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Raising
the Attendance at Ward Events
By
Clark L. and Kathryn H. Kidd
Anyone who has
planned a ward activity is familiar with the knot that forms in
the pit of the stomach shortly before the event is to begin. This
knot manifests itself long after all the work has been done, the
food has been bought, and the decorations tied to the basketball
hoops. It’s the knot of fear that nobody is going to show up to
appreciate the work you have done.
This was a recent
topic of discussion among one of the LDS activities groups (see
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LDS-activities/).
“Heidi” wrote in to say:
We
work so hard, plan for months, brainstorm ideas, make decorations,
send sign-up sheets, assign duties, and then have very low percent
attending. It's frustrating and I know my weak spot on this is
publicity. You need to get the word out and get people excited
about coming. If it's in the bulletin it's not necessarily going
to get to everyone.
Calling
people who signed up the day before is really important. It makes
people feel like their contribution is needed and they usually
make an effort to attend (one lady got unexpected relatives dropping
in and sent her vegetable tray anyway!!) I really like activities
with "built in" publicity, like the Christmas program
("Christ the Lord," or “Christmas in Zarahemla”) that
has one of the prophets visiting the auxiliaries and priesthood
the week before the event to publicize it, and Samuel the Lamanite
going to Primary to hear the kids sing. I need to get a spokesperson
to advertise like that for each activity!
Some wards just require food (full dinner) for good attendance.
I have never seen poor attendance at a Christmas party either.
Some wards need to dangle carrots. I think this is the case with
my ward. I will have door prizes at the next activity, and there
will be people attending who will hold that ticket in their hand
the whole 2 hours. At least they come and might even have some
fun!
Heidi didn’t
ask for any advice, but she got it anyway. The group is a terrific
resource for all sorts of advice — solicited and unsolicited.
RT
Wagner responded:
I
recently started taping a flyer to the doors going into and out
of our building to add some more publicity. I also volunteered
in ward council to make the up the ward calendar so I know that
the ward activities are listed. We hand that out with the ward
bulletin on Fast Sunday or the Sunday before and our RS president
had a great idea of having 2 binders, one that goes to the RS
room and the other one gets taken to the YW and Primary. In there
is the roll, and a bunch of pocket dividers so I can add flyers
into a pocket of each binder and also add a sign-up sheet. That
helps tons, because then I only have to worry about the Priesthood
one floating around and can leave the ones for the ladies in the
binder until the week of the activity when I need them for reminder
calls.
Dana Bell of
Woodland Hills, California, agreed. She wrote:
My successes
in the past have had to do with publicity. I do overkill on publicity.
I start publicizing an event at least three full Sundays before
the event — sometimes even four. I start with colorful posters
at the entrances in the foyer areas on both sides of the chapel.
The two weeks before the event I put fliers inside the programs
at sacrament meeting
I ALWAYS USE
GRAPHICS — LOTS OF THEM, AND COLORFUL, even on my sign-up sheets.
And finally, I send a catchy email to the web administrator in
our ward to be mailed out to all that have email the Monday prior
to the event. This also serves as an extra reminder.
Another thing
that I have made a routine of doing is taking lots of photos with
my digital camera at the event. Get them developed ASAP and post
them on large poster boards for display the following week. This
serves two purposes. First, it gives the Primary great photos
to display in the Primary room, also documents an event for future
activity chairs. But it also gives people a sense of what they
missed out on and encourages attendance for future events. I've
noticed my attendance at each future event has been growing.
RT Wagner and
Dana are absolutely correct: You can’t get too much publicity when
you’re putting together a ward event. Everyone has different methods
of doing it, but the bottom line is that more is always better.
Secret Ammunition
In our ward,
we have the perfect secret ammunition to help us publicize every
ward activity. Our ward Relief Society secretary has the email
address of every woman in our ward who uses email, and she sends
out announcements to everyone on the list at least once a week.
If we want to
remind ward members that our monthly game night is coming up, or
try to round up volunteers to paint scenery for the ward Christmas
party, or donate extra cans of wheat to the first person who will
come and haul it off, help is only an email away.
This one resource
has proven such a huge asset to communications in our ward that
we would highly recommend that any ward that doesn’t currently use
email find a way to incorporate email into the arsenal of weapons
that are used to draw wards closer together. There is no way to
exaggerate the helpfulness of this one simple tool. But don't forget
that a certain percentage of the ward either don't have email or
don't check it regularly. So this can't be your only form of publicity,
but it is a great secondary tool for those that use it.
