In 2004, Lynne Reeder came to Moose headquarters as an independent consultant assigned the tough job of training Lodge and Chapter officers from scratch on a completely new system of membership-management and financial reporting.

In fall 2005, she was asked to take over the office that continued to be the ‘eye of the storm’ in the turmoil over the fraternity’s technical and procedural changes. Despite long odds, she and a small staff have worked with dedicated volunteers to engineer a remarkable success story in . . .

Education & Training

By KURT WEHRMEISTER

> During Lynne Reeder’s first 16 years in the business of adult training and instruction in the corporate environment, the challenges involved in training clients’ employees comfortable with existing ways of doing things--on new procedures, and computer hardware and software--were challenges she had long before become accustomed to tackling.

But in late 2004, when, as an independent consultant, Reeder was engaged by Moose International to put together a training program to teach new basic procedures and new software, all at once, to roughly 1,800 Lodge Administrators, 1,600 Chapter Recorders and 180 Moose Legion Secretaries, in all 50 states and four Canadian provinces--roughly half of whom were still not using computers to perform their tasks at all; and on top of all that, the software and the procedures were being rushed into place, and so had several serious glitches . . all in all, it was a situation that ratcheted “challenge” up to a whole new level.

By late-summer 2005, with the deadline having come and gone to implement the new membership-management program and software, called LCL.net; with phones ringing angrily off the hook at Moose International; with frustration skyrocketing both in the field and at Moose headquarters--Lynne Reeder was asked to take charge of Moose International’s department responsible for training the thousands who needed to learn these new skillsets--as well as for training thousands of new Lodge and Chapter officers every year in their fraternal responsibilities.

That she agreed to take the job perhaps could be viewed as remarkable in itself.

That she and her staff have, in little more than 18 months, revamped and re-energized the fraternity’s training function into a vital, growing, organized operation, incorporating nearly 600 enthused volunteer trainers, is perhaps nothing short of astonishing.

Beginning late this winter, Reeder (right) and staffers including Instructional Designer Doug Adams (left) began conducting Moose International’s first experimental “Webinars”--sessions in which appropriate Moose volunteer participants will be invited to attend via e-mail, then can participate in full audiovisual learning experiences, generally 30 to 60 minutes in length, using computer and telephone simultaneously, in their own homes or offices anywhere. The obvious benefit is learning made much more available, much more often, to many more people (up to 1,000 at a time), at much less expense. The first late-February sessions, were on “The Future of Administrator Training.”

Before the onset of personal computers in the early 1980s, Moose training had been a straightforward, predictable, relatively unchanging function, handled all through the 1960s and ’70s by the meticulous Carl Weis. Weis, in his position as Supreme Secretary for 22 years beginning in 1961 (he had supervised the Moose Legion and the fraternity’s Community Service program before that) was responsible for ensuring the smooth operation of the fraternity’s Lodges and Moose Legions. (Women of the Moose operations and training was handled solely by the Grand Chancellor’s office until just the last decade.)

Weis’s office was responsible for two basic functions: First, he and his top deputies in the Supreme Secretary’s office--Bill Stanley, Marv Schroeder and others--compiled and taught a two-and-a-half-day Secretary’s School (using the former term for the Lodge Administrator).

Larry Greene of the current Education & Training staff took this course as a young new Lodge secretary. “All of them together traveled across the continent at certain times of the year and taught the two-and-a-half days,” Greene said. “It dealt with the job in-depth, under the old hard-books format--ledger, cashbooks, etc.--for both the House Committee (food/beverage functions) and the Lodge (membership bookkeeping, etc.).”

And, in several different lengths and formats, the Supreme Secretary’s office also administered Officers’ Schools for new members of a Lodge Board of Officers. “I first attended in the early ’70s,” said Greene. “It was an all-day event, put on by Weis, Jay Stoehr, and Don Ross (then Assistant Controller, later Weis’s successor in 1983). It was mandatory for every Treasurer, Prelate, Jr. Governor and Governor; held at Mooseheart and in visits across the continent. You were supposed to attend once a year.” Later came abbreviated versions of this, “so an instructor could hit six Lodges over a weekend, and give a brief two-hour overview for the Board of Officers.”

