Here is a recipe for attracting new members. It’s a formula that worked well for Colorado SPJ, enabling our chapter to grow by 30 in one year.

Results may vary. Feel free to modify these instructions to best fit local conditions. Just let us know what worked for you.

Step One: Assemble the cast

To produce a successful training seminar, at minimum, you will need the following five people:

A chair: someone who oversees the operation, delegates work, holds people to schedules, makes adjustments when needed.

A campus insider: someone currently working at a college campus with routine and regular interaction with students, someone whom they trust and respect.

A booker: someone who is responsible for assembling the speakers.

A publicist: someone who is charge of marketing the event, who will do outreach and build an audience.

A designer: Someone who will create a graphic that can be used interchangeably as a flyer, e-mail, poster or postcard.

Four speakers: each with a different area of expertise that would be relevant to an audience of young journalists or journalism students. Someone who would be willing to donate about 90 minutes of their time for free.

Step Two: Doing the logistics

Find a venue: a room capable of holding up to 50 people, preferably with a projector screen and Internet access. Ideally on a college campus, it can also be in a newsroom, a library or a community center. Also needs to be free.

Time: Do not attempt one of these sessions without at least six months advance notice. You will need half that time to plan the program and the other half to publicize it.

Pricing: Set your price low enough to just break even. The fee should be equivalent to the dues that your chapter charges its members.

For example: in Colorado, we charge the national rate of $72 for professionals and $36 for students plus local chapter dues of $17.

We applied the $17 toward lunch and other expenses and forward the rest to SPJ national in the form of a dues payment. Try to hold food costs to about $15 per person.

In some cases, where we had student members who were not part of the state chapter, we simply forwarded $17 to SPJ national and upgraded their membership to pro chapter status.

Thus we were able to charge the following rate structure for the half-day seminar: $89 for non-member professional; $56 non-member students and $30 for current SPJ members (students or professionals).

If possible, try to collect fees in advance of the event. Here’s where a campus adviser/insider can help by serving as both RSVP and money collector.

Location: Go to where the students are. It’s easier to ask four speakers to drive to your location than to have your audience commute to your event.

Step Three: the initial organization meeting

Take an hour to have the principal organizers outlined above meet face-to-face to decide the following: venue, date, price, theme and date for a follow-up meeting.

It helps to have a catchy title such as the baseball motif we used Spring Training or Fall Classic. Also use related titles for each of the individual sessions. We had sessions such as “Put me in coach” for a talk on the editor/reporter relationship and “Slick Defense” for a session on copy editing.

Discuss possible speakers, but leave it to the booker to sort out the details and the lineup. Don’t get too hung up on the theme and the speakers. Remember to devote an equal amount of time to publicizing the event as you devote to programming it.

Have a designer begin to rough out a graphic immediately after this meeting.

Step four: the follow up meeting. This can take place via conference call. During this time, finalize the speakers and the order in which they appear. Also sign off on the graphic. It should be colorful and not too text-heavy. Include contact info for the RSVP person.

Step Four: the publicity campaign.

The publicist should enlist other journalism groups that can share the flyer with their members.

It also helps to find one person in each nearby newsroom who will agree to act as a contact person and ensure that the flyers actually get into the hands of their co-workers

Attend local press association conventions, journalism forums, mixers and make newsroom visits where possible to promote the event.

It also helps to hold a mixer at a local bar about a week prior to the seminar and invite students and young journalists to attend.

Third and final meeting: Check list of final details. Make sure audio/visual and Internet access works. Make sure there’s coffee and donuts at the beginning of the session as well as bottled water and snacks for the afternoon.

The booker should make a round of calls about a week before the event to reminds speakers when and where to show up.

Miscellaneous notes:

Scheduling: We found that Saturday morning from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. works best. Beyond 3 p.m. even the most brilliant speakers will have a tough time holding the audience.

Sessions: Instruct your speakers that they have to fill one hour. A half-hour presentation followed by 30 minutes of question and answer session generally works well.

Encourage your speakers to bring handouts. Leave a break period of 15 minutes after each session for speaker and audience to interact one-to-one.

