I’m in a small-ish org. There are about 60 members total, but only 10 are actually active in any way. There are another 15-20 or so who are semi-regulars, or who will sometimes attend meetings, or sometimes attend demonstrations or actions etc with us.
It’s gotten really bad over the past few years as people have sort of started fading away. People are flaky, and it routinely takes several weeks to get an answer or an update from some members for even trivial things.
Several of us have tried doing social activities of all kinds, but they always end up the same.
This gets really embarrassing when we try to do things with other groups and can’t muster the numbers to be effective.
We’ve tried to do outreach to members to see what’s going on, and we just get the same explanation - I’m busy.
Has anyone here faced something similar? Any tips to get us out of this rut?
The main group I’m with locally was killed by wreckers almost ten years ago, which was before I came to this city. It took a few years to even get the local reestablished on paper, and I joined shortly after that. We’ve been struggling to expand for years. If it wasn’t for having a big, well known national organization, it would absolutely be dead, as most of our new members have come from that.
Now, getting people engaged is hard. Before COVID, we had established weekly in-person hangouts where we socialize, complain about work, talk theory, and do org work (in that order of priority). COVID obviously killed that, but we brought it back when we felt comfortable. We try to have in person meetings as much as possible, but always make the official meetings hybrid online so that not everyone has to risk COVID, and we’re all adults with jobs and families (presumably).
I would suggest providing social space for members. This also helps provide a fun onboarding experience when you bring a new member to a bar or coffee shop and just kinda chill and talk shop with people who’ve been around for a while. It’s a much better experience than bringing them to an official meeting where we’re concerned with rules of order and agendas.
We were able to keep on doing most of our stuff. Our level of outreach declined, but our regular programming and interaction with each other stayed consistent. It was a several-point strategy that we used: open multiple windows; use fans and air purifiers and CO2 meters; establish "pods" who are the only safe people you go maskless indoors around; always mask up outside your pod and especially outside the org; physical distancing and further occupancy limits based on level of breathing.
We went almost 2 years after the first lockdown without any of our core people catching the rona, and even then it was likely from their workplace.