The first major 1980s changes in that comfortable setup came in the area of Secretary/Administrator training--forced by technology. In 1985, new Director General Paul J. O’Hollaren had created an Information Systems Department for the first time, as it had become obvious by then that advances in PC technology could make an Administrator’s job, at least in theory, much more efficient and less time-consuming. In addition to computerizing Moose International headquarters, the I.S. department was to work with the Supreme Secretary’s office on what was called the “Lodge Computer Project”--a system of proprietary hardware and software that, with training, enabled Administrators to keep and update basic membership and bookeeping functions on a DOS-type system. But at a minimum $4,000 price tag, very few Lodges took the plunge. Even when prices came down with the revamped LOOMIS system, interactive with Moose headquarters, introduced in 1996, one major roadblock still remained: a large number of Lodge Administrators and Chapter Recorders had not used computers even by the mid-1990s--and many preferred not to. Administrator training, especially, became very complicated: a grueling six-day session at Mooseheart, split between overviews of Moose functions from a parade of lecturing department heads, and then separate breakout sessions--one offering computer training on the LOOMIS program, the other still teaching the old-fashioned “hard-books” methods! Attempting to help in the field was a steadily growing force of volunteer Technical Training Consultants (now simply Technical Trainers), begun under I.S. Director Barry Wilkening in 1996-97 and continued under his successor, Dennis Hanks from 1997-2002. There are now roughly 220 Technical Trainers, all across North America; a list is available at www.mooseintl.org/portal/FraternalEducation/
Publications/TechnicalTrainers.asp

Said Austin Howard, who was a Lodge Administrator at two Illinois Lodges before becoming a volunteer Technical Trainer and joining Reeder’s staff as Senior Technical Trainer in mid-2006: “At one point in the late 1990s, we had three different systems being used, and that Moose International was trying to support--new LOOMIS, older DOS, and oldest hard-books--all at the same time. It was a mess.”

The second day of the new Administrator’s School moved from the lecture setting of the O’Hollaren Centre across the street to the lower level of the Loyalty Hall training center, with computerized workstations for every attendee.

Lynne Reeder’s vantage point during this period was as an independent consultant, brought in several months prior to the “D-day” date of June 30, 2005 to assemble an online training tutorial for Administrators, Recorders and Moose Legion Secretaries on the new LCL.net system--which was going to be required as of that date; hardcopy reporting was no longer going to be accepted. Of course, June 30, 2005 was also the date on which Centralized Dues was also going to become reality. “They didn’t just change the computer system; they changed processes, procedures, Centralized Dues--all at once . . . we forced multiple lacerations; lots of salt in the wounds,” she said.

One unfortunate result is that the fraternity lost many good Administrators and Recorders--and Technical Trainers--when it needed them most. “Once the Trainer walked through the Lodge door,” Reeder said, “they ‘were Moose International’ and would hear ‘why doesn’t your system work?’ . . . and a lot of them quit because they were getting beat up so much.”

What was then called the Fraternal Education Department was also being pressed to take on more of the technical-training duties that were now a front-line function. (Up to that point, Fraternal Education was exactly that--involved writing curriculum for, and guiding the efforts of, the smaller force of Leadership Trainers, concentrated solely in the areas of officers’ training in fraternal functions.) When Director Mike Reemts elected to retire, Reeder was offered the job at perhaps its most challenging moment possible.

She has succeeded through exuding a crisp professionalism, an unfailing “can-do” spirit, and a determined insistence to (as she has handwritten on a whiteboard in her department’s area) “celebrate success--no matter how small.” She has recruited creatively--Greene and Howard were both originally Lodge Administrators, Susan Hawkins has been involved in nearly all phases of Moose computer training over 20 years, Barb Tuma is a veteran Moose International support-staffer, while Doug Adams was a career instructional designer with both Sears Roebuck & Co. and the State of Illinois--and it is he who designed and who teaches most of the completely revamped Moose Administrator School!

Moose Education & Training, By the Numbers

TECHNICAL Trainers:
226 Volunteers in 45 States and 4 Provinces

Teachers of QuickBooks financial reporting software, and LCL.Net membership management software, primarily to Lodge Administrators and Chapter Recorders

TIPS Trainers:
162 Volunteers in 44 Associations

Teachers of various programs on proper safeguards in serving alcoholic beverages--as of 2005, required of every beverage server in every Moose Center

LEADERSHIP Trainers:
91 Volunteers in 41 States and 1 Province

Teachers of the Lodge Officers’ Orientation Program and the Lodge Basic Operations Course

WOTM Session Leaders:
186 Volunteers in 49 States and 4 Provinces