The Tipping Point

Week Six Assignment

1. One of the female staff here at our school reminds me of a connector.  She knows so many kinds of people.  If you need a resource person to make a presentation for class, she can give you a few names of people to call.   If you need medical help, she knows which doctors you should or should not visit.  If you are planning an event, she can tell you who to call to rent a room or to cater.  She is most definitely connected to her community and beyond.
2. The two theories that most spoke to me in regard to building local membership were those of the salesman and the stickiness factor.  We need to identify a salesman or two in our district who can use their power of persuasion to influence people to become members of our local chapter.  We as a chapter also need to find something “sticky” about belonging to our organization, something that will be remembered as a selling point for educational association membership.
3. My plan is a three-step process:

1. Use face-to-face word-of-mouth to speak with those in our district who are not members of the chapter.  Talk to them personally about why we members decided to join the chapter and the benefits of membership.  Relaying our own personal reasons for joining may make people curious enough to attend a membership meeting.  
2. Identify the salesman or salesmen among our members and have them present at a membership meeting.  After all, the salesman is someone who has proven himself/herself to be capable of persuading people through their use of dialogue and micromovements.  One of our members in particular comes to mind as a salesman.  He is so confident in his dialogue and the way he carries himself that many of our staff go to him for advice or at least really pay attention when he has something to say.  Perhaps he could present to an audience of potential members and explain why membership is ideal for them.  I feel they would listen to him and consider what he has to say.
3. This is the tough part.  We would have to come up with a way to make our message about the importance of membership sticky.  The reason I joined the chapter was because I had heard some horror stories about teachers and their administrations and school boards.  These stories made me think about the power of being a part of a group.  Those stories were the “sticking point” for me.  Not that we want to scare people into becoming members, but perhaps making them aware of the benefits of membership in these types of difficult situations would make membership sticky to the prospective members and would give them a logical reason to join our organization.