As the Vice President of Membership, you have two core directions of work:
- Ensuring that the club's members are taken care of
- Ensuring the growth of the club.
Here are your main responsibilities.
Increasing the membership
This is a task that is jointly accomplished with the Vice President of Marketing and the Community Manager (if there's one).
Although you will be relying a lot upon their actions, there are a few things that you can do on your own:
- "Bring a friend" - Plan "bring a friend" sessions where you ask each attendee to bring along one friend that might be interested in the club.
- Membership building contests among the club members and present awards to the people that bring in the most guests and visitors.
- Plan "open doors" meetings for the general public and other membership-building campaigns.
- Participate in other community events related to public speaking and leadership, and speak about Agora and your club - explore events at sites such as Meetup.com, Internations, Airbnb, Couchsurfing, etc.
- Advertise and hold public debates on hot current topics (together with the VP of Education)
if the club doesn't have a VP of Marketing, then that role's responsibilities fall on your shoulders.
Organize Shared Activities
While all Agora meetings need to follow a specific educational purpose and general organization, this doesn't mean that these are the only things that you can organize.
Here are some additional ideas for strengthening the community aspect of the club:
- Trips and excursions
- Parties celebrating different holidays
- "Public Speaking" retreats, possibly with special guest speakers attending
- Thematic nights
- Flash community projects
Since these activities are organized in your role as VPM and using the club's membership roster, they may not engage in activities contrary to the Core Principles or the Bylaws of the Foundation.
For example, organizing a retreat for the members to explore Tantric Healing (a pseudo-scientific discipline) or a thematic retreat for advocacy speeches for Human Rights would not be allowed.
When you organize those events, make sure to take the Club Banner to help the VP of Marketing create abundant material:
Ensure Guests are well-received and treated
As a VPM, it's one of your core tasks to ensure that guests and visitors to Agora meetings feel welcomed, supported, and want to join. This is so important that we have a separate article just devoted to treating guests properly.
If you can't tend to guests personally, make sure you delegate explicitly to someone that will be able to do that in your absence.
Always invite guests to sign up to the club, or at least to the club's mailing list.
Never be excessively pushy - everyone needs to walk along their own mental path to the decision. If you keep pushing, it may backfire.
Make sure to tell them that they're free to come as many times as they wish, but that to enjoy the full benefits (such as being able to access the full educational materials or present full speeches), they would need to join.
At every meeting, make sure you have enough guest welcome packs ready. Also, be prepared to answer any questions they might have after the meeting, and offer help if they're confused with any part of the signing process.
Usually, it works better to focus on the benefits of belonging to a club, and all the skills the people will learn, and the contacts they will make rather than insisting that the club is free or has very low fees.
Too many people associate "free" with "bad quality". Also, way too often, people can't believe that something is really free or low cost and think there's a trap or evil intention somewhere - the usual "if you're not paying for the product, then you are the product."
If you meet this objection or feel that it can be an issue, you have some excellent examples to make a strong counter-argument:
- Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia on Earth, and it's free.
- Mozilla Firefox is one of the best browsers, and it's free.
- Linux is the most powerful operating system, and it's free.
- The top world universities - MIT, Stanford, etc. publish many of their courses for free (MIT Open Courseware, Stanford Free Courses, etc.).
- Top free educational sites, such as Coursera or the Khan Academy.
- The Apache Software Foundation has produced dozens upon dozens of extremely high-quality open source products that are free and power some of the most sophisticated companies in the world.
- And there are countless other open-source, totally free programs - from video editing to games.
The main idea here is that there are things that are free because they're a work of passion and love created by many people, not necessarily driven by some machinating evil genius.
Have a Guestbook and always follow-up
One of the biggest missed opportunities is not getting the guests' contact info, and after that, not following up.
Not everyone is ready to sign up instantly after the first meeting. Some people need gentle reminders and some amount of gentle pushing.
Ask guests for their name and EMail at the beginning of the meeting, rather than waiting at the end. Otherwise, you might miss those that leave early or in a hurry.
Also, try not to ask for more information than just a name and EMail, and possibly where they learned about the club. Every additional piece of information you ask for will increase the resistance to provide anything.
Once you have the guest's information, be sure to notify them of new meetings. Don't just push them to join the club - maintain a light and open communications channel with them by sending them meeting invites, occasional interesting articles, etc.
Taking care of members
It's all too frequent for a VPM to focus excessively on getting new members and forgetting to take care of the existing ones. This never ends well.
- Talk regularly with the VPE to make sure that members are progressing along the educational path. If someone is not doing that, they might have some issues that need addressing.
- Try to talk periodically in private to all members to ask them how they feel, whether the club is serving their needs, whether they are growing personally and professionally, and whether there are any issues they'd like to address.
- Plan workshops on internal club and Agora topics, explaining how Agora works, the different roles, how members can get the most out of the club, etc.