign up for RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. Once there, look at the In Our Community section and see how the Community Relations mission is being represented!  This new web-based approach to telling our story will take Auxiliary messaging into its modern state and allow us to reach the Right Audience with the Right Message and the Right Time. This can be done by any Auxiliarist!  For instance, while I'm writing this sentence I decided to take my cell phone and shoot a very crude video clip of myself working on this article Telling the Auxiliary Story.  In the time it took to warm a microwave lunch I was able to load my story onto a public server and make it available for viewing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgp6Sr-nLUk Pretty amazing huh?  I think so and it's what our audiences are looking for and it's what they expect - Welcome to 2008!  (I can also see how many of you actually went to the link and you can leave me immediate feedback there).

End of Part One

In Part two we'll explore specific methods, opportunities and tools available to us which will greatly assist us in recruiting, retention and mission execution. 

Posted by Lt. Cmdr. Andre Billeaudeaux, Auxiliary Director, Thirteenth Coast Guard District 

Notes:

[1] GAO report number GAO-07-780 'Military Personnel: DOD Lacks Reliable Personnel Tempo Data and Needs Quality Controls to Improve Data Accuracy' July 17, 2007. http://www.gao.gov/htext/d07780.html, (accessed 2 Mar, 2008).

[2] Shenk, David. Data Smog Surviving the Information Glut, ISBN 0-06-018701-8, http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=56750, (accessed 2 Mar, 2008).

[3] Jacoby, Susan, The Week Magazine, Vol 8, Issue 350, "How Dumb Can We Get" Feb, 2008. p 36-37

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