If Your Society Folded Today, Would Anyone Care?

What does success look like?

The new year is fast approaching, and we're asking the hard questions here at FGS.

What does success mean to your genealogical society?  Membership numbers? Meeting attendance? Quantity (or quality) of historic document archives?  Have you set measurable goals?  Are you actually tracking the numbers?  How active is your board, and your society as a whole, when it comes to working toward reaching those goals?

Guest Randy Whited provides insight into planning, measuring, and amending goals to see the greatest success.  From the date and time of your society meetings to creating special interest groups and programs, learn how your society can become and continue to be relevant to the community - whether it's a small local society or a regional or state-wide society.

Listen to the archived broadcast of "If Your Society Folded Today, Would Anyone Care?" on the blogtalkradio My Society channel by FGS, or you can listen below:

Check Out History Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with mysociety on BlogTalkRadio

For more information, check out these articles from our Society Strategy Series:

• Long Range Planning

• Now That You've Attracted Those Members, Keep Them!

• Put Your Best Foot Forward: How Small Societies Get Noticed

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