I realize I may be coming a bit out of left field as I am a conservator, but I have worked with hundreds of smaller institutions, some entirely volunteer with no professional staff. The fundamental question in your question is what is the purpose of membership? I have seen numerous institutions struggle with defining this, and probably even more that ignore it completely. For some, membership is a revenue stream, although in my opinion, a relatively ineffective one. In the more modern view, it is a communication device. You as an institution can not get your message out if you can not reach people. Who are the best people to reach? In the commercial world, this is your past customers. It is much cheaper for a store to market to their past customers than find new ones. So, I would suggest (and this is only opinion, not fact) that for your anniversary year you offer free membership. That would be for current members renewing, new members, people walking in the door to visit, radio promotions, giveaways for contests, standing at the door of malls handing out applications, whatever. Your goal is to build up as much as possible your contact list. Hopefully at the end, it will be at least 10 times bigger. Then, when you announce the next fundraising dinner, it will be sold out in days, or the next new event at the museum, it will be mobbed. "Customer retention" is the difference between success and failure in the business world. It is also relevant for museums (and historical societies are museums for this discussion). Just remember to get email addresses when people join. This is critically important. This allows you to build your outreach potential. Do not accept a membership without an email address. Train everyone taking applications of this need. All museums are competing with many, many other avenues of entertainment (yes, you are in the entertainment business) so the long-term trend WILL be less visitors. But you can reverse this by aggressive marketing to your ideal constituency. Best wishes!! Marc From: Yearous, Jenny Dee Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2017 9:08 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [MUSEUM-L] Ideas needed Hello, I received this email on our state museum list serve. It is coming from a small county historical society here in ND. We got a couple of I would be interested too type replies but haven't seen any ideas. So I would like to post it to you all. Do you have strategies that work for small underfunded institutions in sparsely populated rural settings? I imagine there are others out there with similar issues so please post to the list. Thanks in advance Jenny Yearous Curator of Collections Management State Historical Society of North Dakota ______________________________________________________________- Hello All! I hope everyone had a good holiday season! Going through the end of year financials, we noticed that our yearly memberships are down, and seem to have been trending down for the last few years. Since it's the 25th anniversary of our opening, I was thinking that this year might be a good year to do a membership drive, and see if we can get those numbers back up. I was wondering if any of you have done a membership drive recently (or not so recently) and have a particular strategy, or something that worked well for you? Did it work at all? Any ideas would be appreciated! Thanks! ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes). ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).