Engaging & Keeping Your Members
Brett Cease
3862 Posts

Originally posted on old Community. Links may no longer be active.

In the spirit of last night's Group Leader call and learning from the wisdom from all CCL's group leaders, we set up this forum to keep sharing best practices and examples that you use with your team to make sure your new and returning chapter members are engaged at your monthly meetings! Thanks for sharing and all you do!
3 Replies
At our February meeting, rather than just pairing off and practicing our laser talks, we finished up our meeting with a call to a congressman or senator. It gave us one more chance to practice our laser talk, and for those who had never called a congress member, they found out that is isn't hard or scary. A good way to put your practice into practice! This coming month, we expect to have a number of new members as a result of a push to increase our membership. Our challenge is to find out what will kind of activities will be fun and rewarding for them. Drawing out new members is hard, because they often don't know anyone, and its easy to shrink back from involvement. We propose to have a "2018 projects roundtable" where we put members around a large table or in a circle (as opposed to classroom seating where its easy to hide). Rather than having the leaders talk extensively about new projects, we propose to briefly summarize each of our project ideas, the objectives of each, and then pose possible problems or unsolved questions that we see might hinder implementation. We intend to throw these problems out and invite members to comment. We propose to use brainstorming rules where we don't comment on the quality of the ideas, but just try to get some juices flowing. Our senior members will be primed to watch for those folks who seem especially interested in some projects and we will approach them to see if they might be interested in participating in a "pilot" project to get it off the ground. A pilot promises limited involvement at first, and gives us a change to further engage with the new members as the experiment proceeds.  We will try to update this group with our results in a few months. Ed Beshore and Jane Conlin, Tucson Chapter UPDATE: April 24, 2018. We tried the "Pilot Project" approach at our last monthly meeting with very good success. We introduced "Coffee with the Candidates" — a program to engage local candidates for Congress before the primaries. Engaging now has many benefits: 1) If they win, we have a relationship with a Congressman and they know about CCL and CFD 2) If they don't win, we have a relationship with a community leader who knows about us 3) Its great practice for lobbying, and because it's before a primary, it's easier to schedule time with candidates. 4) It prepares members for candidate forums, where we can have some followup questions. 5) It's a service to our members, as we do share results with them (but not publicly.) We had some extensive discussion about approaches to implementation, and had 12 volunteers! Other projects did not fair so well, but the key is we found something that people wanted to do, and hit pay dirt. I can't emphasis enough the role of having people sit in a conference style setting if space allows. It seems to put people into a collaborative mood. Now we are full speed ahead with our project.
D C
508 Posts
On the topic of how to keep and engage members ~

At the end of each monthly meeting, our chapter members like to give recognitions and share gratitudes.
We plant a seed at the top of the meeting and explain this, in order to give folks a chance to think about it, and we'll give an example:

"VolunteerName, thanks for putting together the event X this month. It was really successful and I also want to thank volunteers A, B, and C for helping to promote and take sign ups and welcoming folks at the event. This helped a lot with spreading the CCL message and friendliness in our community."

Then at the end of the meeting to close the meeting, we open the floor up for gratitudes, popcorn style, and usually someone in leadership is ready to go with one or two. I privately ask our leaders to thank intermediate or new volunteers, because new and intermediate volunteers will often say something thanking the leaders. The idea is to (1) reflect the light of praise and create more light.
https://sd54.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/290/2019/03/Big-Potential-Enhance-at-Administrators-Meeting-Ad-01.08.19.pdf

ie. The tabling wasn't a success just because of the organizer. It was a success because of everyone on the team, and even the individual who came and brought cookies helped the team morale!
Our chapter meeting hostess will often get appreciations from newbies for her warm welcomes. Even though she doesn't have the capacity to do much activism beyond this seemingly minor task, she is a large reason people enjoy their first meeting with us. And so the (2) reason we do these gratitudes is because we want people to keep doing their "minor" things! It's noticed, it's appreciated, it makes a difference, please keep it up! I am hopeful that this is a way to make the CCL "work" something that "fills your cup" rather than work that is draining.

In that link above from the book Big Potential by Shawn Achor, which I recommend for anyone leading groups, this is an opportunity to "democratize the praise". I think our practice has helped create a culture of frequent gratitude in our chapter, from anybody, not just leaders but also your peers. I've heard anecdotally from several people that the ending gratitudes are their favorite part of the chapter meeting. One woman who moved here from another CCL chapter said when she heard it at her first meeting with us, it made her want to do something to get recognized too!

With gratitude,
Debbie
 
Alex Marianyi
469 Posts
In the Chicago Northside chapter, a majority of our most active members are in their 20s or 30s (including yours truly), but when I participate in statewide, region-wide, or national events (especially at a leadership level), I notice that there aren't as many folks in this age bracket. As the person who reaches out to new members in our chapter, I've been paying close attention to my email exchanges, phone calls, and zoom chats with my fellow Millennials and Zoomers, and there are a few things I've noticed. (This isn't based on years and years of data collected in any sort of scientific way; it's just what one Millennial has noticed about my conversations with other CCL members at a similar life stage.)
  • Concern about not knowing enough or not being good enough.
    • I've heard phrases like "I don't know anything about climate science" and "I don't know how to lobby Congress" multiple times. Being very open about my own lack of knowledge of all of the above and more when I first joined CCL seems to make people feel less self-conscious and more eager about being involved.
    • I also get folks say they're nervous about not doing something "right" and downplaying their abilities. Again, being very open about my own shortcomings when I first joined CCL (and honestly, some that I still have) seems to put them at ease.
  • A couple folks have mentioned looking for the "right" organization to be involved with, and I even had one new member say they were "shopping around" for a climate organization to be involved in.
    • In these cases, being pretty straightforward about what CCL is and is not has really helped frame the discussion.
    • One member who's now pretty active in our chapter said they really appreciated my bluntness about it and that it made them willing to spend more time and energy.
    • I had another new member who was clearly looking for something that CCL is not. They wanted to be marching in the streets against the meat industry's contribution to climate change--a feeling I personally identify with as a vegetarian but not exactly something we're going to plan at our next CCL chapter meeting. They appreciated that I was clear about what we spend most of our time doing at CCL.
  • They all seemed relieved/excited on some level that things like writing clear emails, being professional on the phone or in a zoom meeting, and just plain being organized about projects were all qualities that we really need and value in the Chicago Northside chapter.
  • Surprisingly, no one was really concerned about how much time things took. A couple people mentioned not having hours and hours every week, but pretty much everyone was willing to do more than taking 10-15 minutes a week to write Congress.

I'll continue updating this post as I observe new trends or develop strategies to further engage folks in my age bracket. If anyone has any specific questions about engaging Millennials and Zoomers, feel free to reply here or send me a message on Community.

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