Best source of new members? New members, of course.

The new member initiation ceremony isn’t just the end of the process of recruiting those members; it’s the beginning of your best chance to grow your aerie or auxiliary membership even more. Those new brothers and sisters are themselves gold mines for new prospects.

New members have family, friends, neighbours, co-workers, fishing buddies and fellow softball team members who know little or nothing about the Eagles. They need to be motivated to recruit them.

Remember EMOALONMTHAEY? We often say (and most of us post a sign saying) “every member owes at least one new member to his/her aerie/auxiliary every year”. If all Eagles did that, of course, our overall membership would double every year, while we are in fact declining in membership numbers. The Grand Aerie Membership Department says only eight percent of us sign a new member in any given year.

If we can get new members to sign up others right away we can make a dramatic difference. According to Grand Aerie Membership Director Vince Kinman, “if only four percent of new members signed up another member during their first year, the FOE overall would have a net gain in members every year.”

Imagine what could happen if each of our Local Aeries set a goal of one new member from each new member. It’s a modest enough goal, but the payoff would be spectacular!

Here are a few suggestions for meeting that goal:
• Have an officers meeting before an initiation, to review what we know about each candidate. Assign an officer to be in charge of welcoming each new member, along with that new member’s proposer.
• The assigned officer’s job begins at the end of the ceremony: he or she now has to engage the new member in conversation, take him or her around to introduce other members, and let the new member know what upcoming activities there are that might be of interest.
• The assigned officer is given a list of upcoming events (dinners, dances, work parties, etc.) and regularly scheduled activities (darts, shuffleboard) that might be of interest to the new member. The goal here is to get a commitment from the new member to come back one more time.
• The assigned officer also gives the new member an application form and lets him or her know that we expect him/her to sign up someone else right away.
• The assigned officer’s job doesn’t end until the new member leaves for the night or gets involved in conversation with someone he/she did not know before the initiation.
• People organizing upcoming events should be asked to be present, and to have one or two specific tasks they could ask the new member to help with.
• Make sure there’s food available on initiation nights. It doesn’t have to be a full-blown dinner. Throw some Kraft Dinner into a crock pot or whip together a couple of loaves worth of egg salad sandwiches if you have to. The whole point is to give the new member a reason to stick around at least for a few minutes after the ceremony.
• The day after the ceremony, mail a personalized welcome letter from the membership chairman or the President to the new member’s home. Repeat the request to sign up a new member and include another application form.

By the end of March, Ontario’s Local Aeries signed up 60 new members. Imagine where we’d all be if each one of them signed another new member of their own. Three of our five Local Aeries don’t even have 60 members in total. Ontario’s four Local Auxiliaries (Toronto 2311 doesn’t have one) signed up 14 new members by the end of March. All of us could become net gain aeries or auxiliaries, and we could guarantee ourselves that every new member has a friend at the Eagles, a reason to come by more often.

Let me know if you can think of any reason this wouldn’t work.