Before moving to Maryland I was the secretary of my Ohio lodge. I can attest the system works and provides my lodge with a stream of potential new members. I checked this morning and my lodge has six prospects at various stages of contact. Each lodge in Ohio appoints one or two prospect managers for their lodge to make contact. Grand View allows you document your contact efforts for each prospect, so their is a record of what has been done.
My lodge invites prospects to the dinner prior to a stated meeting and offers additional opportunities for meeting one-on-one to answer questions and provide information.
Thank you for this perspective as someone who has experienced the Ohio system firsthand. I really appreciate it!
My Lodges as well get a small but steady stream of prospects from both BeAFreemason and our Grand Lodge website. And in my Jurisdiction we also use Grandview to track progress and effort.
I really, really like the drip email campaign idea from Ohio though, and hope that we can add it to our efforts here in Washington. Last night at our Rummer & Grapes gathering we discussed that in some detail with our Jurisdiction's Membership Development Committee Chair, and he seemed to like the idea as well, so I think we will probably be moving towards that.
I would guess that your Jurisdiction should be receiving a steady stream of them. We do here.
As I understand the internal system we are using here now:
We receive an inquiry from BeAFreemason, or our own GL Website, and those go to our Assistant Grand Secretary.
An email is then shot back to the inquirer, asking for some really basic contact information and such.
The AGS then sends that information, name and contact info. off to whomever the Lodges of a given District have designated to be their 'Prospect Manager.'
The 'Prospect Manager' then reaches out to the inquirer, answers is questions, provides some more information, and then invites the fellow to start attending non tiled Masonic events near his home. Lodges too have 'Prospect Managers' and the info is shared down to the Lodge level in that way.
After a bit of visiting, the fellow can decide if Masonry is right for him, and if so, what Lodge he wants to Petition.
Only a small percentage of inquirers move from inquiry to petition, but in my experience, it is a nice steady stream.
As you know, in North Seattle we have about 10 Lodges, all meeting in extremely close proximity together. The fellows you know at Esoterika, primarily W Ken Lane have worked really hard to perfect a really elegant system for all 10 of those Lodges that seems to be really effective. Next time you are up, or they are down, you might want to talk to them about these great methods they are using. This does of course require buy in from each of those area Lodges, so we have had meetings of the assembled WM's to discuss and support these plans as they were developed.
The whole BeAFreemason thing is run by the NMJ SR, with financial support from the SJ and Shrine. I think that the NMJ would be really pleased to discuss what they are doing with you further if desired.
There's two sides to that coin. Let's stipulate that as a Fraternity our efforts to engage with inquiries have been spotty. However, I've found that in the majority of cases where we do a good job, after a few contacts the prospect ghosts us. So yes, let's to a better job but let's also be realistic and not let ghosting discourage us.
I think this is right. No matter how good we do, we will only actually 'convert' a small percentage of those who inquire. I think it is like that with everything. Back when I used to be heavily involved with the running of political campaigns, I learned that we could only ever convert a small percentage of people from 'cold' to 'donor.'
But, there are enough coming in that the percentages will work for us, I think. Most especially in urban areas.
All that said, in some Lodges, the effort is still not being made. Very recently I saw an urban Lodge's prospect list, it was quite large, but the Lodge wasn't doing a thing with it.
This system is inspiring. We should consider viewing the onboarding process from the Prospects point of view. Prospects have been on the internet, have read or heard about Freemasonry. We need to help educate Prospects throughout the onboarding process. Most Prospects believe every Masonic lodge is the same - yet, we are not well equipped to accurately inform Prospects of our differences and what they can / should expect from each Lodge. We need to ensure that we are treating Prospects as people and not an admin transaction whereby we assign them to the closest lodge, get them a petition and going as quickly as possible. Instead, from the outset, we need to be Brotherly and assist men on their journey. Masons should be more focused on the business of retention and engagement. Retaining good men, we should focus on continuous improvement by asking questions along their path - as EAs, FCs and MMs is the lodge / Fraternity living up to the expectations and promises made? If not, how do we continually improve to achieve our mutual goals so men remain and flourish within the Craft.
Your point about the importance of retention is very well taken. Thank you.
It matters not if our Lodge Initiates a man every day of the week, if all those men demit or go NPD after a year or two.
And we surely do seem to lose a lot of good men between EA and MM, then another group after MM, and a third large cohort once they become PM's. If we could stop that, membership would increase, at least in this Jurisdiction. We do seem to be extremely close to stable now.
The reason I begin my Substack was too full. One to create a blog which I could offer free to those visit in my future membership website, and secondly to gather and email list to finalize my subscribers to my future entertainment website. Or at least introduced them to it if they would like to join. Hopefully we will have this up and running sometime in this next year in 2025. I am always interested to learn about it other people are doing. Thank you for sharing Cameron!
Before moving to Maryland I was the secretary of my Ohio lodge. I can attest the system works and provides my lodge with a stream of potential new members. I checked this morning and my lodge has six prospects at various stages of contact. Each lodge in Ohio appoints one or two prospect managers for their lodge to make contact. Grand View allows you document your contact efforts for each prospect, so their is a record of what has been done.
