News / Articles

By John Seville,

President, CSSA "I have long been a shooting enthusiast, whether hunting rabbits as a boy in Indiana or shooting in 50-ft. smallbore scholastic/non-military state competitions beginning at age 14. Firearms and shooting activities have been a big part of my life for many years. You can imagine my interest in late 2019 when an NRA-ILA attorney, Alexandra Garza, and the then-current President of the Colorado State Shooting Association (CSSA), Tony Fabian, approached me about becoming the next President of the CSSA. Tony, who had faithfully served for 19 years, was ready to step down, and we both agreed that it was time to rebuild the CSSA. After the election in January of 2020, Tony eventually transferred 13 storage boxes full of materials and records, and it was time to begin revitalizing the CSSA. To rebuild the organization and scale it quickly would need to start with the integration of People, Process, and Technology. The people component would begin by forming a new working board of directors. The members elected three of us to the new board in January 2020, and since then, we have added five members for a total of eight volunteer board members. We are now expanding our association by recruiting coordinators to work with each board member in their area of responsibility. The next area we tackled was processes looking for opportunities to eliminate inefficiencies and leverage technology to minimize administration. To accomplish this, we began a software selection process for an integrated platform that could handle our web presence, membership management, email campaigns, texting, forums, back-end integration with financials, and organizational development tools like volunteer and committee management. We made our selection in the late spring of 2020 amidst the Covid-19 pandemic and began configuring the platform in mid-2020. It was and continues to be a significant undertaking as we implement the various modules of functionality. An unusually challenging aspect of the project was combining and cleaning membership records from the previous 20 years. Thanks to one board member's efforts, Daniel Fenlason, he was able to pull together multiple sources of membership information and upload the data to the new platform. In the future, the CSSA will have a single repository for membership data and organizational knowledge, making leadership transitions more manageable. In mid-January 2021, we published our new website with our first email campaign announcing our new platform and the launch of a monthly webinar. Formerly, we had a monthly in-person Spring 2021 • NRA CLUB CONNECTION • 15 meeting attended by 8-15 members. But through webinar technology, we now have the opportunity to reach members in all four corners of our state with timely and relevant information and programs. Within the first ten weeks of our launch, we tripled our membership with a $5/month fee. Supporters can cancel their membership at any time, especially if the board of directors fails to fulfill our promises and mission. The recent Boulder shooting and proposed new Colorado anti-2A legislation, in addition to the emails that our CSSA board members received from hateful and willfully ignorant citizens, is a reminder of the importance of our mission in Colorado. "To effectively engage and educate all Colorado citizens on the inalienable and constitutional right to keep and bear arms responsibly and to promote all aspects of shooting activities." Even though we have just started, we are clear on our mission and are executing our strategy. Every day, we find and recruit Colorado citizens who love our state and our country. We encourage them to develop "titanium spines" for the current and oncoming fights to keep our second amendment rights. We are finding our voice again.We are back, and we will not fail."

Colorado State Shooting Association
P.O. Box 519 Elizabeth,
CO 80107
Phone: 719-966-7512
Website: cssa.org
John Seville,
President Email:president@cssa.org