2009 Southern Region FOS Campaign

The Winner of the June 17th $250 VISA Gift Card Drawing is Shane Cooley, Program Director of West Tennessee Area Council in Jackson, Tennessee.

In August 2000, Shane started his career with the Boy Scouts of America in the Pine Burr Area Council, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he served as a District Executive, Senior District Executive and then later as a District Director.  He joined his current council in October 2005 as the Program Director, assisting with the FOS campaign.

“We have a plan that works, and we stick to it.” Their plan consists of hosting one council-wide dinner called the Eagle Club Dinner and several community dinners.  They select table hosts and ask them to invite guests to the dinners.  The council prepares a pledge card for each guest, which contains a suggested dollar amount written in red ink asking each giver to consider an increase to the next level taken from the guest’s pledge history.  At the dinners, the council asks the guests to give more than they did in the past.

The West Tennessee Area Council kicked off its FOS campaign in the fall of last year, by confirming gifts from their board members and big donors.  The council hosted its Eagle Club Dinner on February 24, 2009 with the keynote speaker, Mike Ditka, former NFL player, television commentator, and coach of the Chicago Bears and New Orleans Saints; the event raised $325,000.  “Even though the economy is bad, we find that people are still willing to give to a cause they believe in.  We were at $576,655 by the end of May; that’s more than $25,000 over our goal of $550,000 and over $27,000 more than where we were the same time last year.”

According to Shane, it takes the commitment of the entire West Tennessee Area Council’s professional staff to work every card at every dinner to make the campaign a success.  “We still have some cards left to work in some of our districts, and we plan to ask each donor to give more than he or she gave last year.”