Good evening, everyone....Need suggestions on bring up coin club attendance. Have 8 or 9 regulars and want to bring it up. Would like for young people who want to start out collecting. Good size city in central North Carolina. Thank you in advance.
Free beer and ESPN. Sorry, couldn't resist. I don't have an answer unfortunately. Coins are not my only hobby. One, which I have pursued for 44 years is suffering exactly the same. Younger people generally do not show interest in non-electronic hobbies and middle-aged people are often too busy and don't have a lot of spare cash. There are obvious exceptions to both, but it is an uphill battle. Do you have a LCS? Have you considered talking to the local library and asking to put on a display?
You could get together and host a small coin show, and have a table to promote the coin club. That might raise funds and attendance! If you do not have one already, you can create a free website through www.weebly.com, or have a facebook page? I hope that this helps.
Coin Club attendance is a weird thing. I belonged to one in a major East Coast city that had been around since 1860 and there would only be 15-20 people in attendance. I also belonged to one in metro area that was lucky to have 100,000 people and they regularly pulled 40+ at each meeting. One possible suggestion is to contact clubs within 100-200 miles of you and see what works (or doesn't) for them and incorporate those that make the most sense for your clubs demographics.
Check out my coin club's website and you should get some ideas. We were down to about 4-5 members at one point, and now boast 80+ members. www.tampabaycoinclub.org
Our club is the only one left in rural West Tennessee. Others have disbanded. Closest one to us is Memphis. We have a show each year that has good attendance and dealers generally are pleased. Every kid entering the show gets something for showing up. We draw for door prizes and notify winners by mail. Prizes have to be picked up at the coin club meeting within the next three months. Everyone gets notified that he/she won and everyone who shows up gets a door prize. Dealers and three or four club members donate the prizes. We only have about 15-20 members who show up each month. We have a small auction but nothing of serious value is put up for sale. We have a couple of club dealers and people trade before and after the auction. It seems the hobby has become more of a business, with most interest on silver and gold. Always difficult to get young people involved. Unless you are into errors, it is more difficult to find coins of value in circulation. And, as someone else said, young people like electronics. It was different in the 60's. Three West Tennessee clubs chipped in $50 each and we had a July 4th show at a local restaurant. We fed free BBQ and drinks to everyone who showed up. It was there I bought my first $5 gold Liberty for $28.50. When I sold it for $33, I was getting rich. Those were the days. Last year I bought 78,000 wheat cents for 3 cents each and sold them for 3.5 cents each. Still getting rich.
Building excitement about a hobby and bringing children and young adults into the hobby is key to its growth. While coin collecting may not be as exciting at soccer, baseball, hang gliding and other sports, you can whip up some excitement by emphasising the fun of discovery, the reward for completing a collection (series) and the fellowship that comes with sharing your interests with others. So – here are some ideas. 1) Boy Scouts has a coin collecting merit badge, and girl scouts have a “Fun with Money” badge. https://meritbadge.org/wiki/index.php/Coin_Collecting https://www.money.org/young-numismatists https://www.money.org/scouts Most councils allow adults to be merit badge counselor without being a full member of scouting. So you should check into that. Most councils have annual merit badge fairs where scouts get a sample of many different badges and can meet the merit badge counselor for the different badges. The club could setup a display at one of these events. 2) Make sure the date, time, place of your monthly meeting is listed in all the possible places that it can be listed. Local newspapers (yes they still exists), Craig’s List, Meet Up site, and others. In addition, of course, you should have a Web page even if it is just what I call a ‘Sign Post’ page with just date, time, place, contact info, and a few photo. You can set one up on WIX for free. I've lost track of all the clubs and coins shows that I looked up that had some key points missing in their listing, like time, address, city, contact info. Just this weekend I looked up two. One had no city and the other had no times. 3) Look for and approach some of the groups in your area that help, aid, support people, both young and old, who are physically handicapped. Coin collecting is an excellent hobby for someone who is wheelchair bound for the rest of their life. 4) Once you get kids hooked it can be hard to keep their interest up. Kids love free things especially free money. Any kids and young adults who you can get to attend a meeting should get something free, like a book, uncirculated coin, anything. And if they bring a friend, they get something for bringing a friend. What is cool is if you can have some progressive items to give them at each meeting or a contest. Like who can collect all the pennies from 2000 to date first. Short sets are great for kids. It gives them very achievable goals and a real sense of accomplishment when they achieve it. 5) Also – give the youngsters a small role at each meeting. It might be just a few seconds to say what the best coin was that they found during the previous month, or what they are currently working on. It makes them feel like one of the group and almost like one of the adults. If you ignore them, you won’t see them again. When I was very young, the coin club I belonged to had a monthly meeting raffle, one for all who attended was a gold coin (You’d had to be present to win). In addition, there was a raffle for just people under (I think the age of 16 or 18 – but might have been younger) who attended. It would be something like an uncirculated Buffalo nickel or Mercury dime. It was a big club, with perhaps 100 members and the monthly meeting had 30 or 40 people attending with maybe 6 to 10 kids, some with parents attending, but most without. 6) See if you can interest your local newspaper or TV news station in a feature article or story about the club or perhaps a standout member (like a member who is the oldest, youngest, most coins, oldest coins, etc.). Pick up the local newspaper or go to their web site and look for similar articles that profiled a person or an organization and see who wrote those articles and approach them with several ideas for an article. Moreover, remember to be persistent. Keep in mind journalist are looking for the unusual, oddities, etc. Like do you have any members that have ever found a very valuable coin in their pocket change? Or watch the pages of Numismatic News and when it’s discovered that the mint has just turned out some variety of coin that is worth a lot (like a double die or missing lettering on the edge) pitch that to your local newspaper or TV station. They would love a story like that, and YOU (or someone from the club) can be the local expert on that coin and coin collecting in general. That’s the sorts of articles and stories that get people interested in coin collecting and will bring them to your meetings, both young and old. Building a successful and long lived club of any type is constant work. You are farming. As long as you plant the seeds, tend the crop you'll have a harvest it. But then it starts all over again. Stop planting the seeds, and tending them, and soon there is no crop, and the club dies. It has been my experience that often that are just a few people who are driving membership. As long as they are active, you have new members. But eventually, they get tired of doing it, leave, die, etc. At first, nobody notices that there are no new members. Then one day someone sees that instead of 50 people at the meetings there are only 30, then 25, then 10. Don’t make building and maintaining membership the responsibility or just a few people. While you should have a person who is a membership chairperson, building and maintaining membership is every club member’s responsibility. Well, I hope you can get some ideas from this.
