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VA should contact vets online, airman says

A Wisconsin Air National Guard staff sergeant told a House subcommittee Tuesday that the Department of Veterans Affairs is not doing enough to reach out to Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.

Elizabeth O’Herrin, who completed her third Iraq deployment earlier this year and plans to leave the Guard in September, said VA’s long reliance on pamphlets, brochures and letters to contact veterans isn’t working in the digital age.

The pamphlets about veterans’ benefits that she received after her first deployment are “collecting dust under the guest bed” at her parent’s home, and letters from VA have gotten lost after she changed addresses five times in the last seven months.

O’Herrin, a munitions systems technician in the Guard and executive director of Student Veterans of America, testified before the House Veterans’ Affairs oversight and investigations panel about new VA efforts to reach veterans with paid advertising.

VA is launching a few campaigns, and another veterans’ group, Iraq and Afghanistan War Veterans, is launching its only public service advertising campaign in November.

VA’s reliance on traditional mailing campaigns to inform veterans of their earned benefits “may work well for older, more sedentary veterans,” O’Herrin said. “However, for many recently discharged veterans, this form of communication is less than optimal.”

She also is no fan of another program in which VA calls newly discharged veterans to see if they need assistance.

“While I appreciate VA’s effort, I can also attest that calling me is actually not the best way to make sure I am informed,” she said.

For one thing, the only number she has ever provided to VA is her cell phone, and she told lawmakers she never answers that phone unless she recognizes who is calling. And information received on the phone doesn’t stick, she said.

“Personally, I do not retain information that is rattled off to me in a telemarketer fashion.”

E-mail, she said, is one way of reaching people that is less inconvenient to the recipient while also having information that can be read and re-read.

But it has disadvantages, she conceded. “There is nothing more annoying that irrelevant e-mails clogging my inbox,” she said, suggesting that veterans be allowed to tailor the e-mail to cover only subjects they are interested in.

Subcommittee members said O’Herrin’s ideas have promise. Rep. Ginny Waite-Brown of Florida, the panel’s ranking Republican, said she is surprised to learn VA does not collect e-mail addresses as a primary method of communication.

But Rep. Harry Mitchell, D-Ariz., the panel chairman, said he still worries that e-mails could become the modern-day version of the box of brochures collecting dust under the bed.

Lisette Mondello, assistant VA secretary for public and intergovernmental affairs, said VA is open to trying almost anything.

“Traditional advertising venues such as broadcast and print are available to us, but we are also looking at social marketing and internet-based nontraditional media,” Mondello said. She mentioned YouTube, MySpace and Facebook as venues VA can use to pass on its message.

But she noted that VA has to reach several generations of veterans, which may call for different methods.

“Facebook might work best for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, but not [for] our Vietnam-era veterans,” she said.