Having joined SPJ as a college sophomore, in many ways I feel like I’ve always been a SPJ member. It’s hard to remember a time when I wasn’t involved in SPJ – a student chapter, professional chapters, as a regional director or as a member of a committee.

I’ve been giving a great deal of thought about a message I want to send to colleagues and friends who aren’t members asking them to join. SPJ does many different things for many different people. Some may find it valuable for networking, others for training, some for the freelance job directory and still another group who believe strongly in the power of journalism.

All of those reasons are compelling, but I’m wondering what would make me join SPJ now if I had never been a member (or hadn’t been a member in a long time)? I’m curious to hear from new members about what prompted them to join now. And long-time members, what would make you join now?

I am very excited about SPJ’s new membership campaign – 2010 in 2010.  Launching Jan. 1, 2010, this membership drive has the potential to bring in new members, reward local chapters for their member recruiting efforts and just give us some plain ‘ol fun.

Is a goal of 2010 members in the year 2010 ambitious? As Mickey Mouse (I have a toddler) would say, “You betcha!” Is it doable? Another “You betcha!” I know of few organizations whose members are as dedicated, devoted and enthusiastic as SPJ’s. We can easily channel that enthusiasm into a membership campaign and I firmly believe we can achieve our goal.

With the journalism profession as we’ve known it for years crumbling around us, I definitely want to be part of a solid journalism organization and surround myself with other great journalists.

In the next few weeks, start making a list of the journalists you know who are not SPJ members. Now would be a great time to invite them to a program, send them a brochure or point out all the great programs SPJ has. Will they join? I’m going to say, “You betcha!”

Here are the contest guidelines:

 We will have three categories: large chapter, small chapter and campus chapter.

1. You should recruit new members at every opportunity…awards, professional development programs, mixers, in the hallway, at the park, in the bathroom, etc. Just ask!

2. Anyone from your area who signs up during the year (Jan. 1 – Dec. 31) will automatically be awarded to your chapter. Meaning, someone doesn’t have to sign up at a chapter event for you to get credit. We are going to assume that your chapter has spread the word and people came to us because of your great work.

3. We will track the results at HQ, but provide regular updates so all can see how the contest is going.

4. Membership applications and payment (mailed or online) must be received by Dec. 31, 2010, HQ to be counted.

5. To up the ante a bit, we will count new AND renewing members. After all, it doesn’t do us much good to sign up 2,010 new members if we lose 3,000. In addition to recruiting, we need you to focus on meeting the needs of those already in your ranks, and showing them value of SPJ.

 The chapters who finish in the top three in each category will win:
1^st place – three complimentary convention registrations for 2011 (no travel or meal costs included). A $555 value.

2^nd place – two complimentary convention registrations for 2011 (no travel or meal costs included). A $370 value.

3^rd place – one complimentary convention registration for 2011 (no travel or meal costs included). A $185 value.

From SPJ’s Leading Edge Newsletter:

If you are looking for a great program idea to build a membership campaign around, consider the continuing education program being conducted by the Western Washington Chapter. They conduct an eight-week, skills-based series designed to help journalists stay on their toes.

This series is one of their most popular and best attended annual programs, and they do most of it at low or no cost.  They have also been able to get chapter grants from national SPJ to help them cover their costs.

The chapter makes the program free to SPJ Members and charges $10 per class for non SPJ members. Of course, anyone may register to become an SPJ member at any class to receive the class free. They also provide free parking, pizza and bottled water.

To read more about the program here.

And if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Region 10 Director Dana Neuts via email or phone at 360-920-1737.

Here at the Garden Center, we’re looking to share resources and ideas that will help grow SPJ’s membership. Please post a comment with you suggestions or e-mail me at holly (at) fishers2000.com with your suggestions. No need to reinvent the wheel – let’s hear what’s working for you or what didn’t do so well. Thanks! ~~ Holly Fisher, SPJ Membership Chair

Below is a message the Cincinnati Chapter is sending out to members who fell off of their rolls last month, as well as anyone who might be interested in joining for the first time. It’s a month-long membership special: if you join SPJ at the $72 rate, you get into two of their upcoming ticketed programs for free. This may not apply to chapters that don’t have programs on a regular basis or that don’t charge for the programs they do have.  Thanks to Aiesha Little for sharing this.

