Add and retain membership with real value, community

How do you find new members for your Legatus chapter, retain them as members, and develop programs they will find valuable? Here are some ideas that have worked for our Cincinnati Chapter.

For your primary tool, use personal invitation to people you know. In my Cincinnati Chapter, 40 percent of the members have joined in the last five years. Many of these new members are “young” – under 50, and some in their 30s. Most of these members joined because someone in the chapter thought they would be good candidates, entered their background information in the national membership portal, and upon confirmation from the regional office invited them to attend a meeting. Personal invitation is the most meaningful way for candidates to experience Legatus.

Coordinate LinkedIn searches with your regional office. The Cincinnati Chapter has picked up several members this way.

At every monthly chapter meeting, remind the members that they know people who would find Legatus valuable. You may not know the people, but your members do – and they may not even realize they do. Ask your members to think hard about who would be good candidates and to enter the candidates’ background information in the national membership portal. Remind them how simple the portal is to use. Consider making this request a standing agenda item for your chapter meetings. It takes two minutes at most.

Evaluate local or regional Catholic conferences as potential venues for finding candidates. In Cincinnati, we have had some luck running a booth at the annual Catholic Men’s Conference. Each year, we have found several candidates this way. In fact, this year we ran into Legatus members from other chapters who recommended several people in our area as potential candidates.

In talking with candidates, right away explain to them the value of Legatus Forums. In the Cincinnati Chapter, the men’s Forum is well attended every month. For these men, the Forums are as valuable as the chapter meetings. So many lay Catholics today struggle to find community, even in their parishes. The Forums concretize community.
 
Use the post-meeting surveys to identify how the chapter can be even more valuable to its members. After our monthly chapter meetings, we email our survey to every member, including those who didn’t attend the meeting. We try to cover more than just, “How did you like the chicken?” We ask about prayer requests and potential candidates. The feedback can help with programming. For example, after considering survey answers alongside our budget, we decided to reduce our meeting venues to four. This change was not an improvement the members requested. It arose because we viewed the feedback in the broader context of chapter programming.

Between chapter meetings, use an electronic chapter newsletter to deliver substantive Catholic material to your members. Somewhere in your chapter is a creative member talented at electronic graphic design. This person can run the newsletter. Our own creative member creates a great newsletter every month. It contains information about holy days, saints, theological themes, books, videos, and member birthdays and anniversaries. It’s another way to create community.

These activities require humility. The idea is to base all membership and programming on the human need to experience God’s presence in a person. Jesus Christ is a person – not a message, not a theory, not a concept, but a person. So many people today, even practicing Catholics, are isolated, lonely, and seeking the peace of God. In imitating Jesus, our chapters consist of persons who can be instruments of help.