New-Member Initiation of the Month

Here is a new-member initiation ceremony you can use during a Club meeting at any time. We’ll publish one each month. Send us your favorite to share!

[[New member]], It is with great pride that I officially welcome you into Altrusa. To be invited to become an Altrusan is a high honor indeed—and one that should be cherished. Remember that you do not join Altrusa, you become an Altrusan.

Confucius said: “Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”

Most women want to look beautiful and often use makeup to enhance their natural beauty. Tonight, let’s think of this makeup bag as a representation of Altrusa International Inc. of [[Your Club Name]]. The items placed inside will represent the opportunity you will have to make our Club and our community more beautiful.

Let’s start with:

A Good Foundation. Foundation is an important component in adding beauty, as it creates the canvas to which color will be added. In Altrusa, the foundation is attending meetings, participating in service projects, and adopting the ideals of Altrusa. Much information you will need to become acquainted with Altrusa is in the Bylaws and Policies and the Altrusa Encyclopedia. These items, coupled with your attendance and participation, get you off to a good start. New-member orientation will help you to understand many facets about the Club and its operation.

Blush or Rouge. Blush is used not only to brighten up your face and add some color, but can be used to contour features to enhance them. In Altrusa, there are many opportunities for you to enhance who you are by utilizing your talents in programs, service, and fundraising for the betterment of the club and the community. Your colors will shine brightly as you find yourself taking on tasks and learning new skills. Because Altrusa is a builder of women, you have much opportunity for personal growth as a life enhancement.

Eye Shadow. The varied colors of eye shadow represent the multitude of service opportunities and friendships that await you in Altrusa. The interests in this Club are varied, as are the personalities and even the ages of the members. Community needs come and go, and Altrusa strives to meet the needs of this community. Just as you would not want to wear every color of shadow on your eyelids, you might not want to participate in every project done by the club. Mix and blend the choices well and you won’t be overwhelmed. But you might want to try a new color every now and then.

Mascara. Mascara is the product that really makes your eyes pop, bringing your lashes into view, and often helps lashes to grow. In Altrusa, we need to grow as well, and you are encouraged to grow in knowledge of Altrusa, to grow in friendship with the other members by working together and getting to know each other, and to help bring in other new members so that our club will also grow.

Lipstick. Now that we have the foundation, the blush, eye shadow, and mascara, it is time for lipstick to add that finishing touch. Lipstick represents your dedication to Altrusa. Just as your lipstick will fade with wearing, so can your dedication to Altrusa fade if it does not become an important addition to your life. So, I encourage you to pay attention to your commitment to Altrusa just as you do to keeping lipstick on your lips. A way to do this is by attending District Conference each year. International Convention is held on odd-number years. Both will help you to maintain your enthusiasm for Altrusa and its service, so attendance is encouraged.

The last item to go into the bag is a mirror. The mirror provides opportunity for you to see the reflection of who you become through membership in Altrusa. I trust that you will find it a beautiful sight!

Now, if you are still ready to become a member of Altrusa International Inc. of [[Your Club Name]] and follow the ideals of Altrusa, please say “I do.”

Sponsor, will you please present her pin? The pin is to be worn proudly over your heart. Wear it to meetings, of course, but wear it daily so that it will be noticed and you will have opportunity to share Altrusa with others.

Madam president, I am happy to introduce our newest member, [[name]], whose membership is sure to add beauty to this Club.

Brenda Tucker
Altrusa International Inc. of Pampa, Texas, and Past Governor of District Nine

Please let your voice be heard. Write your ideas, and send them to Governor Beth for publishing on “Thoughts From the Mighty Ninth.”

The Nuts and Bolts

So, we’ve identified our target audience and its preferred communication channel, and we’ve worked on creating connections through like-minded social media channels. Now, let’s address a few of the nuts and bolts of how all this works.

Do you have a personal Facebook account? You should, and your club should, too. The fact is, Facebook is how the world is communicating right now, and if you want your club to move forward, you have to participate.

Your club should, in fact, have at minimum two Facebook pages. The first one is a group page, with club members as the only participants in the group. This page is not for the public to see. Here is where you should share the information only club members care about. For instance, wish one another happy birthday here. Share news of members and reference meeting reminders. Each member is able to post on this page.

Your club also needs to have a fan page, which is the type of Facebook page most people recognize. This page will have a couple of administrators to control the content. This is the page we want the public to follow.

Once you’ve set up the page, follow these hints to make it shine.

·         Make sure all of your members “like” your public-facing page, even if they are “members” of your group page, so all posted content will appear on their feeds for their friends to see.

·         Stay away posting the self-referential information; post what would most appeal to the public. For instance, if your club spent Make a Difference Day working at the local food bank, make sure you’ve posted lots and lots of pictures and written about what you’ve done.

·         Tag, tag, tag. You want to tag each person in each picture, you want to tag where you are, and you want to tag the project. Why? Let’s say there’s a picture of me on Facebook stocking apples at the North Texas Food Bank for Make a Difference Day. First you tag me in the picture, now all of my Facebook will see that picture in their news feed. That’s a lot of people seeing what we’re doing. Now let’s say the picture had four Altrusans in it, all tagged. That’s the Facebook network of four people seeing us working hard and having fun servicing our community.

·         In addition to tagging people in posts and photos, we want write in the description that we’re at the North Texas Food Bank. That will mean our picture will also pop up on a Google search. You can add more, like “Altrusa International Inc. of Dallas serving the North Texas Food Bank on Make a Difference Day.”

There are a couple more ways to use Facebook that can be beneficial. An event or fund-raiser your club holds can have a fan page of its own. This works best if it is an annual event as it takes a while to build a following. Have each of your members “like” the page, so Facebook will share that information with all their friends.

