Charting the Course - What You Can Do
Charting a Course for Tomorrow: Thoughts on how to energize your club
Outings
Many groups offer birding outings amongst their activities. In the Spring, wildflower outings are also popular. Our tips this time are to utilize these outings to attract the public and hopefully gain new members.
- Promote the outing in your local newspaper, online news, Facebook, etc. Invite newcomers to come and learn from your club’s passionate birders.
- Make sure you emphasize that visitors are welcome and you’ll be sharing your knowledge with them.
- Specifically invite families to bring their children.
- Make sure your publicity makes it clear if the walk is easy, how long it is, and be very clear about how to get to the location, what to bring, footwear, etc.
- Parents with children might find a slow-moving birding outing to be boring. Especially if they don’t have binoculars!
- Your club should buy one or two binoculars that you can loan out during the outing. Also buy a birding guide or two.
- Assign a member to each new family to welcome and coach them during the walk.
- At the end of the outing, give the visitors a piece of information that informs them of upcoming outings and encourages them to join your group.
Got your own idea? How are you doing?
Meetings and Presentation nights
Many groups have meetings for their members, so let’s look at some ideas that we have received. These are from groups attempting to make their meetings more interesting and thus more attractive to members.
- First, remove club board or executive business such as budgets and committee reports. Deal with that at separate meetings of the board.
- If you can’t go that far, put the guest speaker at the beginning of your meeting, followed by a short break, before the other “business”.
- Another tip is to have a “show and tell” of members’ photos or a “stand up and share”, reporting recent nature observations. This gets people involved.
How to gain younger members
A common observation amongst nature clubs…everywhere!…is that we are aging. Having “mature” members is not a bad thing, but we also want to see people from younger generations becoming active.
One tip is to take a look at the activities your club offers. Are meetings held in evenings?
What could you offer in your community as daytime and weekend activities, which would be more accessible to those who are employed and/or have young families?
Maybe offer a noontime talk or walk, or a Saturday nature exploration outing, open to and advertised to the public.
Encourage those who attend to become members after a couple of free outings.