Maintaining and Obtaining New Membership

[kansas64]

Congrats Nom’s
In the last few months I have almost quit geocaching completely, not that I have issues with it but have chosen to try to get much healthier. I that process I joined another club that in many ways is similar to the WGA.
Its very social but at the same time you can work at your own pace, non competitive but yet its still about the numbers. And it faces other common problems with the WGA it is having a hard time obtaining new members, it membership is a little older than average (sorry WGA are not as young as we would like to think we are) and has issues maintaining its membership. All three of these issue also describe the WGA in some context. I cant ask you how you would suggest fixing the other club but how do you address it in the WGA?
Thanks

[The Crippler]

Thanks for the question.

As I mentioned in my earlier posting, I believe the WGA needs to be prepared to adapt to all these rapid changes in geocaching quickly. It is clear that Geocaching.com is adapting towards more families and the younger crowd and so should WGA. We do some things right like having quality kids activities at most events but we also need to understand more about what drives them and how this group learns and gets its information. Social media is one area and WGA prepared educational tools that can be presented to parks and recreation offices would be another. It was hard for me to believe but when I approached our local park and rec department about teaching a geocaching 101 course the director asked “what is geocaching?”.

[Northwoods Tom]

Good Question!

These are concerns that the board will need to address as well as others that haven’t even been asked yet. Two items I touched on in my earlier post may start to address these concerns and being a new candidate I will find that many items are being dealt with already and I may not yet be aware of it. I”ll quote my earlier thoughts as a starting point that can lead to further discovery:

1. “Getting young members involved. Lets come up with programs to get geocaching in the schools.” “Workshops for educators, donated GPS units to schools, local workshops. When I brought in my GPS units to my class and the kids started using them, it was great! I created more geocachers that have now taken the hobby home. It’s a drop in the bucket, but it’s a start.”

4. “Sessions on the technology which is changing faster than I type are needed. Look at the posts, people need questions answered on how to utilize it.”

The kids and/or young famllies are looking for activities to participate in and do together. We got a Christmas letter from a friend who talked about how their son had gotten into geocaching. I’ve run into young members in the field as well as young families. They are out there and we have to keep them interested. Promote at events, work shops, get schools involved, civic groups, rec departments. The list doesn’t end. I was workng with a student today in art class with a computer program, he didn’t want to read the instructions, he wanted me to show him how to do it… We need these events or whatever you want to call them “showing people how to do it”. Be it program, game, new technology, the hard part is going to be getting more saturation. Possible solution, more small gatherings throughout the state.

I’ll admit I’ve been out of my 20’s for 30 years but I work every day with kids and young adults as well as parents. They ask the same kind of questions and look for the “what can it offer me” answer.

You find ideas and ways to get them involved and bring them in or back.

[zuma]

If the premise of your question is that the WGA is having hard time obtaining new members, and has issues with maintaining its membership, and that this is a problem, then I reject the premise of your question.

I think that the reality is that geocaching is just one of a thousand leisure activities that people can choose to participate in, and it is not realistic to expect every individual who enjoys finding a cache or two in their spare time to want to join a group of people who enjoy the same thing.

I also think the reality is that people come and go from this sport for a lot of different reasons, and for the most part, those reasons are not within the control of the WGA.

Increasing membership is a worthy goal, a goal that we have worked on to the extent possible. We talked in the Membership Committee about specific things that we can do to increase membership, and I remain hopeful that the committee can come up with even more things in the coming year to increase membership. However, I do not think it is realistic to expect everyone who caches a bit to want to join the WGA. There are just too many options out there for attending events, and Facebook is strong competition for those people who want just to socialize.

However, I can name 5 things the board did last year to expand our marketing presence.

First of all, our web master moved the cache page logo link to the front page of our web site. Most of our new members find us by visiting a cache with the WGA logo on the cache page and clicking on it, and that is a very effective way to let geocachers know that we exist. We made it easier for our members to post the WGA logo on their cache page this past year by moving the link for this right to the front page of the web site where it is easy to find. It used to be hidden, and I am hopeful that now that it is easy to find, most of our members will add our logo to their cache pages.

The second thing we did this past year to improve marketing of the WGA was to host 12 different events, in all parts of the state, reaching out to potential members in a variety of areas.

The third thing we did to improve marketing was the purchase of the WGA pencils and start distributing them to caches. The idea is to get the WGA golf pencils into as many caches as possible, as another means of advertising our group. We still have many pencils to distribute, so more work is needed in this area.

The fourth thing we did this past year to improve membership was to clarify our Terms of Use, and make it clear that civility is an expectation of all users of the site, and that harassment of other members is not tolerated.

The fifth thing we did this past year, was move towards increasing our presence in social media, including Facebook. This has not yet occurred, but we have started the process of improving our social media presence.

zuma

[Barry Butrymowicz]

With the younger crowd I was going to say that we should start a Facebook page, but apparent that has all ready happened, but no one is really active on it. Events and etc. posted there could increase our presence, The upgrades to our site might help a bit, but like Zuma said every one who caches, does not necessarily wan to join a group of people with the same interest.

[TyeDyeSkyGuy]

Thank you for your question. The membership committee, of which I am a member, has been working on retaining membership, as well as establishing new ones.

In this past year, we have revised the new banner, and made it easily accessible. As well as asked the membership to assist by using it more on their cache pages. As part of the web comittee, we revised the banner to include local events and news, and make it easily revised at any time for that use.

There is also a new member email campaign that we worked on. Unfortunately, the response was seriously lacking at only 3% and the effort was discontinued, as it was done manually and time consuming. We are searching for new ideas and ways to make this work, or any new ideas that anyone may have.

Retaining members is another story all together, and something that we still discuss. It has been found very difficult to retain someone that has left the WGA, and we believe at this time, as with most web communities, it is time better spent finding new members, then trying to get back people who left, for more reasons then there is time to list. This is not to say we have given up. We are still searching for new ideas, and welcome suggestions at any time.

[Scrappy Scout]

Thanks dean for the question.

I think there is a lot we can do to get new members. We need to get out there and pound the pavement per say like holding events where events have not been held before. I held a Geo 101event last year at KMSU where we had 64 people come from the campground and surrounding areas, and I have been asked to come back this year and put on 3 more events this coming summer. One of the nice things we had there was a banner that showed the WGA logo and we hung it up so people can see it. we even had people who were not planning on coming walk by see what we were doing and then join in. we got a lot of people interested in geocaching and in the WGA. I had a lot of people come up and ask for the web site so they could sign on and look around. Hopefully this year we can have some WGA pamphlets so we can hand those out too. As to how to keep members interested that is a hard thing to do because people loose interest in the game or get a bad taste when things happen so they drop out and they do not want to come back because of X,Y,or Z. That is something the membership committee has been trying to handle but again hard thing to come up with an answer because of all the variables. But we have tried and we will keep doing it as soon as the membership committee gets started again.

Scout

[AuntieNae]

[Averith]

Thanks for the question!

1. Attracting new members:

Advertise, advertise, advertise. We need to get our name out there as much as possible. We have made some good strides in this direction (WGA logo on cache pages, WGA pencils, WGA sponsored Geocaching 101 classes, etc) but I’m sure other areas could and should be explored.

Geocaching has come to the forefront in the scouting program in the past year. Finding ways to work with local scouting programs on the new Geocaching Merit Badge, or CITO events might be a way to get both future members as well as new current members from the scout leadership.

2. Retaining members:

This is really a more difficult questions to answer. People leave groups for many reasons, some that really can’t be addressed at the BOD level. The best I think we can do in this area is be willing to listen to our members and do our best to address their concerns.

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