Well February the 1st saw us Launching the Website with no idea on how the reactions would be. So far the reactions have been good with over 5000 hits on the web page and over 250 new members have signed up as free members in order to make the most of the community pages, which includes the free use of our Veterans Forum.
Our application to become a member of the Forces Covenant was accepted and proudly placed on the website.
Our next step is to change from a limited company to a community interest company so that we can legally accept donations and paid members, all of these funds will be going direct to our Veterans Shield Trust. This will be used to help veterans in time of need with immediate funding or by helping other veteran run charitys working on bigger funded projects.
We have been updating new Listings almost on a daily basis. Two of the biggest listings so far have been the Royal Corps of Transport and the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment, this has only been possible with the amount of feedback we had from Members and fellow Trogs, In some cases where a particular Squadron was missing we created a new social media group and left one of the members as an admin to run it.
With all your help and feedback we can build up every page to make it a complete community for Veterans to go to.
We have also seen other veteran groups coming to us and wanting to be part of the Combined Service Veteran Shield Association where we can all start working together, talking and coordinating in order to get help out there quicker. So a big shout out goes to Icarus Online, Mates of primates, Save our Soldier, Soldiers off the streets Scotland, Minds at War to name a few, with more hopefully being added over the coming months.
We have also had a new addition to the team, Craig McWha and you can read his Story on another post in the Blog. He will be in charge of keeping on top of the Blog posts. One of these that we are hoping to have as a weekly feature will be, either anonymous or named stories from fellow veterans who have suffered but managed to find help. Again this will help us gain ratings for all the various help and support groups that we have listed, so that veterans looking for the help they need can be found at a glance and only get the best available.
Over the next couple of months we have some planned events organised, one of these will be a tandom parachute jump done by my wife and her work collegue and also a static line jump with one of our admin team, Dan and his pal, all raising funds for our veteran shield trust.
Another event we are working on for later in the year is our annual get together where we will have a combined service event, with each charity/organisation raising funds for their own causes. This will include a Tab over a certain distance TBC and for those not taken part a day of team building and networking will be arranged with a BBQ to celebrate at the end.
It is still very early days but over time and with all your continued support and input we hope to be able to make this the only place you need to go to find help.