My lodge invites prospects to the dinner prior to a stated meeting and offers additional opportunities for meeting one-on-one to answer questions and provide information.
Thank you for this perspective as someone who has experienced the Ohio system firsthand. I really appreciate it!
My Lodges as well get a small but steady stream of prospects from both BeAFreemason and our Grand Lodge website. And in my Jurisdiction we also use Grandview to track progress and effort.
I really, really like the drip email campaign idea from Ohio though, and hope that we can add it to our efforts here in Washington. Last night at our Rummer & Grapes gathering we discussed that in some detail with our Jurisdiction's Membership Development Committee Chair, and he seemed to like the idea as well, so I think we will probably be moving towards that.
Not once have I ever seen or heard of a “referral” going to one of our Secretaries…especially me!
Using your numbers and a rough population percentage calculation I came up with us looking at 3,360 candidates. My mind is BLOWN.
No referrals from beafreemason.org?
I would guess that your Jurisdiction should be receiving a steady stream of them. We do here.
As I understand the internal system we are using here now:
We receive an inquiry from BeAFreemason, or our own GL Website, and those go to our Assistant Grand Secretary.
An email is then shot back to the inquirer, asking for some really basic contact information and such.
The AGS then sends that information, name and contact info. off to whomever the Lodges of a given District have designated to be their 'Prospect Manager.'
The 'Prospect Manager' then reaches out to the inquirer, answers is questions, provides some more information, and then invites the fellow to start attending non tiled Masonic events near his home. Lodges too have 'Prospect Managers' and the info is shared down to the Lodge level in that way.
After a bit of visiting, the fellow can decide if Masonry is right for him, and if so, what Lodge he wants to Petition.
Only a small percentage of inquirers move from inquiry to petition, but in my experience, it is a nice steady stream.
As you know, in North Seattle we have about 10 Lodges, all meeting in extremely close proximity together. The fellows you know at Esoterika, primarily W Ken Lane have worked really hard to perfect a really elegant system for all 10 of those Lodges that seems to be really effective. Next time you are up, or they are down, you might want to talk to them about these great methods they are using. This does of course require buy in from each of those area Lodges, so we have had meetings of the assembled WM's to discuss and support these plans as they were developed.
The whole BeAFreemason thing is run by the NMJ SR, with financial support from the SJ and Shrine. I think that the NMJ would be really pleased to discuss what they are doing with you further if desired.
I will inquire about it to our assistant Sec.
The Shrine doesn’t exactly love us, so that’s what I’ve chalked it up to over the last few years.
There's two sides to that coin. Let's stipulate that as a Fraternity our efforts to engage with inquiries have been spotty. However, I've found that in the majority of cases where we do a good job, after a few contacts the prospect ghosts us. So yes, let's to a better job but let's also be realistic and not let ghosting discourage us.
I think this is right. No matter how good we do, we will only actually 'convert' a small percentage of those who inquire. I think it is like that with everything. Back when I used to be heavily involved with the running of political campaigns, I learned that we could only ever convert a small percentage of people from 'cold' to 'donor.'
But, there are enough coming in that the percentages will work for us, I think. Most especially in urban areas.
All that said, in some Lodges, the effort is still not being made. Very recently I saw an urban Lodge's prospect list, it was quite large, but the Lodge wasn't doing a thing with it.
This system is inspiring. We should consider viewing the onboarding process from the Prospects point of view. Prospects have been on the internet, have read or heard about Freemasonry. We need to help educate Prospects throughout the onboarding process. Most Prospects believe every Masonic lodge is the same - yet, we are not well equipped to accurately inform Prospects of our differences and what they can / should expect from each Lodge. We need to ensure that we are treating Prospects as people and not an admin transaction whereby we assign them to the closest lodge, get them a petition and going as quickly as possible. Instead, from the outset, we need to be Brotherly and assist men on their journey. Masons should be more focused on the business of retention and engagement. Retaining good men, we should focus on continuous improvement by asking questions along their path - as EAs, FCs and MMs is the lodge / Fraternity living up to the expectations and promises made? If not, how do we continually improve to achieve our mutual goals so men remain and flourish within the Craft.
Your point about the importance of retention is very well taken. Thank you.
It matters not if our Lodge Initiates a man every day of the week, if all those men demit or go NPD after a year or two.
And we surely do seem to lose a lot of good men between EA and MM, then another group after MM, and a third large cohort once they become PM's. If we could stop that, membership would increase, at least in this Jurisdiction. We do seem to be extremely close to stable now.
The reason I begin my Substack was too full. One to create a blog which I could offer free to those visit in my future membership website, and secondly to gather and email list to finalize my subscribers to my future entertainment website. Or at least introduced them to it if they would like to join. Hopefully we will have this up and running sometime in this next year in 2025. I am always interested to learn about it other people are doing. Thank you for sharing Cameron!
Thank you Charlotte! I look forward to seeing everything you continue to create!