Growing the network
By Kate Fazzini
Sometimes baby steps – and a little ingenuity – can help boost membership rolls at your chapter.
Case in point: Robyn Sekula, freelancer and membership chair of the Louisiville (Kentucky) Pro Chapter, describes a recent event that helped bring six new members on board with help of a big name in new media and an event sponsor.
“We wanted to have a panel discussion and a visit from Barbara Friedman of the University of North Carolina,” Sekula explains, “The topic was to be the role of social networking in media.”
Friedman, a former journalist for the Chicago Tribune, New York Times and Baltimore Sun, has written on tactics for journalists in using online resources. The request came about after a high-profile shooting in southern Indiana, Sekula said – she noticed that while local television news relied heavily on information from the shooter’s MySpace page, some local newspapers were more reluctant to use those resources.
“His last act in the world was to sign onto MySpace,” she said. “I started looking at Facebook and LinkedIn and MySpace, and joined them all. Most of us just Google everything, but I wanted to find a way to discuss social networking sites and how journalists use them.”
So, the chapter applied for a national SPJ grant to get funding for a two-day seminar, to include Friedman, but they were not awarded the funds. So the chapter looked elsewhere for sponsorship for the event.
“I called about five places that I thought might be interested – AT&T agreed to sponsor us,” she said. “The $3,000 paid for us to have Barbara come in and paid all of our food expenses for both events.”
To help recruit more members, the chapter charged $20 for non-members and $10 for members and students. But the event was free for anyone newly joining SPJ.
“We also had a pretty good turn-out for us. We have a membership of about 95 members,” she said. “We gained six from these events overall. We also had about 32 chapter members (participate) and 20 non-members.”
So what about the subject matter?
“As far as I know, there have not been many other events and seminars that talked about social networking, particularly in our area. The content that we offered was unique and informational and something that answered a lot of questions,” she said.
The two-day event established some good basic rules, she said, particularly in the area of proper sourcing when using social networking sites. Specifically, remembering that when viewing someone’s profile on a social networking site, to be sure to thoroughly verify the source of the information.
Sekula said the chapter was careful when finding a sponsor, as well, making sure to find a business that, for example, didn’t hold a stake in Facebook or MySpace.
“We would like to have another workshop of some description like this,” she added. “We were very grateful take the event to the next level and recruit the kind of talent we wanted.”