Tuesday night, we had the opportunity to witness a live taping of the Ask an Atheist podcast here in Edmond, Oklahoma. Afterward, I got the chance to talk to the AOK officer in charge of outreach, who has been really cool to work with even though we ran against each other in a contested election last December. We talked about what has effectively driven growth and participation rates in the group over the last few years, and she mentioned that I should probably have a look at the complete data set, which I did not know was available from the meetup website.
I downloaded the data, and it turns out that just yesterday the meetup group (which I started organizing with just a couple dozen active members back in 2003) broke the threshold of 1,600 nominal members, due to truly phenomenal growth over the last several years. Here is what that growth has looked like in a chart:
Interestingly, while the overall membership growth curve is relatively smooth, the active members growth curve is more volatile, spiking in Sep 2010 and again in Feb 2013. Both of those spikes leveled off afterwards, however, as the overall participation rates trended up from 25% to around 30% over the five-year span.
The lesson here, as best as I can tell, is that major media bounces like billboards and local news spots will create a temporary spike in activity, but the real long-term growth is happening via everyday outreach, particularly the constant effort that the leadership board has been putting in to finding potential members on new media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) and via real-world outreach (tabling at festivals, marching in parades, etc.) and letting them know who we are.
As to the rising participation rates, those have been the result of constantly delegating responsibility to people with new ideas and thereby diversifying what you do as a group. Whereas we used to just hang around and eat pizza in the evenings, but we now have a book club, a monthly lecture series, game night, trivia night, arts/crafts night, bowling night, several different groups that meet for lunch all over the metro, a softball team, and people who run 5k mud obstacle challenge races together. There is far more going on than any one person can hope to attend, and I’ve probably left something really cool off the list, like the unofficial bacon orgies that my wife and I never get invited to these days.
In a nutshell, then, this is the much-abridged secret formula for growing an increasing active local freethought group:
- An outreach team constantly strives to identify unbelievers and bring them into the fold
- Bold new ideas are implemented whenever their inventors are willing to take ownership
- A responsible leadership board strives to herd all the cats and keep them purring along
If you have any other ideas on how to grow your nominal membership and your participation rates in a local freethought group, please leave a comment below. Thanks!
