Jaycees - Are Existing Members, or New Members More Important?

Articles rage, people rant, and I write about membership in the Jaycees. On this windy October Friday, I consider the topic of new members vs. existing members., and their relative importance in the organization.

Businesses beat the drum of hiring and retaining the best employees. Industry metrics compare the cost of hiring and training a new employee to keeping an existing employee, and employers will generally agree that retaining employees is the preferred method to getting the job done.

Now let's consider the Jaycees. As a volunteer organization, there aren't the normal business costs (relocation expenses, signing bonuses, health club memberships). Yet we DO invest in new members. We invest time to recruit them, train them, and activate them in our chapters.

Getting from a potential member to a fully activated member can easily take several hours of time for other members. Once these members are signed up and past their first few months, many chapters drop their time investment on these individuals. Instead, they ask the new members to start paying out time.

What would happen in your life if a company courted you, hired you, trained you, only to then ask you start paying the company to work there? Obviously THAT relationship would sour quickly.

Although we are in a volunteer organization, there is an often ignored need to continually invest in members as long as they are on your roster. More unfortunately, the USJC's and many State Jaycee organizations place the burden of emphasis on recruitment of new members, and not on retention. I've heard many 'leaders' (I'll define Jaycee leaders in a later article) proclaim new members as the lifeblood of our organization.

Consider a patient laid out on an operating table at a hospital. The Jaycee 'leader' is Surgeon Bob, you are the patient. Surgeon Bob has proclaimed that blood transfusions are your lifeblood. He enthusiastically starts multiple transfusions in both arms.

Meanwhile, your leg continues to bleed out each transfusion. Unfortunately, Surgeon Bob is more concerned about getting multiple transfusions into your arm, and less concerned about keeping the blood IN your body.

This is not unlike members in chapters who will bring in new member after new member, but won't take 15 minutes to call existing members to keep them active and healthy in the chapter. This is also a behavior that is semi-intentionally encouraged by the USJC's. If you consider the metrics used to encourage chapters, and LISTEN to the words of 'leaders' you will hear much more about recruiting more members vs. retaining members. We need more surgeons who can stop the bleeding. End of story. Well, not exactly. Back to the operating room.

Unfortunately, Surgeon Bob kept pumping transfusions into your arm, and you went into shock. Chapters experience this when turnover is so high that the bulk of chapter operations are being supported by brand new, inexperienced members. The few veterans left (who are like your heart and lungs, trying desperately to handle all of this new blood) are unable to integrate the new members quickly enough to provide beneficial results to your chapter. They burnout, shock sets in, and chapter is now in the ICU ward...

This medical example is just one of many ways to describe what happens when a chapter is unbalanced in membership. I've also touched on a few key issues our organization faces over the coming years. There are solutions, but they take time and investment.

1. As long as the leadership message is heavy recruitment, and not heavy retention, we will have challenges in making long term progress. The patient needs to be moved from the battle field to a hospital to recover. Our organization needs to pull in, regroup, and create a foundation of behavior that supports long term growth and development.

2. Chapters need to place more value in existing active members (I'll also define active members later on). With the horrendous 2 year and 3 year retention numbers we are facing, chapters need to create new ways to encourage members to be active for multiple years, and not follow this fast cycle of membership. We KNOW what long term experienced members can accomplish. Start beating the retention drum in your chapter!

3. Members - spend time on retention! Get off the email, and call people. Send cards in the mail. Pick people up for meetings. If you want to get away from working every project, and being short handed, invest your time in ways that will pay off. In my chapter, an 'active' member contributes a few hundred hours per year of time. It takes 12 semi-active members to equal just ONE active member. Consider that when you are deciding whether to spend your time building a haunted house, vs. spending your time activating members.

I've ranted enough. Bottom line is that unless we get a much higher retention level nationally, statewide, and chapterwide, we will continue waste our transfusions, and end up in the scrap pile of organizations...