Strengthening a Genealogical Society on FamilySearch Wiki

Genealogical societies who wish to grow need interesting projects, valuable products, contributing members, customers, and revenue. A wiki – a Website where anyone can edit without having to be a techie – is a great vehicle to foster these society-strengthening attributes. FamilySearch Wiki is an established and rapidly-growing community of volunteers whose tools, services, and contributors can help you turn your genealogical society into a thriving powerhouse.

Simplify &amp; democratize the improvement of the society Website
Many societies need to cut costs, such as those of maintaining a Website. Others want to remove technical bottlenecks that prevent their best writers from adding value to the Website. Societies are welcome to publish their whole Website on the wiki. This cuts maintenance costs and removes bottlenecks so more writers (not just techies) can add value to the site. On FamilySearch Wiki, you can add answers to genealogical questions your society answers repeatedly. Then you can link to those answers from your society’s wiki page or your personal wiki page.

Find content for your meetings and training
Societies are constantly looking for meeting content. The wiki is growing at a rate of ___, so it is a great place to find information about what’s new in data sets, software, and record collections. When your society offers training, you can announce these events in the wiki’s county and state pages, as well as your society’s wiki page. You can also post presentations, handouts, and homework assignments on the wiki.

Learn new tech and best practices that support projects
The wiki’s creators have learned a lot about what makes projects fail and 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 non-genealogists in accelerating your project? Does your society struggle to recruit a critical mass of volunteers for a project because they don’t scope out the specific tasks and skillsets they need?

Our Community Services team would be happy to share some best practices in project support with you or your society board. We’d be happy to join you in a virtual meeting about these topics, and we can supply the tools that will allow us to add a toll-free conference call and screen sharing to the meeting.

Activate (retain) current members and win new ones
Your society probably has some 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 an interesting problem to solve. There’s no easier way to gain a voice and solve the challenges of many genealogists at once than to contribute to a wiki. What do your society’s inactive members know that would help other genealogists? Find out and have them contribute!

People volunteer more when they can see how their skills fit with the specific needs of the society. You can list members on the wiki by locality focus, ethnic focus, residence (city), involvement with projects on FamilySearch Indexing, GenWeb, RootsWeb, Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness, and other sites. Also list their 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.

Member attributes go beyond what they know. Another thing to include is what they want to learn. 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.

Members working on interesting projects have a tendency to recruit friends. If you activate members using the abovementioned ideas, they will become customer evangelists and recruit people to join the society and help them.

Grow your project teams
FamilySearch Wiki has 12,000 registered users and is growing at a rate of 105,000 edits (and 850 million characters) per year. Find which wiki users are contributing content for your area and recruit them to work on your projects.

Another good source of labor beyond the wiki’s current contributors is the Boy Scouts of America. Some societies offer opportunities for completing Eagle Scout projects. Use the wiki to connect Scouts to the projects your society needs to be done.

Recognize member achievements
On FamilySearch Wiki, you can post announcements about the achievements of your members. You could recognize:


 * 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

Draw people to your society’s Website
Every registered member of a wiki has a user page. Your user page can mention that you’re an officer in a certain society and link back to society pages. If each member of your society did this, you could generate dozens of links to the society Website.

Draw people to your meetings &amp; training
Post your meeting agendas on FamilySearch Wiki. Then link to the agenda from pages that relate to each subject. If the meeting will feature a training segment on digitized Revolutionary War records of New England, post it in the News section of each New England state page and county page. In a very short time you could make dozens of links to your meeting.

Use back-issue content to boost traffic
Back issues of society newsletters and quarterlies abound with genealogy tips and lead to genealogical original source material. These tips are society assets, but most societies derive no value from these assets after the newsletters are published. Republish this information on the wiki, give it wider circulation, and keep it working for your society by driving traffic back to your Website! If you have back issues that aren’t in digital form, find members who can either type their gems into the wiki or who can scan them and OCR them. If you OCR them, find others who will edit out any mistakes in the OCR.

Cut newsletter costs and add revenue
A society can cut newsletter production costs by having its printed newsletter be a single page of teasers that draw people to a blog where they can read the full articles. The blog could then, in turn, point to premium articles found only in the printed newsletter circulated to society members, much as Dick Eastman does with his Online Genealogy Newsletter. Offering the bulk of the newsletter in a blog could bring ad revenue.

Sell more publications
The problem with paper publications is that they are too expensive and they fail to fulfill a growing consumer desire for instant gratification. That is a barrier to sales. Fix this by going virtual with your society’s publications. Link from the wiki to free online indexes of published cemetery books. These free online indexes, in turn, can link to the cemetery books themselves, which you can publish for a fee as e-books on Amazon. This gives the society a steady income stream.

= COME STRENGTHEN YOUR SOCIETY ON FAMILYSEARCH WIKI! = Whether you’re adding interest to projects and products, boosting member contributions, or building your customer base and revenue, FamilySearch Wiki is a great place to be. Our Community Services team is ready to help you design creative solutions that will strengthen your society. Visit

= Bibliography = Amy Johnson Crow, CG, Staying on Track: Managing Your Society’s Projects, Federation of Genealogical Societies conference, 2008.

Kay Haviland Freilich, CG, CGL, Society Publications: What, When, Why, and How?, Federation of Genealogical Societies conference, 2008.

Kimberly Powell, Secrets of a Successful Genealogical Society, http://genealogy.about.com/od/societies/a/society_success.htm, accessed Feb 2010.

Patricia Walls Stamm, CG, CGL, Educating the Public through a Society’s Classes, Federation of Genealogical Societies conference, 2008.