The question of why or why not is this forum growing is directly tied into why do we even have this forum? What is its purpose? Why club membership has continued to slip is the other question that feeds into the first question.
If I remember correctly, one of the reasons suggested for needing a forum like this was that it would help with attracting new members to the club. By making this an open forum, potential club members would be able to get to know the club via this forum, even if they had no other interaction with any club members. We've seen some people join this forum that are not club members, so that has certainly happened, even if only in a limited manner. Making this grow will not only help this forum, it will help our club.
Another reason presented for having this forum has been it's ability to enhance communication between club members, AND between the club leadership and other members. I've seen several of the state officers posting here, but I haven't seen much posting by national officers. I'm not sure that is a big problem however, since they do communicate through the STAReview to all members on a monthly basis. I would suggest that ALL state directors NEED to be ACTIVE members of this forum, AND do all they can to promote it to all of their members on a consistent basis. I don't think that it is any random chance that the states with the biggest and most active memberships have state directors that use this forum, and other means, to do a great job of communicating with the members. Looking through the BlueBook, the vast majority of current members have e-mail. I think that would indicate that the majority of our members have Internet service. I'm willing to bet that ALL of our potential members ARE Internet savvy. We have some members listed in the BlueBook that have no address or phone number listed. I doubt that we will ever get any of those members to become active forum users. But I would think that any members that have an email address ARE potential forum users. The question then becomes, how to reach them and intice them to become active members?
My suggestions.....
State directors must contact all members and INVITE THEM to become forum users, and they must keep inviting them on a regular basis.
The STAReview goes out to all members. It should be used as a way to promote forum usage.
A class on the forum should be offered at Star.
ALL forum supporters must be willing to invite other members AND potential club members to visit the forum. If you have MSTA cards you pass out, make sure they have the forum address on them.