It also helps to have someone who can talk over the lunch hour. Have fun with your speaker topics. Don’t be boring.

Backup: Have one person (usually the moderator) who is prepared to step in and make a presentation on short notice in the event one of your scheduled speakers fails to show.

Finale: End each seminar with the SPJ initiation seminar. (See Garden Center Post “Ritual as Compost” from Dec. 30) You will need some candles and about 2-3 chapter members to conduct the initiation.

About a week after the seminar, the organizers should do one last conference call to critique what worked and what didn’t.

The chair should prepare a report for the SPJ national membership coordinator, detailing who joined, supplying their contact info as well as a breakdown of the money that will be sent to purchase new memberships or upgrade existing one.

About one month after the seminar, the chapter president should send an e-mail welcoming the new members to the chapter and out-lining other upcoming events.

Good luck and if you have any questions, feel free to contact me at damon_runyon@hotmail.com.

SPJ by the Numbers

Membership this week           9,480

Membership last month         9,391

Membership one year ago     8,813

The Gardener has taken some time off to deal with a real gardening problem: the enormous weeds that threatened to turn his front yard into a jungle.

Last weekend, however, I was fortunate to serve as one of the facilitators at SPJ’s annual Scripps Leadership Institute in Indianapolis.

There I had the chance to talk with 50 up and coming student and pro leaders about what it will take to grow their chapters.

We talked about a great many things: dues, programs, strategies and best practices. We talked about how retaining members is just as important as recruiting them.

Central to our conversations was an idea that has become increasing important to my thinking over the last two years on the subject of membership development: the importance of knowing your audience.

In my view, there is a spectrum of journalists whom we can and should try to convince to join SPJ.

At one end of this scale at what I call the “altruistic” journalists, those for whom the core values of what SPJ stands for are central to their reasons for joining.

On the other end of the spectrum are the “pragmatic” journalists, those who believe in their profession but who always require a tangible answer to the question “what do I get for my money?”

In small group sessions in Indianapolis, I asked each of the pro chapter participants to explain why they belonged to SPJ. Their answers were heartening. They cited:

-SPJ’s setting the standard for ethics.

-Our work on behalf of a federal shield law.

-Our support of diversity in the newsroom.

-Our commitment to journalism training.

-The networking that SPJ provides.

It’s not surprising that the future leaders of SPJ would be among the folks who you would find on the altruistic end of the scale.

However, I pointed out to them that in recruiting new members, often they will be talking to prospects on the other end of the scale. Inevitably, one of them will ask, “well what do I get for my $72?” It’s best to have a ready answer.

One such answer is training. Having the right new media skills is becoming increasingly important to finding a job in U.S. newsrooms.

A journalist who knows how shoot video, do audio slide shows, report and write online stories and maybe even blog is someone who is increasingly in demand.

And yet, it’s my distinct impression that many newsrooms lack the time or the budgets to provide such training.

That’s where I believe SPJ can provide a valuable role that can help us bring in new members in bunches.

By hosting such training sessions for fees equal to one-year’s dues, I believe we can provide an answer that will resonate with even the most pragmatic of journalists: join us and we’ll help you improve the skills to need to advance in a multi-media newsroom.

Some caveats: I’m not suggesting that we give up on recruiting members for whom the core values such as ethics, diversity and freedom of information are paramount. Those reasons should come first. And those members tend to join and stay for a long, long time.

But what I am suggesting is simply this: know your audience and adjust your membership pitch accordingly.

I’m aware that “pragmatic” journalists have a tendency to drop their membership one year later unless they are given a compelling reason to stay.

But that’s where the equally important strategies of member retention come into play.

Over the course of that year, if chapters provide a steady stream of reasons to be a member (i.e. programs, mixers, discounts, ect.) we’ll be able to hang onto a fair percentage of these pragmatic journalists before their memberships expire.

Who knows, we might even nudge them a bit closer toward the altruistic side of life.

Next week, I’ll outline a training protocol that has enabled Colorado SPJ to nearly double its membership in two years.

SPJ by the numbers

Membership this week                  9,407

Membership last month                9,326

Membership last year                    8,743