Building club participation with a member poll

[Weltevreden SA (Dana)]

Our club is casting about for ideas to rebuild membership. The present meeting format is stuck in a cycle of a member talking about black holes or antimatter, etc. I'm a new member and the only one with enough equipment to host a star party. Beyond star parties, the club could use some fresh ideas. I'd like to do a member survey. Has anyone here devised such a thing for their club members? What questions might I ask to broaden our awareness of what members really want?

[Larryp (Laurie)]

Our society runs annual public open nights, for which the local newspapers give us some publicity-we also contact radio stations, etc-anywhere we can get publicity.
We do a Friday and saturday night and if the weather is good, we can get over 1000 people over the 2 nights. This stirs interest and we get some new members out of it.
The other thing is we run an introductory course in astronomy, which runs one night a week for about 8 weeks-again it is publicised, and we gain a lot of new members from it. The society charges a fee for this, and the open nights, and it helps the club finances.

[brian nordstrom (As avatar)]

Hi Dana , my old club in NZ (I am now working in OZ ) the Northland Astro Society was in the same boat about 12 years ago .
A few of us thought this over , as you are doing now , and we started doing exactly what Laurie suggested .We also started doing 'Outreach', I just love doing outreach , its so much fun .

We discovered that the best ways to attract people was 'Outreach' we used to set up outside the public library ( with their blessings ) on a Friday night before our Saturday nite public nights and mate the amount of people that would arrive on Saturday nights was awesome !!

It only took a few of us , normally Maree with her C11 , Terry with his 10 inch Dob and myself with my 6 inch refractor these 3 were plenty enough to get people interested and after a peek at the 1st quarter moon ,,, well the rest is history .

Brian.

[Larryp (Laurie)]

Another thing our society does, is to run star nights at our observatory for school groups, scout groups and social clubs. These are pre-booked and charged a set fee.

[tlgerdes (Trevor)]

I think what people have said is correct. A lot of it comes down to "advertising", let the community know you are out there.

Local newspapers are always looking for stories, things like star parties are good, but also work in conjunction with local educational facilities.

Get the local university to send a lecturer to talk about a topic at your meeting and publicise it through the local paper.

[brian nordstrom (As avatar)]

Here , I dug this shot out of my back up HD , its a photo of one of the many star parties I had at home on my front lawn , this party was a friends large family .

This particular star party started one young man ( the one looking thru the scope here ) on the path of discovery down this wonderful hobby of ours.
I gave him an old pair of binos , he devoured all my books and Mag.s every CD Rom that I have from the 'Sky at Night Mag.' about 30 off .

This photo was taken in 2010 and he now has a nice 6 inch Dob and is very active .

Its another way to conjure up interest and I love doing out reach as I said and people talk and word soon gets around gets around as well as a bit of advertising .

Good luck .

Brian.