Strengthening a Genealogical Society on FamilySearch Wiki

Genealogical societies who wish to grow need interesting projects, valuable products, contributing members, customers, and revenue. A wiki – a Website where anyone can edit without having to be a techie – is a great vehicle to foster these society-strengthening attributes. FamilySearch Wiki is an established and rapidly-growing community of volunteers whose tools, services, and contributors can help you turn your genealogical society into a thriving powerhouse.

Catalyze projects and products

Simplify & democratize the society Website

Several bottlenecks can prevent society members from adding valuable content to their Website:

All content may have to be submitted to a Website czar.
Decision makers may be hard to reach.
Only programmers may be able to add content.
Editors may delete good concepts in an attempt to improve readability.

Liberate writers

Wikis were made to increase the number of authors on a Website. Wikis liberate Web publishing in the following ways:

They offer simple authoring tools so that non-engineers can contribute.
They relax the rules on who can contribute to a given site.
They eliminate "middle men" from the Web publishing process by letting subject matter experts publish directly.

Get help

Democratizing the publication process doesn't just help writers who want to contribute. It also helps the few society members who are constantly tapped for new content. For a genealogical society, having only one or two Website contributors is like having only one or two trainers -- it can be a burden to the few who carry the load. Creating a writer-friendly environment helps to spread that load.

Improve content quality

When many people collaborate together to create content, the resulting content is better than when one or two people restrict the process. Content quality improves with the number of authors because a wiki governs content creation democratically -- by consensus -- and as the saying goes, "We are smarter than me."

Add reference information

On FamilySearch Wiki, the members of your society can add answers to genealogical questions they answer repeatedly. Then you can link to those answers from your society’s wiki page or your personal wiki page.

Fortify meetings and training

Societies are constantly looking for new content to present at their meetings. FamilySearch Wiki is growing at a rate of 14,000 pages per year, so it is a great place to find information about what’s new in:

record collections
data sets
software
methodology

You can also announce your society's training events in the wiki’s locality pages, as well as your society’s wiki page. Feel free to post presentations, handouts, and homework assignments on the wiki.

Learn new technology & best practices that support projects

The wiki’s creators have learned a lot about what makes projects succeed and fail. For example:

Do project leaders struggle to recruit a critical mass of volunteers for a project because they don’t scope out the specific tasks and skillsets they need?
Do you use Skype for audio meetings and real-time support?
Do you use Adobe Connect for meetings that require screen sharing?
Do you use Google Docs to track projects or allow many people to edit a document simultaneously?
Do you know how to leverage even non-genealogists in accelerating your project?

Our Community Services team would be happy to share some best practices in project support with you or your society board. We’d be happy to join you in a virtual meeting about these topics, and we can supply the tools that will allow us to add a toll-free conference call and screen sharing to the meeting.One source of information that might yield some initial answers for your society is How to Run or Manage a Wiki Project.

Another way to learn best practices about running projects is to model your new projects after successful ones created by others. To give your society some ideas regarding how to start or run a project, you can link to other wikiprojects that have achieved great success, either on this wiki or on others.

Grow and support membership

Activate (retain) current members and win new ones

Your society probably has some members who pay their dues and attend the occasional meeting, but aren’t deeply involved. The way to involve them is to give them a voice and an interesting problem to solve. There’s no easier way to gain a voice and solve the challenges of many genealogists at once than to contribute to a wiki. What do your society’s inactive members know that would help other genealogists? Find out and have them contribute!

People volunteer more when they can see how their skills fit with the specific needs of the society. You can list members on the wiki by locality focus, ethnic focus, residence (city), involvement with projects on FamilySearch Indexing, GenWeb, RootsWeb, Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness, and other sites. Also list their involvement in newsgroups, e-mail lists, and other means of group communication. This helps them find answers, communicate, make friends, and collaborate on projects according to shared interests.

Member attributes go beyond what they know. Another thing to include is what they want to learn. Let members list their needs for research help or advice on a common page. Drive members to that page when a new item is listed, or mention new items in the society newsletter.

