Membership Solutions
Lee Wright
The Marlborough Historical Society Board of Trustees
Presented at “Weathering the Storm: Strategies For Surviving in a Challenging Economy”
A New England Museum Association Workshop
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Longyear Museum
Chestnut Hill, MA

Membership
Solutions

Membership
Solutions
Who has the problem that needs solving, the member?
Or us?
What problem are they trying to solve?

Membership
Solutions
Who or what is a “member?”
Why do we want them?
Is our definition limiting our success?
Do we really want them?
Or is their money we’re after?
Or is it grant money?
Or are they a statistic for the year-end report?

Q. Would you belong
to your institution?

Q. Do you belong to
his organization?
Or her organization?

What does
“membership”
mean?

What does
“membership”
mean? Belonging = Community
Saving money = Savvy consumer
Supporting a worthy cause = Validation
Guilt = Relief

What does
“membership”
mean? Meetings?
Volunteering / working?

Membership on whose
terms?

Segmenting
• Motivation—For an historic society, for example . . .
– “I’ve been a member for years.”
– “It’s the right thing to do.”
– “We’re looking for something for the family to do this weekend.”
– “I’m interested in the history of . . .”
– “I’m researching my family.”
– “My parents are from Marlborough. I live in San Diego now.”
– “I’m researching a paper for school.”
– “I’d like to learn more about my old house.”
• Each segment has different interests
• Different communications tools will reach different types of individuals
– Mail
– The newspaper
– E-mail
– The Web
– Twitter/Facebook/others
– Signs

Programming and communication examples

Spring Historic Homes Tour and Tea

Signs in the yards of houses on the tour

Signs at businesses throughout the city

Sold tickets online
• Used Eventbrite.com
• More tickets sold this way than via through any other mean
• Enabled people to start at any point on the tour

We received this homemade scrapbook of WWII
service announcements in the mail

By scanning and enlarging the pages, we turned it
into a large exhibit for Veterans Day weekend

Two board volunteers compiled the largest list of
Marlborough WWII veterans that exists anywhere

The event drew a large crowd, including many veterans

“The Amazing Race,” created by the local Lion’s Club, included
us as a stop, which brought many new people to the Homestead

Community outreach is publicized on our site

We use Twitter to remind people about events

We display historic photos online using Flickr
(Technical details)

We use StatCounter to get highly-detailed information
about how people find us . . .

And were surprised to learn where they come from . . .

Our active site comes up first in Google

Google Maps is another tool

We added photos and other information that is seen by
anyone who searches for us
(Technical details)

This also gives us more insight on how people find us

We added links and pictures to Marlborough’s Wikipedia page
and quickly found that it’s a source of traffic to our site

Totaling the costs
• Web: $7 to register/year (1and1.com)
• Monthly: ~ $5/month (1and1.com)
• Document hosting/streaming: $0 (scribd.com)
• Tracking: $0 (statcounter.com)
• Google Maps: $0 (google.com/local/add)
• Wikipedia: $0
• Photos: $0 (flickr.com)
• Newsletter: $0 (verticalresponse.com)
• Twitter: $0 (twitter.com)
• Facebook: $0 (facebook.com)

Lee Wright
The Marlborough Historical Society Board of Trustees
lee@historicmarlborough.org