Grand Lodges; sources of successful membership models?
From Damien of Lodge Devotion 723 UGLV
Ten years ago in the 9th edition of Devotion News (Nov-Dec 2006) I wrote an article on the declining membership of Freemasonry titled "
Australia Sadly Leads the World". It gave reliable figures on international membership showing 3 Australian States were, by percentage, in the top ten of Grand Lodges for membership decline for the period 1980-95. Victoria was 3rd, shrinking from 76,178 Freemasons in 1980 to 30,896 in 1995 and we now have about 9,000 members. My article considered data on 70 Grand Lodges in Australia, Nth America and Europe. A summary is;
"Top 10" - falling Freemasons numbers (1980-95)
Constitution % Decline
1 Germany* 100.00%
2 Missouri 93.86%
3 Victoria 59.44%
4 New South Wale 56.13%
5 South Australia 53.28%
6 New Zealand 48.48%
7 New York 48.31%
8 Saskatchewan (Canada) 47.37%
9 Arkansas 44.60%
10 Minnesota 43.82%
* Germany currently has 5 Regular Grand Lodges and the above is not indicative of Freemasonry there. Source was Kent Henderson
http://kenthenderson.com.au/m_papers10.html
From the above, you can clearly see where the title “
Australia Sadly Leads the World" came from. Although now over twenty years old, those figures are staggering and refreshed figures show the same story. I’m drolly amused to see in 2006 I wrote "
How do we stay relevant in a changing century - or are the core values of the Craft so enduring that they will always be relevant and if so, how do we communicate this to members, new and old, potential members, and wider society?" A decade on and these are still very much topics of the day for our Grand Lodge.. as is another line for my 2006 article “
We need to get out and promote the Craft and all act as ambassadors for it.” which are both paraphrases of our current MWGM’s messages.
My article was sparked another written by RtWBro John Glover in Grand Lodge’s magazine (Issue 109) back when MWBro Bruce Bartop was Grand Master. Bro John was then Grand Superintendent of Membership. His article written ten years ago was titled "Is Change Inevitable?" and commented
“Our (UGLV) average age is 68 years, we stand to lose significant numbers by natural attrition in the short-term future and we are not attracting equivalent numbers of young candidates… Over 25% of the Lodges have only 30-40 members and 15% have less than 30 members. Are they big enough to survive?….There is nothing wrong with Freemasonry; our ideals have survived centuries without change but do our practices need to change, does our Lodge administration need to change and do our Lodges need to change to ensure that Freemasonry survives the changes occurring within our communities? I do not advocate closure of small Lodges, I do not endorse minimum numbers for Lodges to retain their Warrants but I do endorse and encourage changing practices to ensure Lodge vitality….." Having a vibrant Lodge is indeed a critical ingredient to member retention and common to the sustained success of Lodges.
I’ve never published or promoted either article on the web because declining membership is often a source of pessimism and negativity when what is needed is
optimism. Although Devotion News has a tradition of critical evaluation, we also try to talk the Craft
up rather than
down, and are always mindful of what we project on the web. You won’t find articles bemoaning “the decline of the Craft” in Devotion News (but admittedly you will find a lot about trend of selling Masonic buildings) but rather on how to improve lodges and Freemasons (and how to save buildings)... and reports of Brothers actually *doing* that.
Morale is one of the critical components to successful organisations and while we cannot have our head in the sand, constant talk of declining numbers does nothing for our morale. Morale is a critical component to a successful future and a core secret in lodge success. That’s why it’s a decade since I last publish something on falling numbers of Freemasons in Devotion News. A word of caution; there is a danger that we become fixated and anchored on the shrinkage of Freemasonry when what is needed is to be solution orientated with a focus on building, or keeping, our Lodges as happy and robust groups. Don’t become one of those Freemasons stuck in the past or lamenting fewer Freemasons, be one who is future focused, but at the same time, be aware and be educated. Nonetheless, defining and contextualising a problem is critical to solving it, but those solutions are only found in actions, not statistics. However, data can inform our actions, so I thought I would re-examine the updated statistics of ten years ago to see if they can inform our actions, looking for Grand Lodges, which like Lodge Devotion, are reversing the trend of shrinkage.. That sits nicely with Grand Lodge’s call for “evidence based” decision making. Beyond membership numbers what we often get is subjective (qualitative) rather than numerical (quantitative) information and what would be truly informative is a longitudinal study of Freemasons’ journey linked to the activities and practices of lodges they inhabit, trying to identify what makes men leave (a bit of good work has been done on that) and what makes them stay – concerning which there is almost no qualitative research, but only a lot of statements of what was done, without actual causal links being established. I sometimes suspect that, of the lodges that come together to address their recruitment and retention problems, it is in the coming together, more than the solutions they employ, which is the reason for their success.
