Strengthening a Genealogical Society on FamilySearch Wiki

Publish your society Website easier

 * Publish your whole Website on the wiki. It removes bottlenecks so anyone can add value.

Draw people to your society’s Website

 * Your user page on the wiki can mention that you’re an officer in a certain society and link back to society pages.
 * Could the society save costs by having its printed newsletter be a one-page set of teasers that draw people to a blog where they can read the full articles? Could offering the newsletter in a blog actually bring your society ad revenue? Could you add teasers to the wiki that draw new people to your printed or blogged newsletter?

Find content for your meetings and training

 * Societies are constantly looking for content for their meetings. The wiki is growing at a rate of ___. It is a great place to find information about what’s new in data sets, software, and record collections.

Draw people to your training

 * Announce training events in county and state wiki pages, as well as your society’s wiki page.
 * Post training on the wiki for download.
 * Post handouts to presentations.
 * Post homework assignments.

Recognize member achievements

 * Post announcements about the achievements of your members
 * Society tasks (like giving lessons or helping with indexing projects)
 * Personal achievements (like completing certification, winning their first client, publishing a family history, or creating a new blog)
 * Tasks for third parties, like being part of a team that completed a FamilySearch Indexing project.

Involve current members

 * People volunteer more when they can see how their skills fit with the specific needs of the society.
 * Your society has members who pay their dues and attend the occasional meeting, but aren’t deeply involved. The way to involve them is to give them a voice, and there’s no easier way for them to contribute than on a wiki. What do these members know that would help other members? Find out and have them contribute! Involved members renew their membership.
 * List members by locality focus, ethnic focus, residence (city), involvement with projects on FamilySearch Indexing, GenWeb, RootsWeb, Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness, and other sites, and involvement in newsgroups, e-mail lists, and other means of group communication. This helps them find answers, communicate, make friends, and collaborate on projects according to shared interests.
 * Let members list their needs for research help or advice on a common page. Drive members to that page when a new item is listed, or mention new items in the society newsletter.

Learn new tech and best practices that support projects

 * FamilySearch Wiki has many learnings about what makes projects succeed. Do you use Skype for group meetings and real-time support? Do you use Adobe Connect for meetings with screen sharing? Do you use Google Docs to track projects or allow many people to edit a document in real time? Do you know how to leverage even many types of non-genealogists in accelerating your progect? Our community services team can teach you about these things.
 * Societies sometimes struggle to recruit a critical mass of volunteers for a project because they don’t scope out the specific tasks and skillsets they need. We can help you do this.

[Create a wiki page on strengthening a society. Make the wiki THE PLACE to go to learn this. Make a portal page and several supporting pages. From these pages we could link to a page which is the value proposition of why societies should engage in the wiki. Perhaps we could assign a research/writing project to an employee member of the UGA.]

[A prospective volunteer’s knowledge, skills, and abilities must fit the job. The better we collect data on these issues regarding our volunteers, the better a society will be able to tap their talents. Searching user pages could do this in a clunky way if user pages included interests and the like. Categorization might be stronger, though.]

Publish

 * Add answers to genealogical questions your society answers repeatedly. Link to those answers from your society page.
 * Back issues: Genealogy tips abound in society newsletters and quarterlies. Publish this information to give it wider circulation! If you have back issues that aren’t in digital form, find members who can scan them and OCR them, and others who will edit any mistakes in the OCR.

Grow your project teams

 * FamilySearch Wiki has __ registered users and is growing at a rate of __ per year. Find who is contributing content for your area and recruit them to work on your projects.
 * Societies offer opportunities for completing Eagle Scout projects. Use the wiki to connect Scouts to the projects your society would like done.

Sell more publications

 * Link from the wiki to an online index of your published cemetery books.

= Bibliography = Kimberly Powell, Secrets of a Successful Genealogical Society, http://genealogy.about.com/od/societies/a/society_success.htm

= Research = Kimberly Powell, Secrets of a Successful Genealogical Society, http://genealogy.about.com/od/societies/a/society_success.htm