A few years ago, I finally did something I had wanted to do for a long time — I put up a flagpole in the front yard at my home.
Once it was up, I felt an immense sense of pride. But I soon realized as happy as I was, I had no idea how to actually fly the flag. One of my biggest questions was when was I supposed to lower the flag to half-staff? So I did what most people probably do: searched the internet and looked at the flags around my neighborhood. I assumed others had it figured out, and I'd just do what they were doing.
But what I actually found was lots of inconsistency. Half-staff here, full-staff there, no real pattern. The truth was, nobody really knew — myself included. As great as it felt to fly the flag, I couldn't help but feel like something just wasn't quite right. I wanted to do better.
This past Memorial Day, I was visiting a historic site in our state with my family. We came across a memorial honoring fallen soldiers with flags at half-staff and it hit me: I had recently joined a retail business with flagpoles at each location. I immediately checked in with my operations team to make sure we'd followed protocol at our stores.
Embarrassingly, we hadn't.
And, as it turned out, neither had the historic site I was visiting. As I recently learned, Memorial Day protocol calls for flags to be raised back to full-staff at noon — these never were. Who knew?
That was the moment it clicked for me. There are plenty of sources that can tell you what the protocol is on a given day. But none of them remind you via text or email leading up to the event. None of them sync to your own calendar. None allow you to easily alert the right people at your business of the protocols.
That's the gap FlagAlert exists to fill. We will send you an alert the moment an order changes, and sync every federal and state protocol straight to your calendar — so you never have to guess, and you never have to remember on your own.
We all live busy lives — but if you choose to fly a flag, it comes with a small responsibility: getting it right. FlagAlert won't make you patriotic, but if you already are, we will help you fly the flag the right way, every time.