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:

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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.

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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. 

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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!