Society Involvement????

Just wondering how other IFAS groups are fairing with regard to members involvement outside the core group that make up the committees.

I’m asking this from the point of view that my own club KAC is now 8 years old and essentially the same group of people have been running the club.

With every organization if new people do not join and bring new ideas things become stale and interest falls off.

How do you get members to get involved? I have asked on several occasions if anyone wanted to do a small dissertation or something but so far no one has approached us. I myself took the plunge to overcome a slight stammer while speaking in public.

So I asking the older IFAS gropes what have your experiences been?

Kerry Stargazer :gramps:

Hi John,
What we try and do here is get people involved in the committee first or give them a small job to do, this is not for every person less then one year in the club, only those who you think would be interested, that gives them a confidence and it makes things very transparent, the worst thing that could happen is that someone might perceive there is a clique in a club that is very hard to break into, even if its not actually the case.
Astronomy can be a very foreboding subject to people who have just joined, giving them the confidence to speak up is a big part of getting them involved.
Some people are just not naturally good public speakers, as for the rest, we've found here that once they get a little self confidence they usually join in on running the club and doing things if they're genuinly interested.
There are some people who are forever destined to sit in the audience and are happy just to do that, not a whole lot you can do about it.

DAS has struggled every year to have enough members to keep the club running. Twice now we have organised evening classes (in Dungarvan & Waterford) but have had to cancel due to lack of numbers (that's despite ads in local paper, posters up around town and emailing any locals who've attended observing sessions in the past). I really don't know how long we can keep going, despite having a core group of 6 to 8 people who faithfully turn up for meetings, organise events etc. We've talked about getting an observatory for the club on private land - have any other clubs done that and has it helped improve member numbers? I worry that it could be an expensive project for little gain. We've never even had a guest speaker come to us as I would be mortified if only a few people turned up.
How do we encourage people to be more active members and suggest observing nights or events themselves as it's always the same people left to do it? I know the weather doesn't help as quite a few times, we're had to cancel nights cos of the weather and that can really get disheartening but I would love to see us have membership of up to 20 and get our club really DOING stuff!

Don't let it put you off John, it's a normal occurrence, not just in Astronomy clubs but in other clubs and hobby groups too. Sometimes it could give the impression that the core group of members are elitist in that they are the ones always doing the work, presenting the lectures and so on, but that's not the real case at all. Keep mentioning it at club meetings how you are looking for a new (not fresh) voice to present a talk, one that can be as easy or as technical as they wish and any subject in Astronomy. We sometimes get a few different faces in MAC/TAS over the years in this way, including 3 new members this year who never spoke before, stepped up and presented very interesting talks in the end.

If it doesn't work out, just make sure - and I am only chipping in my two cents worth from experience here - that the same speakers do not give the same talks. Presentations twice a year on the same topic can risk boredom if not presented in a fun way OR the same people from the public keep turning up (they'll skip the meeting the second time around). Split different topics as a challenge to speakers, even ones they never gave before. It makes them learn something new and they then have to present that to the public. Daunting, but worth it!

Seanie.

Well, we in the IAA have a fairly stable Council and have managed to keep our membership stable around 180 or so during a difficult time in astronomy due to the lack of good weather. Like any group, there is a core of diehard amateur astronomers and we have members of all ages and degrees of experience - indeed we have an 8 year old who is one our most knowledgable members

Apart from the fact that our size enables us to pull in some bigg-ish names, we try to bring new people onto the lecture programme each year, and each lecture starts off with a 10-15min beginners' talk - usually given by Andy McCrea or myself aimed at letting new members know what's going on in the sky and explaining some of the bigger things in layman's terms.

Where we've made big strides in recent years has been in our outreach activities. The weather is just too unpredictable for the Observing programme to be the only way of doing this, though we do have some great successes there. We have access to a Stardome and a few different ways of presenting astronomy within it - it is a major draw at functions that we attend and these can be dedidcated - such as our observing evening at Castle Espie this coming Fri 2nd Dec (plug!) or part of a larger event such as our participation in Glenavy Fun Day in June when we had over 120 folk, mostly children, through the Stardome! Of course there's some things need to be in place for us to be able to do this - Child Protection Policy and Public Liability Insurance mainly, but it's worth it because we know we pick up members through these activities.

We also encourage greater involvement by minimising the differential between Standard and Family membership, being £20 and £25 respectively - we hope this encourages members to bring partners. children etc to our events and we find this works well.

Hope that's of some help!

Paul.