Recruiting for your Circle

Recruiting is important! Recruiting new members is critical to keeping the Circle strong. Maintaining the Circle population is about balance: keep the experience fun so that members will stay in the Circle, and replace those members who graduate. Here are some suggestions for recruiting:

- Identify a volunteer from your circle to serve as your point of contact for new member coordination and promotional material distribution
- Give a referred prospective member your Circle meeting information
- Adopt a local school to coordinate the distribution of promotional materials
- Distribute annual promotional flyers at your "adopted" school
- Distribute annual promotional flyers at your member churches
- Borrow the recruiting poster kit - just contact the Expedition Scout.
- Generic recruiting flyer - feel free to save it and edit for your use.

Other points...
- In any organization or company, members will join, have a great experience, and eventually leave the organization. A son entering the Circle when he is in kindergarten can spend as much as 7+ years in the Circle before graduating. Some sons will join when they are older (3rd or 4th grade), and some sons will graduate early to go on to different activities. A Circle can lose as much as 20% to 35% of its population each year.
- There appears to be a "perfect" size, or critical mass in the size of the Circle population, which occurs at about 20-25 members (dads and sons). A circle with a smaller population may find it to be more of a struggle to maintain its size, so it must spend more time recruiting. A circle with 30+ members may find that recruiting is very easy and may be tempted to turn away candidates. If you find that your Circle is almost too large to be manageable (does everyone fit in your house for the meeting?), try to steer those candidates to the smaller circles. Of course, very large circles may be better off to split up into 2 Circles (huge circles may find it to be almost unmanageable to fit all its members into a member's small house and still conduct the rituals and work on the craft).
- Be wary of starting a Circle with a large population of one grade: it will be a challenge to replace this population bubble when the group graduates. Of course, this may be unavoidable, so please prepare the Circle for the challenge of replacing this group of graduates. In a perfect world, the Circle will have 3-4 sons in each grade, so that you need to replace 3-4 sons each year.
- Target your recruiting efforts toward the younger sons. Of course, the best policy is to accept any son (along with his dad) in the age range of 5-12+ years old. However, the organization will gain the most by recruiting sons from grades K/1/2 so that these new members spend more years in the organization. And don't neglect 4-year-olds, since they are just one year away from joining the program.
- A good goal could be to recruit between 3 and 5 new sons every
year to replace the anticipated losses thru graduation/moving. Don't get
discouraged, since not all candidates will join; these candidates may even
join their friends in another Circle.
- The Expedition and the YMCA works on the recruiting effort, too. There will be advertising and articles in the media. You may borrow the YMCA recruiting poster kit. The Expedition may hold recruiting events like a kick-off-the-year potluck picnic.
- We must recruit during the entire year. Everyone is a recruiter. Dads talk to other dads. Moms talk to other moms. Parents talk to their co-workers. sons talk to their peers. We tell everyone how fun the program is, and offer membership to candidates. Inviting candidates to the Circle meetings and/or Expedition events (hayride, bowling, etc) can even be part of the recruiting effort. We can send out personalized invitations. - We could have a booth/table at the elementary school orientation night. We could have a recruiting BBQ and/or potluck picnic. We could ring doorbells in our neighborhood and introduce ourselves.
- Personal contact is the best source of new candidates. Follow-up
several times if necessary. Get to know the parents of your children's
playmates --- and tell them about the program.
- The best time to recruit may be around the late part of the school
year and during the summer so that the new members join when the program starts in the early Fall. Of course, we'll accept new members any time. We will definitely accept members from the Expedition/YMCA efforts. Here is a warning: do not rely on the YMCA/Expedition to provide your candidates or you will probably not meet your recruiting goals.
- Always give new members a warm welcome. Do not decline to accept
"cold-call" candidates. There should always be room for one more member.