I’ve been cleaning my basement,
and found an old Bulletin. I flipped it open to the Chairman’s column and read
this (sharing because I found this mentality-of-the-past interesting in light of my post earlier this week.):
From Across the Table (Chairman’s
column) March 1994
...Growth of the society has been a
consideration one way or another during virtually all of my 25-year membership.
We have promoted growth through both membership contests and heavy advertising.
And, to some extent, the pursuit of growth was successful—obviously there are
more Mensans now than there were 15 or 25 years ago. But Development Officer
The Joyce Lundeen and I agree that we seem to have reached our peak at about
50,000 members. Heavy investments in advertising raised that number to nearly
56,000. Continued heavy investments in advertising maintained that number only
tenuously, and have not been successful in increasing it.
Our working hypothesis is that
Mensa has a “natural” size of about 50,000 and a “natural” annual attrition
rate through all causes of about 12 percent. Our goal, then, is to shape and
size a development program that is appropriate for our resources and that aims
to maintain our natural size by minimizing attrition and attracting enough new
members to prevent stagnation.
…Abandoning growth as an
organizational goal does not imply a conscious effort to reduce the size of the
society or to permit it to dwindle to nothing. It means only this: allowing the
membership to stabilize in numbers. The fundamental idea is to manage today’s
society with today’s resources rather than spending money we don’t have on a
society that doesn’t exist....
Personally, I’m torn. The “spend
what you have on what you already are”… seems rational. But looking only at
what is and not at what could be… seems like a recipe for Mensa
eventually heading the way of the pony express or Blockbuster.
