The American Legion’s Consolidated Post Report is an opportunity for posts to document every activity they fulfilled in a 12-month (June 1-May 31) reporting period – whether it’s providing funeral honors, sponsoring youth to attend a Legion program, conducting fundraising efforts or more.
The recently compiled 2015 CPR reveals that reporting posts provided more than 4 million community-service volunteer hours, conducted more than 7,000 Memorial Day and Veterans Day services, participated in 1,065 veteran job fairs, provided 123,014 funeral honors, awarded 10,308 scholarships to youth, performed 30,023 U.S. flag presentations, presented 8,426 ROTC medals, and much more. View the 2015 CPR results here.
These, however, are not the final numbers for the entire American Legion. Only 8,900 posts submitted a CPR – a 67 percent response rate from the 13,290 total posts worldwide, leaving a third of posts’ activities unaccounted for.
It's important for the CPR response rate to increase so that the great work Legion posts and members are doing in their communities is reflected. Especially since newly elected American Legion National Commander Charlie Schmidt will deliver the report to Congress during his testimony in February, but will only be able to share part of the figures.
“Good things are happening in our posts (and) in every department every day. Document those good things in your Consolidated Post Report. Every post deserves the credit for their programs and accomplishments," said Schmidt during his election address to Legionnaires at the 98th National Convention in Cincinnati Sept. 1.
Posts are strongly encouraged to fill out and submit CPRs, whether in paper-based form – located at www.legion.org/publications – or online through www.mylegion.org. Only 22 percent of post officers filled out the 2015 CPR form online, which required American Legion national staff to manually type in the more than 6,000 reports submitted by paper – a time-consuming endeavor. Submitting CPRs through MyLegion is not only faster, but posts can continually update the form throughout the reporting year. And once finalized and submitted electronically, a PDF of the CPR is automatically generated and sent to the post's department and National Headquarters.
The 2016-2017 CPR will be available Nov. 1 on www.mylegion.org, located on the left-hand side under “Member/Post Processing.”
