Spend to earn

Does your genealogy or family history society have a plan for recruitment of new members? If they don't have a plan, one supported by a budget, your society is likely living the consequences.

I recall reading that Ancestry spends something like $80 to recruit one new subscriber. In absolute terms that's out of the range of possibility for any family history society, but what would it be proportionately considering that a typical society annual membership, doesn't cost anything like an Ancestry subscription.

One rule of thumb is that you should expect to spend on promotion about 20% of what you make on a product. Multiply 20% of the cost of annual memberships totaled over the expected time a person stays a member, then multiply by the number of people you expect, or would like, to recruit and you have a rule of thumb estimate of a reasonable annual expenditure on new member recruitment.

If your annual membership is $50, you expect a person to remain a member for 5 years, and you aim to recruit 100 new members that comes to $5,000. Do you think that`s enough, too much?