You are going to find throughout my blogs that I strongly recommend membership in your local genealogical Society. Granted, there are societies and then there are Societies. I look for a society whose membership fee I can afford. I want it close by so that I can participate in their meetings and activities. And, I look for one who is interested in obtaining me as a member. Not just so that they can get work out of me to accomplish their society goals. But also are interested in what my goals are and what I hope to obtain through membership.
Societies need to have a financial basis so that they can provide the benefits that members want. That means so that they can provide a newsletter, email list or some sort of communications with their members. They also may maintain a collection of research materials and need to house them somewhere. This all costs money. So you must expect that you will be asked to volunteer to help with some fund raising.
Society membership and volunteerism has encountered strong competition from the Internet. While my society does have a web presence it is limited. We do not have all our research materials online, as we simply do not have the amount of space online or the volunteers to enter it and keep it updated. All that information that researchers find online is placed there by someone who found it and then entered it. While the Internet has greatly increased the amount of materials and the speed with which we can find it, it is not all that is out there. There is still the need for on site research for most genealogy. That means we need to get out to those courthouses, libraries and talk face-to-face with family members and other researchers.
My Society does offer our members research advantages that we do not provide for anyone else. For the $12 a year that has been our membership fee for 9 years, we feel that it is the best benefit that we can offer. We have limited research volunteers so conducting research for anyone who contacts us has got to be prioritized and we have determined that our members will always come first. Our research room is open to the public once a week for only a couple of hours, which we hope to expand this year, if we get the appropriate number of volunteers needed. We also have our bi-monthly newsletters, free email list, and members only day trips for research etc. We try to provide entertainment AND educational opportunities for our genealogy and history buffs.
As an example of our activities we have our monthly meetings. Our next one will have our computer guru giving a presentation titled "Prescription for your PC" about basic maintenance and things we should all do at home to keep our computers working at their optimum. We advertise each meeting on our website, in an email list reminder to members, in the local newspapers and on local radio. We also have our programs advertised on the Calendar of Events at the Wisconsin State Genealogical Society website. We make sure that each news release reminds all that the meetings are free and open to the public.
We know that there are many people in our county doing genealogy and are not members of our Society. We hear "but I don't have any research in ___county" as an excuse often. So, we try to construct our programs for anyone doing genealogy. While we collect materials for our county to be housed in our research room more than 80% of our meetings have to do with general genealogy, not local. However, when we have a local expert talking about their area of the county or a local author talking about their book, we tend to get the greatest turnout at our meetings.
For our members, we are planning at home viewing of some webinars and then hope to schedule one at our Research Room for members who have never tried these online seminars and need some leadership. We have a day trip for research planned to the UW Stout Area Research Center on April 4th and another to the Minnesota Historical Society Library on May 3rd. We are waiting to see when the movie Conspirator will be coming to the local area, and then have a Movie Night planned with coffee and discussion afterwards.
We plan for local presence at the Pioneer Village and Museum's Heritage Days in July and once the weather is nice we get out in the local cemeteries to transcribe and photograph the tombstones. [This major project is designed to create a photographic and written record of all the tombstones in the 65 cemeteries in our county.] We are, individually, experimenting with Skype, as we have at least one member who may be housebound for a while with colon cancer treatments. She may enjoy being able to view our meetings from home.
I guess my point is, as a Society we WORK at being inclusive (no cliques), communicating all events through our email list and newsletter (and a phone call if necessary), and activity. Driving all of this through our news releases and personal invitations and contacts, we present a positive approach of enthusiasm that we WANT people to become members of our great group because we are having fun. I strongly believe that no one would want to be part of a group that does nothing much and isn't having much fun doing it. And nobody wants to be part of a group where they are not enthusiastically wanted and greeted.
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