Recruitment - Step 2 (What are your recruitment goals?)
Once you have discovered why people join organizations and you have explored the reasons why they might, the next step is recruitment. How many members is your organization looking for? What is the right number of members? When do you draw the line? Before you start recruiting you need to think about how many members your organization is looking for and when do you draw the line... make sense? An organization can have 20 members with all of the members being very active and then another organization can have 40-60 and their members will not be as active. You need to think of how active would you like your members? How much responsibility would you like for them to have? My opinion is if you want to have members stick with your organization and be excited at the same time, then you need to have them take on more responsibility and not have all the tasks spread out between 40-60 members. But then again it all depends on the size of the college, student schedules, type of event, etc..
Then you need to think about a process of how people can join your organization. Can they join at any time? Can they only join during a recruitment period? Is the membership by invitation only? If you are looking for a few new members for your organization, then I would go ahead and only allow people to join during a recruitment period. Then again you might only be looking for people to volunteer their time to help out with events/programs. So then you might want to have recruitment throughout the year, depending on if any help is needed. Is there a certain target audience that you are looking for? If so figure out where those prospective members most likely frequent. What will attract their attention? Maybe think back to when you first became involved - what attracted you? How were you recruited? Start asking yourself questions..
Why have I stayed involved? How did I hear about the club/organization? Did something catchy attract me to that club? It's always a good idea to look back at yourself and answer those questions. The answers will help you attract the prospective members that you are looking for your organization.
Stay tuned for next week!!
"b" carpenter
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