You can also create an event on Facebook. By creating an event you can show the time, place, date, and what the activity is. Next, you want to invite all of your members and ask them to invite or share this with all their friends. For instance, in addition to our annual fund-raiser having its own Facebook fan page, with lots of pictures and glowing remarks, The fund-raiser is created as a Facebook event each year. Our goal is to have each of our members share this with all of their friends and then to have at least some of their friends share it with their friends. This is how something goes viral. You remember the old shampoo commercial: “and they’ll tell two friends, and they’ll tell two friends, and so on and so on”? Well, this is just that on a larger scale.

Consider focusing more on the Club website and Facebook for the coming year. Get your various pages up to speed and looking great. Make it interesting to nonmembers. Create tags that will generate Google hits. Add lots of pictures, videos, and blogs. There are so many great reasons to be an Altrusan, let’s use social media to let the rest of the world know it.

Deborah Hecht
Altrusa International Inc. of Dallas

Please let your voice be heard. Write your ideas, and send them to Governor Beth for publishing on “Thoughts From the Mighty Ninth.”

Kicking Off a Successful Social Media Campaign

Yesterday we discussed that reaching Gen-X comes most readily through engaging social media channels. Today, I’ll teach you how to start doing that.

It’s important to know that setting up a Facebook fan page, a group page, a Twitter account, and a LinkedIn account alone is not enough. That was my mistake. I was the oaf at the cocktail party who stood on the table and screamed how great Altrusa is and how each person should join. I thought if I said it enough times, people would listen. I was wrong. There are ways to do this that take a bit more time and effort but should yield better results.

Let’s go back to the analogy of the cocktail party or another social event. How do we actually behave here? What we typically do is join a group that has already gathered for conversation. Again, we don’t just butt in with what we think we should be talking about; we listen for a while.

This is what we should do to kick off a successful social media campaign. Start by listening. Join or “like” the social media groups that have similar goals as some of your service projects or fund-raising projects. For instance, if your group does work with the food bank, consider joining groups about feeding the hungry. If you work on literacy projects, find groups regarding literacy. When you join these groups, start by simply reading the comments to get a feel for the group. Listen, see what the tone is, discern what’s important to these folks, watch how they do things. The next step is to interact. When you read a comment that is relatable to something your club does, mention it. For example, if the literacy group conversation moves to how it’s hard to get books to kids in impoverished areas and your club just happens to donate books, well, there’s your golden opportunity to write something like, “Our Altrusa club recently donated 500 books to the XYZ School. There’s an explanation of how we did it on our website at ….”

With this sort of comment we’ve accomplished a couple of things. First, we’ve shared that we have donated books with a group of people who think books are important. We shared a message with people who care. Second, we have referred these people who care to our website. Hopefully, these people will click the link and see pictures and video from the event and testimony from those who were there. They will see that we are people just like them, doing what they like to do.

The linking is a very important step in the process to create a following. There needs to be a ton of back and forth linking between your Facebook page, your LinkedIn account, and your webpage. Everything should eventually drive to your site, which will then drive to personal interaction. Here’s another analogy. I don’t know if you have ever done any online dating, but I think we all know the premise of how it works. This isn’t really that different. We put ourselves out there with what we hope will catch the attention of someone we’d be interested in. We make sure we’ve presented our best pictures and have descriptions that portray us in the most positive way. Once we catch the guy’s attention, we hope to start the online conversation, but of course, the eventual goal is to meet in person. Remember, if you saw a profile on Match.com that had in big, bold letters “MARRY ME NOW,” you probably would be a bit frightened away or you would at least ignore this person. Same for us, give people a chance to get to know us and then naturally they will want to become Altrusans, or at least help.

Tomorrow: The Nuts and Bolts

Deborah Hecht
2013-2015 Membership Development Committee Co-Chair (Recruitment)

Please let your voice be heard. Write your ideas, and send them to Governor Beth for publishing on “Thoughts From the Mighty Ninth.”

Celebrate Altrusa Using Social Media

It is no longer a question of IF clubs should execute a social media strategy. The question for most clubs is how to best execute a meaningful and engaging approach that generates results. With so many social media marketing options available, communications teams must also decide best practices and what tactics to avoid.

First thing for each of us to remember is social media is social first, media second. Imagine yourself in a room with the people you are reaching out to. Speak to people as if they are there with you. You probably would not walk into a cocktail party and immediately shout out “Hi, I’m an Altrusan! Greatest organization ever! You should join, or at the very least, donate money to us!” Unfortunately, this is part of many organizations’ bull-in-a-china-shop approaches to social media.

There are a lot of nuts and bolts questions regarding social media. Let’s start with why we bother with social media at all. Nearly half of all Americans use Facebook. Based on ages, the group we are most likely to grab and influence using social media is Generation X, a group of people who typically have now settled into their lives and can think about giving back to their communities.

So who is Generation X? This is a group that is motivated by results; they are independent, flexible, and adaptable multitaskers, and they know how to work their computers. Generation X expects to change the rules and views change as an opportunity—which is why using social media to reach them is going to be important. New methods of communication like Facebook and Twitter are wide-reaching, easy to use, free, environmentally friendly, and most importantly, the way our target market is communicating with one another.

In other words: Get on this bandwagon or get left behind.

Tomorrow: Kicking Off a Successful Social Media Campaign

Deborah Hecht
2013-2015 Membership Development Committee Co-Chair (Recruitment)

Please let your voice be heard. Write your ideas, and send them to Governor Beth for publishing on “Thoughts From the Mighty Ninth.”