Times may be tough, but the Greater Cincinnati chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists wants you to know that we’re here for you. That’s why we’d like to help you stretch your membership dollars in the coming months. If you join the organization or renew your annual $72 membership by October 31, you’ll get two of GC SPJ’s upcoming ticketed programs for free!*

It probably seems like ages ago, but I promise you, it’s only been three weeks or so since we met in Indianapolis.  Since then I’ve spent three days in Orlando being deposed in a defamation case (no, I’m not in trouble) and 6 days in Wales delivering a paper at a conference on the Future of Journalism (yes, there is one!).  Plus, I had to keep may day job, so those are my excuses for not getting this out to you more quickly.

We have some new members on the committee:
Mia Rhodarmer, Editor and Publisher of the Advocate-Democrat in Sweetwater, TX
Ann Augherton, Managing Editor, Catholic Herald, Arlington, Virginia
Mike Walter, President, Walter Media, Washington, DC

At our meeting in Indy we talked about the types of questions we’d like to include on the survey HQ will be sending out to members.  Proposed questions centered on topics such as how do you like training delivered (online vs. in person, travel to training vs. have training come to you), as well as the types of training, i.e. which new media skills are needed or even whether help is needed in selecting hardware and software.  We also wanted to know how great the interest was in entreprenuerial journalism, social media skills, etc.  (Kevin, I have not sent those questions to you yet, but I’ll be working on getting those to you today or tomorrow.)

Kara proposed and the rest of us agreed that we’re interested in talking to HQ about the possibility of adding a social media module to the courses offered in the newsroom training program.  Obviously, we may want to wait for the survey results before committing to developing the content, but Kara also suggested that Jeff Cutler might be an excellent choice for creating the module.

We discussed a few sessions we’d like to propose for the 2010 convention, including sessions in which multimedia journalists might show & tell – show us their work and then tell us how they accomplished it technically, we might also propose a session on multimedia time management – how does one person do it all.  We discussed a session on the increased pressures newsrooms face to make money in ways they probably wouldn’t have considered in the past, i.e. Gannett’s advertorials, a Maine TV station that let an organization pay for travel on a story, etc.

During the last few months, the SPJ membership committee and the national staff have talked about ways to possibly help laid-off journalists continue paying their SPJ membership dues. We are concerned about losing these unemployed reporters as members, perhaps permanently.

Some ideas that have been discussed include having local chapters contribute to a fund that could be used to temporarily pay dues for laid-off members, possibly for six months; reducing the membership fee for journalists who have lost their jobs, perhaps to $36; or waiving the fee altogether and giving the unemployed reporters an electronic membership.

None of these ideas, though, seem to be a clear favorite. So I’m asking for your help. Please let me know what suggestions you have. What can SPJ do to help retain members who have lost their jobs and, due to financial hardships, are unable to continue paying their dues? Do you like any of the above ideas? And would your chapter contribute to a fund for laid-off journalists?

You can respond either by adding a comment to this post or by sending me an e-mail at john.huotari@oakridger.com.

Thank you.

John Huotari
SPJ Membership Committee Chair

*************************************

Membership on Friday, March 13, 2009– 8,645
Membership one year ago — 9,212

I recently fielded a question about whether SPJ offers trial memberships. The answer to that question is, no, SPJ does not offer trial memberships.

However, there are options available to those who might be interested in joining SPJ but want to first learn more about the organization. One option is to use the SPJ Web site, which is loaded with information about the organization and its activities.
A second option is to find out whether there is an SPJ chapter in your area and, if there is, get in touch with someone in that chapter and plan to attend the next event. To help you find the chapter closest to you, visit SPJ’s Local Connection page.

Another option is to try some of the training sessions provided by SPJ and its chapters. Information about those opportunities is available at the Training page on the SPJ Web site.

Potential members should also be aware that SPJ offers membership specials, including a deal for college graduates, who pay $72 for a three-year membership after college. That will save post-graduates some money, considering the normal professional membership is $72 per year.

Meanwhile, students can buy a four-year membership for $100. There are other specials available, including for retired, lifetime and household members. To see the membership categories and their fees, visit the Membership Fees page.

I got a telephone call last month from someone in Belgium who is interested in joining SPJ. However, this person was having trouble filling out the membership form online because the system wouldn’t accept his entries in some fields, like those used for state, zip code and telephone number.

I asked Joe Skeel, SPJ associate executive director, what he would recommend. Joe said people living overseas who are interested in joining SPJ should download the registration form from the Web site at www.spj.org, print it out and fill it out, and then mail it in.

