A Society On the Grow

A Society On the Grow

Is your society suffering from declining membership? Are you looking for new and exciting ways to reach out to the community and increase your membership? Three years ago, the Utah Genealogical Association had a lofty goal: triple their membership by the end of the year. How could they possibly expect to meet that goal?

Learn how they took the time to get together and create a plan by using a Kaizen (a Japanese word meaning "continuous improvement") process, which utilizes the following steps:

1. Define your problem
2. Document your current situation
3. Visualize your ideal situation
4. Define measurement targets (how will you know you've reached your goal?)
5. Brainstorm solutions to your problem
6. Develop Kaizen plan
7. Implement your plan
8. Measure, record and compare results to targets
9. Prepare summary documents
10. Create short-term action plan, ongoing standards and sustaining plan

UGA past President Janet Hovorka and UGA Board Member Christy Fillerup explain how they plan to do it utilizing several different initiatives:

Education - recognized the need for intermediate/advanced genealogical education
Networking - putting researchers in touch with each other for collaboration opportunities
Flexibility - implemented virtual meetings for committee/chapter meetings across the state
Volunteerism - offered varied opportunities to utilize the diverse talents of its membership

You can hear the details in the archived broadcast of “A Society on the Grow” on the BlogTalkRadio My Society channel by FGS or you can listen below:

Listen To History Internet Radio Stations with mysociety on BlogTalkRadio

A Society on the Grow