There is another
drawback to using email, and it’s potentially a biggie. Anybody
whose name is put in the “to” field of your email is vulnerable
to having his name harvested by spammers, hackers, and other creeps
who use worms to infiltrate people’s computer systems. If you want
to safeguard the names of the people on your ward email roster,
put your own email address in the “to” field, and specify that everyone
else receives a blind copy. That means that their email address
will not appear in the header, so those who get the email will not
be able to tell who received it. Every email program is different
in terms of how you specify blind copies. Using America Online
(AOL), you enclose the email addresses within a set of parentheses
— just as in the illustration below:
click
to enlarge
Notice how for America
Online only one set of parentheses is needed, with the opening mark
before the first name and the closing mark after the last name.
Names are separated with commas.
Our secret ammunition
is enough to guarantee that almost any decent activity will have
excellent attendance, but our ward doesn’t stop there. We send
out frequent, informative, and colorful announcements — usually
we put them in our ward bulletin for about three weeks before each
ward activity. Thanks to modern technology, we can do this cheaply.
The Canon Pixma printers are dirt cheap, and the ink for them is
ridiculously inexpensive, especially if you buy it on eBay. If
you’ve got the right materials, doing professional announcements
doesn’t have to break your activities budget.
Our ward makes
an effort to assure that every announcement will be seen again and
again by the people who need to be reminded. We do this by formatting
each announcement as an issue of The Refrigerator News.
We even have an official ward refrigerator magnet (emblazoned with
a stern warning that people who use the magnet for anything other
than The Refrigerator News will be prosecuted to the fullest
extent of the law). Every family gets a magnet, and we can only
hope that every ward refrigerator is proudly displaying the most
current of our ward announcements. The attendance at our ward activities
suggests that the magnets are indeed being used for the intended
purpose.
click
to enlarge
This is what you’d see if you went into the kitchen
of an Algonkian Ward member.
Our other
publicity weapon is in the form of a member of our activities
committee. This diligent member is one of the rare breed of people
who do not mind making telephone calls. She is particularly excited
about telephone calls in this age of answering machines, because
leaving a message on every machine in the ward is so much faster
than talking to people.
If you’ve got
a member of your ward who likes making telephone calls, enlist
that person! A well-placed telephone reminder on the day of
an event can do wonders to pick up people your other publicity stunts
may have missed. And providing this service may go a long
way toward helping a shut-in feel more involved with the people
in your ward.
Other Tricks
to Raise the Body Count
As important
as publicity is, there are other tricks that will help you raise
the attendance at your ward activity. Here is a list of some that
come to mind:
1.
Involve as many ward members as possible. Most
activities planners learn early on that sign-up sheets are vital
if you want to boost attendance to any ward event. Anyone who can
be convinced to sign up to bring something is going to be at the
activity — or at least, as Heidi noted, stay long enough to drop
off whatever he or she signed up to bring. The more people who
are involved in bringing food or decorations or providing information,
the more people you’ll have on hand.
Our ward recently
hosted a Family Feud activity. We played four games, which meant
we needed eight teams of five persons each. Because we had few
families in our ward with five players over the age of eight, we
were creative about how “families” were comprised. Most teams had
members from at least two households represented, and a couple of
teams were made up of five different households.
Before anyone
else walked in the door, we knew we were going to have those 40
people there — plus everyone else in the households of those contestants.
Sure enough, the activity was so successful that we had to set up
extra chairs to accommodate the overflow crowd.
2.
Make sure your bishopric and ward leaders are on board.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. Ward members follow
their leaders. If your bishopric and your other ward leaders think
it’s important to attend ward activities, the members will attend
the activities too. If you don’t have the support of your ward
leaders — especially the members of the bishopric — you might as
well pick up your marbles and go home.
If you can get
your bishopric members to attend ward activities no other way, do
it by putting their children on the program or getting their wives
to bring a casserole or cake. If one family member attends an event,
the others will usually follow.
3.
Be careful when picking dates for your ward activities.
Not only do you have to make sure your activity doesn’t conflict
with the local homecoming dance or high school play, but you also
want to make sure you don’t schedule an activity on a week immediately
after general conference or stake conference. Our ward recently
held a wildly successful ward temple night on the Saturday after
stake conference, but the evening was only successful because our
Relief Society secretary sent out emails and The Refrigerator
News was proudly announcing the event. Unless you have a ward
that is extremely publicity-oriented, scheduling any activity on
a week after people have not met in the building is the kiss of
death.
4.
Finally, plan activities that people want to attend.
If your ward Christmas party is exactly the same every year,
people are eventually going to stop coming — no matter how successful
the menu and program were the first time around. Put someone else
in charge and try a new approach.
—-
Note to readers:
We have recently received many emails telling us that our book,
Ward Activities for the Clueless, is nowhere to be found.
Sure enough, we have done some detective work and have learned that
the book is out of print. We hope to rectify the situation soon.
Stay tuned for further updates!
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© 2005 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
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