What are the ‘products’ of the Theosophical Society? What service(s) do we provide? Who are we in competition with? What are we best at? Worst at? Is it different in different countries? At different levels within countries? What needs are we meeting? What opportunities are we missing?
Why do people become members? Why do they stay members?
What do you want from the Theosophical Society?
I’ve asked myself these questions, too. Working in Member Services in Wheaton, they are particularly relevant to me as we at Wheaton work to figure out what to do about declining membership numbers.
Information seems to me to be our main commodity. Community is one, too, but that one is much less quantifiable, so I hesitate to label it a “commodity;” I can’t measure one’s sense of community, but I can at least attach numbers to things like how many books Quest has on offer, and I can list some of the major themes our material tends to cover. One of the main ways the Society has worked towards its Three Objects is the dissemination of information. There still seems to me to be a great focus on that, which is good, but to me, that’s not enough. For one, the information the Society disseminates is available in some form or another in many other places–often for free.
Community is essential in my book, even though it can’t be quantified as readily, and it’s in that sense that we seem to be struggling. We have many Lodges and Study Centers, but many of them aren’t very active. It would be nice to find ways to rejuvenate them. Another issue we have to cope with is that about half of our members are members-at-large; how do we bring them into the fold, thus providing for them that sense of community? They can’t all travel to a Lodge or to Olcott.
The internet offers some intriguing possibilities along both lines. Information technology has made it possible to disseminate prolific amounts of information widely and cheaply, with stunning rapidity. We would do well to use that capability to its fullest. We must balance such efforts with an equal or even greater focus on building and maintaining a sense of community in order for the Society to survive, though. We can use the same technology to do that, and we should. We’re working on it as I type.
I’ve inadvertently set up a duality of sorts between information and community as our commidities–I’ve associated the information with quantity and the community with quality. This can be misleading–our information must be of a certain quality, and quantity is just as important as quality when it comes to a sense of community. Some prefer a small clique, but others find a large family more inviting.
It is important for us to balance quality with quantity. Too much focus on one or the other will manifest in undesirable consequences. I think at present we need to shift some energy into quality. I have noticed a marked emphasis in our membership strategy on quantity–we have been asking ourselves, “How do we get more members?” We are looking for ways to increase the join rate, but we are losing members even more quickly. More attention should be paid on how we can better serve the members we already have–if we tend to our existing community, growth will take care of itself, in my view.