Members working on interesting projects have a tendency to recruit friends. If you activate members using the abovementioned ideas, they will become customer evangelists and recruit people to join the society and help them.

Grow your project teams

FamilySearch Wiki has 12,000 registered users and is growing at a rate of 105,000 edits (and 850 million characters) per year. Find which wiki users are contributing content for your area and recruit them to work on your projects.

Another good source of labor beyond the wiki’s current contributors is the Boy Scouts of America. Some societies offer opportunities for completing Eagle Scout projects. Use the wiki to connect Scouts to the projects your society needs to be done.

Recognize member achievements

On FamilySearch Wiki, you can post announcements about the achievements of your members. You could recognize:

Society tasks (like giving lessons or helping with indexing projects).
Members' personal achievements (like completing certification, winning their first client, publishing a family history, or creating a new blog).
Wiki pages members have written. Link to them to recognize members' efforts and to drive society customers to member-written articles that can help them.
Members who are contributing content. You can link society pages on the wiki to the user pages of members who are contributing. When members add background information to their user pages, this can be a great way for potential members to find members with the same interests.
Tasks done with other organizations, like being part of a team that completed a FamilySearch Indexing project.

Attract customers and revenue

Draw people to your society’s Website

Every registered member of a wiki has a user page. Your user page can mention that you’re an officer in a certain society and link back to society pages. If each member of your society did this, you could generate dozens of links to the society Website.

Draw people to your meetings & training

Post your meeting agendas on FamilySearch Wiki. Then link to the agenda from pages that relate to each subject. If the meeting will feature a training segment on digitized Revolutionary War records of New England, post it in the News section of each New England state page and county page. In a very short time you could make dozens of links to your meeting.

Use back-issue content to boost traffic

Back issues of society newsletters and quarterlies abound with genealogy tips and lead to genealogical original source material. These tips are society assets, but most societies derive no value from these assets after the newsletters are published. Republish this information on the wiki, give it wider circulation, and keep it working for your society by driving traffic back to your Website! If you have back issues that aren’t in digital form, find members who can either type their gems into the wiki or who can scan them and OCR them. If you OCR them, find others who will edit out any mistakes in the OCR.

Cut costs and add revenue

Societies are welcome to publish their whole Website on FamilySearch Wiki. This cuts Website hosting and maintenance costs.

A society can cut newsletter production costs by transforming its printed newsletter to a single wiki page of teasers that draw readers to a blog where they can access the full articles. The blog could then, in turn, point to premium articles found only in the printed newsletter circulated to society members, much as Dick Eastman does with his Online Genealogy Newsletter. Offering the bulk of the newsletter in a blog can also bring ad revenue.

Sell more publications

The problem with paper publications is that they are too expensive and they fail to fulfill a growing consumer desire for instant gratification. That is a barrier to sales. Fix this by going virtual with your society’s publications. Link from the wiki to free online indexes of published cemetery books. These free online indexes, in turn, can link to the cemetery books themselves, which you can publish for a fee as e-books on Amazon. This gives the society a steady income stream.

Strengthen your society on FamilySearch Wiki!

Whether you’re adding interest to projects and products, boosting member contributions, or building your customer base and revenue, FamilySearch Wiki is a great place to be. Our community is ready to help you design creative solutions that will strengthen your society.

Bibliography

Amy Johnson Crow, CG, Staying on Track: Managing Your Society’s Projects, Federation of Genealogical Societies conference, 2008.

Kay Haviland Freilich, CG, CGL, Society Publications: What, When, Why, and How?, Federation of Genealogical Societies conference, 2008.

Kimberly Powell, Secrets of a Successful Genealogical Society, http://genealogy.about.com/od/societies/a/society_success.htm , accessed Feb 2010.

Patricia Walls Stamm, CG, CGL, Educating the Public through a Society’s Classes, Federation of Genealogical Societies conference, 2008.