Unfortunately, the examination of these updated membership statistics (this time solely focused on the Masonic Service Association of Nth America) did not identify a Grand Lodge to emulate; and led me back to my conclusion of ten years ago; our solutions will need to come from ourselves or other organisations and will be found and employed at Lodge level, often using the “fail small, fail fast, fail forward” method of trial and error employed with enthusiasm and optimistic experimentation for “continuous improvement”.
In December 2006, Devotion was then one of the “less than 30 members” Lodges RtWBro John Glover had spoke of but we used that as strength to build a tight knit group with high lodge attendance. Our lodge has been through two strategic reviews using SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & threats) put to the whole membership followed by a quiet review when Stephen P was Master, Mike SW, me JW which ended in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the thought our best members would be self actualised or striving for the same, especially men we could help self actualise. Another review was done, drawing on the first, when we considered merger where the whole lodge was fully engaged, including ladies. I was WME then and in many ways Devotion is still riding on that review where we made some significant changes, including changing our meeting night to meet members’ needs, but with many new members, we should revisit our operations, failures and successes from a position of strength rather than waiting for trouble to arrive. Declaring a crisis before one arrives is a great management approach to address obvious threats which might be terminal to your organisation.
Ten years after writing "
Australia Sadly Leads the World”, last September I wrote “
Lodge Devotion; Retention Review & Exit Interviews” (Edition No 114) where I reported Devotion is “... retaining about 63% of our Initiates over the last 8 years with about 73% attendance of those remaining. Better than the “average” lodge but far from perfect.” We seem to be doing something right and key is morale, competency, fraternity and genuine relationships, support to our members, especially MMs and putting their needs first, long term succession & testing everything with the question will our action create the conditions for our warrant to be passed on? What will make us happy and allow us to communicate happiness to others?
Then and today, I still have a preference for smaller lodges of 25-40 members with high engagement & attendance. Large Victorian lodges are often born of mergers, but they don’t address the issues which saw the merger necessary. All too often they simply merge weak lodges into a larger but still weak group without addressing systemic issues. Their retention often actually seems to get worse. That said, we are seeing larger Lodges like Seavic successful and the lesson is clear; keep an open mind, recognise your lodge as a social group and do things that work for its members; nothing succeeds like success. However, many leaders in Freemasonry end up managing decline rather than reversing it. Not so at Lodge Devotion nor Collingwood Masonic Centre. Devotion members should all be very proud of that.
A good test of a lodge’s success is its ability to sustain itself happily into the future. Indeed, defining that as a key reference point often leads to positive change and guides the answers the important questions like how do we get new members, but more importantly, keep them. Many masons use size as a measure of a lodge’s success, echoing the past and an imagined ideal, but size is not the measure of success, although it is often by-product. The real measure of a lodge’s success is its ability
make Freemasons, not just to gain candidates but to retain, educate and influence them, to be a happy place where a warrant will be smoothly passed to the next generation in an enjoyable, nurturing and supportive environment of respect and honour.. That’s success; as is where and when you can clearly see development, high morale and sound ethics, education, training and above all happiness, fraternity and friendship. In short, successful lodges are where you see men who are Freemasons and strive to live up to that and the most important of all titles which can be bestowed; “Brother”.
