By Cory Chase, Program Director

The West Virginia Highlands Conservancy has communicated with its membership through The Highlands Voice for decades, but there’s a new kid on the block. Since the Conservancy hired me (Cory Chase) as program director, Crys Bauer as membership and fulfillment secretary, and our latest hire Olivia Miller as communications director, there has been ongoing discussion about branching out into digital means of communication, including emails to our membership. If you are like me, though, you aren’t crazy about emails and you possibly spend a fair amount of time unsubscribing and deleting them, let alone reading them. Dreadful first-world problems, no doubt! 

But hear me out: we promise to never spam you; we won’t share your information with anybody; we will only send pertinent updates and information about important issues. As much as we’d love for you to support our work, we also won’t send donation requests on the daily. The main reason we want to communicate with our membership is to provide more opportunities for engagement, fellowship and education. Part of our mission is to empower and encourage our membership through quality content and building the conservation community.

Here is what you should expect:

• Updates on our calendar of events like outings, our Annual Fall Review, and partner events
• Legislative updates and action alerts during the winter months
• Opportunities to engage with our Dolly Sods Trail Stewards program and our citizen science water monitoring program
• Discounts on swag: hiking guides, shirts, hats, stickers, etc.
• Educational material about issues in WV
• And more…

Of course, any and all of you are welcome to jump ship whenever you’d like. We can’t make you read or receive our communications (thank goodness) and we most certainly respect your privacy. Although we do hope that you’ll find our communications to be timely and relevant and we welcome member’s ideas, suggestions and criticisms.

In addition, here is a link to sign up to a free six-month trial of The Highlands Voice that we would love for you to share with family and friends who may like to keep up with us: https://bit.ly/highlandsvoice

Also, here is another link for folks to sign up for our email list, too. https://bit.ly/WVHCemail

So now that you’ve been alerted to our upcoming email program, are you more excited or less excited to be a member? Feel free to let me know at director@wvhighlands.org and as always, thank you for your support and interest in the Conservancy.