Layout 8 - Winston Churchill

Googleworld: New Generations
and the Concept of “Joining”
“Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our
capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.”
—WSC, Royal Society of St. George, 24 April 1933
R I C H A R D M. L A N G W O R T H
Organizations
survive by
acquiring a
constant stream of new,
young dues-paying
members—or so we’ve
long assumed. Lately,
however, I’ve wondered
if the old verity is still
true—or whether the
concept of “joining” is
itself disappearing.
We frequently
ponder the age-old question
of how to bring in
young people. One of
the first questions to ask
is what we mean by
“young.”
Class representative Cadet
Adam Ake toasts Ethel
Pont, sponsor of The
Churchill Centre’s first
student seminar,
Stanford University, 1996.
Start with the under-30 crowd. We’ve been
noodling how to reach them for at least twenty years,
and have been singularly unsuccessful at the task.
We’ve declared education our prime function and
built scores of programs for students and teachers.
We’ve offered discount student memberships,
which are very hard to police and follow up.
We’ve given free memberships to participants at
seminars, which mostly lapsed the first time we asked for
a small amount of dues for renewals.
We’ve tried free gifts from back issues to lapel pins
to books to information packets.
We’ve brought students to conferences.
We’ve assisted teachers and students from grammar
school to postgraduate to write reports and theses, and
we answer their email on every question under the sun.
- We’ve published
student papers in Finest
Hour and teacher comments
and interchanges
with professors at
summer institutes.
-----While our efforts
have been received with
high praise, nothing has
kept under-30s on our
rolls when their interests
vary and wander
because of all the many
things competing for
attention at their age.
Last year I tracked the
young law student who
keynoted our 1995 conference
to a Texas law
firm and renewed his gift subscription; he’d forgotten all
about us.
Yet the last time I checked, the average age of
North American members reporting their ages was only
53. So what about people between 30 and 60
If it’s members paying subscriptions we want, there
are richer pickings among the 30-60 age group—people
who have had enough time to develop their lives and to
get interested in history as an avocation or as part of
their profession—and, incidentally, who are more likely
to make charitable contributions.
More settled in life, many of these people have for
a variety of reasons developed an interest in history—
where inevitably they run into Winston Churchill. How
to reach them is the problem. What groups or lists can
we exploit Ah, there’s the rub.
FINEST HOUR 148 / 44