Good membership statistics are very hard to obtain and plebs like me at best only ever get totals which are never segmented by age, lodge, length of membership, city vrs rural, initiations vrs affiliations etc. I'd be very interested to see any Grand Lodge make such membership information available, especially for Vic, NSW and QLD. It would also be good to know if Grand Lodge Scotland shares any data on their District Grand Lodges here and likewise UGLE on our EC lodge (which I understand has been growing but by affiliation rather than initiation). The question would be; who’s growing and why? Again, what would be useful is a longitudinal study over decades which takes lodge activity into consideration, but I am not aware of any Grand or subordinate Lodge which has done that. Again I would love to hear of one and read the research. The only work I know of is American GL’s looking at the retention linked to the Masonic experience concerns One Day Classes (“Blue Lightening” conferring 3 Craft Degrees in one day) which are not generally well regarded and have faded in popularity. The anecdotal reports are mixed, but an authoritative source like Bro Chris Hodapp (author of Freemasons for Dummies and the blog of the same name), says there is no difference in retention. Others say retention among one-day-masons is poor. Again we meet qualitative rather than quantitative data. (Interestingly, Chris Hodapp is himself a product of a one day class; a little known fact.) What
would be useful are reports from lodges that can
prove numerically their models work over a decade or more. Spawning other new lodges might be an indicator, but it also sometimes actually indicates disharmony.. Retention beyond 2, 5, 10 and 20 years should be the test and UGLV’s focus on making Freemasonry a lifelong pursuit should be applauded, as should our move to embrace the opposite of Blue Lightening by the establishment of MAPs and a 12+ month journey to the Master Mason Degree and not less than 5 years as a MM to take the WM’s Chair.
So what did examination of membership statistics tell me? It led me to the clear conclusion no North American Grand Lodge has solved the problem of declining membership, that attrition in Australian GLs was particularly bad and I came to focus in success at the lodge level. I've just revisited this again, finding yet again reliable membership statistics beyond what MSANA puts out difficult to obtain. I've downloaded, collated, reformatted etc the most recent MSANA statistics from
http://www.msana.com/msastats.asp. The data shows that despite some rhetoric to the contrary, ten years on, no North American Grand Lodge has reversed its decline. The only sizable (>10K members) Grand Lodge I know of that is truly growing is GL Turkey (Consecrated in 1965), but it started from a low base - 1980; 4,392 members, 1985; 5,243, 1990; 7,036, 1995; 9,232 members. In the year 2001 it claimed 180 lodges with 12,000 members and now reports having about 211 lodges with 14,900 members, That’s 66 to 70 members per lodge, something to note, especially as it is contrary to my preference... but also that it is a guess without actually having access to the detail. (We can only calculate the mean average when the median and standard deviation should also be examined).
Generally, we’re pretty ignorant of what is happening in Freemasonry beyond the English Speaking World; itself perhaps a great fault. I will ask a contact to do some digging on it, but Turkey is a revived GL hence, like Germany, you would expect growth (it might also be the ground of another P2 scandal). I'd be interested if you knew of any long established GL of over 10K membership which was consistently growing. I’ve been asking this question of my contacts for a few months, and am yet to find another. It would be good if UGLV could point us in the right place so we can drill down to their lodges and see what they are doing, or, even better, if UGLV did that and shared the information.
The short version of all this, is that if you are looking for models of success for improved retention, it appears that you should look to subordinate and not Grand Lodges and realise the future success of the Craft will likely continue be at grassroots Lodge levels in initiatives like the Blue Lounge Social Club. That’s how “empowering lodges” in the current draft strategic plan will manifest, responsibly will rightly be placed squarely on lodges for their own success, but the reality is many lodges do not realise they are already empowered but instead run off to GL to ask permission to sneeze. Don’t look for motherhood statements which appeal, but hard data on initiations and retention and engagement numerically expressed.
The future of the Craft is in the hands of Lodge members like you. Go forth and make Freemasonry better, stronger and a place of fraternity, friendship and self improvement. In the words of MWBro Garry Sebo (Grand Master UGLV 2007-10), “make lodges places men want to be and want to bring their friends”.