Alternatively, they can register by calling SPJ headquarters in the United States at (317) 927-8000. I assume the international access code and country code would have to be added to the beginning of that telephone number.

I’m sure most of you have seen SPJ’s Web page on joining the organization, but, just in case you haven’t, it’s available at http://www.spj.org/join.asp.

SPJ’s Garden Center blog has been dormant since September. Now, I want to revive it. I apologize for not keeping it active these last few months.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is John Huotari, and I am chairman of SPJ’s membership committee. I am also a newspaper reporter, mostly covering city government for The Oak Ridger in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The good news for SPJ is that membership is mostly holding steady, despite the discouraging state of our industry and the national economy. Here’s what the national staff said in their final membership report of 2008: “Given the circumstances that journalists and media companies faced this year, we think SPJ did very well regarding membership.”

The challenge for us this year is retaining those members. During the last few months, I’ve noticed that the numbers of student and retired members in particular seem to be falling from where they were a year ago. Your SPJ membership committee (more information about them in subsequent posts) is working to find ways to reduce or eliminate those losses.

We also want to work closely with SPJ’s freelance committee to ensure that SPJ remains valuable to freelancers, particularly as their ranks are expected to grow.

And we are forming a subcommittee to start a multi-year effort to form chapters in states that don’t currently have them.

As the membership committee gets this blog active again, watch for updates on membership numbers, stories on successful recruitment and retention efforts from chapters across the country, and tips from SPJ pros.

Please feel free to send me any questions or suggestions you might have. The SPJ membership committee is meant to be a resource for members and local chapters, as well as those interested in becoming members or forming chapters. I will do my best to get back to you as soon as possible.

You may contact me by e-mail at john.huotari@oakridger.com or by phone at (865) 220-5533.

May the rain gods bless this blog , and may you visit often.

Gardener’s note: The St. Louis Pro Chapter was one of three chapters honored at the SPJ National Convention for posting the greatest gains in membership. St. Louis won on the strength of a jump from 31 in June 2007 to 80 by May 2008.

Shera Dalin, a member of the SPJ membership committee, provided this story on how St. Louis achieved its rapid increase:

Word of the St. Louis Pro chapter’s whopping 158 percent membership growth over the past year took a few of us by surprise. Certainly we had noticed new faces and had seen some stellar turnout to our events, but we had no idea that we were tops in the nation in chapter growth and No. 2 in net gain of new members.

So how’d we do it? We had to think about that for a bit, but here’s what we attribute it to. The following comments are from Chapter President Rachel Melcer.

·         The chapter had been dormant, so we had nowhere to go but up. Once we reactivated it, people seemed to welcome SPJ—pent-up demand, if you will.

·         We’ve been very aggressive about programming, offering a monthly luncheon panel discussion and a purely social happy hour every month. The quality of our speakers has attracted good turnout, especially the launch of a competing Web-based St. Louis news site—STLBeacon.com. (We packed the lunch discussion when we had the founders come to speak.) We tried to balance our panels between practical journalism and issue-based topics.

·         St. Louis also has a lot of retired journalists, and they were looking for programs like these as a way of staying involved. We’ll be marketing to more of them this year as, sadly, their numbers are growing.

·         We’ve also held a couple of much more high-profile events that were very successful: a spring regional conference in 2007, and a journalism-themed trivia night last fall. Trivia nights are a St. Louis specialty – nearly every church, private school and charity seems to have one. But ours was the first that was tailored to journalists. Selling beer didn’t hurt either.

·         Our board has very consciously worked to diversify itself. As members have stepped down, or new positions have been created, we recruit new board members from media that haven’t been represented. Our board includes journalists from radio, the Web, academia, the freelance world and print publications ranging from the big daily to a small, free-distribution weekly. We are each able to reach out to a different pool of potential members and program participants.

·         We’ve had great membership chairs – first former Post-Dispatch science writer Tina Saey, and freelance journalist Shera Dalin. These days, we benefit from Shera’s broad network of journalists from all over our region. Recently, she and two other board members visited a newsroom where we had been unknown, pitching SPJ to their reporters and editors. As a result, several people have begun attending our programs and we hope to convert them to members.

·         We reach out individually to prospective members and invite them to join in a low-key way. No hard sale tactics required.

·         And we hope to do even more in the future. We’re planning another spring regional conference for 2009, and we’d like to include a journalism contest as part of that program. Another trivia night already is in the works. So, we plan to build on our success going forward to make the St. Louis Pro Chapter even bigger and more vibrant.