AFOVA New Letter 2 of Year 2021

Section 6 - Memoirs CV 2 No. 02 / 2021 Page 195 of 332 Digitization of Personal Records A major objective of this Team is to go paperless in all areas of operations. Towards this end, all membership records available with the Secretary have, some of them as old as the Association itself, have now been digitized and are available to the Secretary online. It is an ongoing process. WhatsApp Group. Starting the WhatsApp group of AFVOA was again one of the initiatives of this committee. We as a Team, were of the opinion that it is very essential for us to stay connected with our members at near real time basis. While many members may not access their email at regular intervals, we were sure that any post in WhatsApp would be accessed by members at once. So I took it upon me to start the AFVOA Group in WhatsApp and this was a mammoth task. To form the group, I had to key in the contact details of around 250 members on to my mobile phone and save them. Then I formed the WhatsApp group and added each member to the group. We were very clear in our mind that we will keep this group free of clutter by avoiding unnecessary Good Morning messages and forwards from group members. Hence it was decided that only the Admin of the group will post messages. Greetings on Birthday & Wedding Anniversary After taking over, we in the Team were convinced that building and nurturing the Family feeling within the AFVOA strengthens our bond. Hence we decided that we must have a personal connect with our members and the one way that we could achieve it was to wish them on their Birthday & Wedding Anniversary. The good wishes of the entire family of AFVOA on the special day will make their celebration even more memorable. Here we added a rider that, we will send greetings only to those who desired to be wished on these two occasions. So a mail was sent to all members with our proposal and they were requested to send in their details like DOB, DOM, name of spouse and photographs. Once we had the inputs, I created a database of the information received and we were ready to go. The first greeting was sent to Maj Gen R Karthikeyan, our Past President on his birthday on 09 Nov 19. Since then, I as the Secretary have been sending wishes regularly to our members on their special day, both through email and WhatsApp. Our best wishes are also displayed on AFVOA website as a streaming message for 24 hours on the special day.