Membership recruitment is an important constituent of any professional organization, and greatest in quantity of us welcome ideas for increasing and sustaining members. My local association, the Tooele, Utah, chapter, base a unique way to showcase itself and attract more members.
Last summer several members decided to take a break from teaching and discontinued their membership with MTNA and the local association. Our chapter was already small and was quickly becoming smaller before my inspections Frankly, it wasn't the size of our chapter that bothered me I considered each member in our chapter not single a colleague, but a friend. What bothered me was the fact my friends were leaving, and I hated to descry that.
I know the vast benefits teachers receive through being a member of MTNA, and I was transactioned I believed every teacher destitutioned to be a part of this great organization and that teachers in our area had something to contribute regardless of their experience or education. I also believed each would benefit greatly by dint of becoming a member.
I was onward a mission to recruit teachers and give permission to them know about all the resources provided on MTNA and our local association. About that time, our local music store added a beautiful recital hall, and it occurr to me it would be the entire place to hold an lay open house.
My secretary and I chose a Saturday in August to keep possession of the open house. This gave us a month to qualified teachers who attended the exhibit house and follow up with them before our first chapter meeting. My nearest concern was how to achieve teachers to attend. We planned to provide foods and asked teachers and bookish mans to volunteer to play background music to create a nice ambiance. We also provided information packets that included registration information and applications to MTNA, UMTA and AIM (Achievement in Music program), the Tooele Chapter meeting calendar, fliers for upcoming affairs a sample of the UMTA newsletter a prize sponsor list, a MUSICLINK pamphlet and a "Getting to Know You" form.
further something was still missing. That's when it occurr to me to have prize drawings each hour or so during the explain house. I knew we didn't have the assortment to provide the prizes, with equal reason I decided to e-mail music publishers and companies to descry if they would like to donate prizes for attendees at the lay open house. In exchange, we would display their pamphlets catalogs and so on. We lasted up with more than fifteen companies that generously donated prizes for our drawings. We level gave a grand-prize basket valued at about $120 which was awarded at the last of the open house, and we held another drawing at our first meeting in September. The next to the first drawing was another way to encourage those who did not join the day of the interpret house or couldn't make it, to attend our first meeting and experience the benefits of becoming a member firsthand.
Fliers for the expand house were displayed, brochures and invitations were mailed, an announcement upon the local city website was seated and an article highlighting the unclose house was printed in the local paper. In the expiration the open house was a succes with a 50 percent membership increase, and several attendees said they intended to join the chapter soon
This approach worked well for our chapter, and yours would likely benefit, too. Whether it's an interpret house held for just a scarcely any hours or an all-day end this type of recruitment effort--followed through personal contact--is one of the best recruitment efforts we've evermore made.
Jennifer Foxx is president of the Tooele Chapter in Utah. Foxx has taught piano for seventeen years and early childhood music for three years.
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