Continuing on the theme:

Conclusions:

1. Although the lower dues are helpful, the primary reason scholastics attract
more members than adults is that there are very significant resources expended
by third parties to attract kids. These resources come from schools,
school-related persons and entities, parents, and in some cases (probably the
smallest group) directly from chess professionals targeting these groups.

2. The perception is that members are routinely lost as they move from
elementary to middle school, middle to high school, and high school to college,
to a large extent because each entity that they are coming from has a focus on
team play, and the new entity often does not.

3. Chess is very cool at the elementary level, much less cool at the HS level.
HS students are generally more social (this is when their brains take on more
social development), and let's face it, adult chess does not typically portray a
cool social environment or cool role models. Additionally, there is increased
competition from other past-times, the opposite sex, etc.


Indicators:

This should lead us to consider the following plans of action:

A. We should work extensively with teacher and school groups to further promote
chess at all scholastic levels, K- post-graduate. This means several distinct
programs, targeting different school types. The goal, of course, is to leverage
their resources to help us get and maintain members.

-At all levels, this means preparing and providing electronic and printed
materials, perhaps even video, to assist teachers, principals, parents, etc. in
learning how to form a chess club, contact local groups to find tournaments,
etc. (Many scholastic events, although rated, are not in TLA's).

-At different levels this will take different forms. For example, one idea for
K-12 is to work with colleges such as UTD, Shimer, etc. to provide programs to
teachers that will meet their continuing education certification requirements
for K-12 instructors. This has several impacts:
-- It helps the colleges.
-- The teacher's district will typically pay for these classes.
-- The teachers are educated about chess and USCF rated play.
-- It creates additional good-paying jobs for chess professionals.

-At the college level we can focus on several key points:
-- Working with groups like ACUI (Association of College Unions-International)
to promote chess to colleges.
-- Work with USCL and SPONSORS to define a few divisions based on size to
promote a college league. Many websites are available to help run leagues, and
this type of website should be incorporated into USCF's site.
-- Encourage colleges to work with the community to help bring continuity to
their chess club. Small schools (under 3,000) will often have a difficult time
having enough chess players for a decent club. But by involving the community,
the college chess experience is enhanced. The community would easily be willing
to contribute time and dues for this, in exchange for having a good, clean
meeting site.
-- Develop materials for the college on how to work with the community, and the
community on how to work with the colleges. Pick some good small colleges (for
example, St. Olaf, IL Wesleyan, Clark University, Agnes Scott, Emory, Reed,
Shimer, are all examples of the kinds of places to test this idea.

The impact on this last idea could be critical in two ways. It begins to
develop continuity from HS to college, and from college to adult, over time, the
hope would be to retain more members.

But in addition, some of the most enduring and strong chess clubs I have seen in
the past 20 years are college-based. The resources are tremendous. Sometimes,
the college chess club budget will even assist with holding significant
tournaments during the year. The difficulty is the significant bureaucracy that
exists at the college. Without a friendly professor, activities director, etc.,
setting up such a program can be extremely difficult.

This could also be critical because it is a targeted and relatively low cost way
to involve sponsors in the college chess league. However, to get sponsors, we
need to have programs and we need to have materials to provide them that
explains why they should sponsor these things.

B. We should develop programs that will help us to leverage OTHER resources
(outside USCF) to attract adults. An example is the college program above.

C. We should develop programs that target continuity of membership.

D. We should expand the member database to include key additional information,
especially for youth. This information would include grade, old school, current
school, school coach (and address) and other coach. This would better allows to
spot or confirm trends in membership loss, and would also assist in the
processing of scholastic entries, which coaches would pay for!

E. We need to develop printed materials and video materials to explain to
potential sponsors and civic groups and schools what chess is about. We could
tell the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, for example, that Supernationals in KC
should be big and that downtown restaurants might want to stay open. But
showing them a video of 5,000 kids playing chess, and another 5,000-7,500
parents, coaches, siblings in the skittles areas with nothing to do would help
advertisers to know that they have a captive audience.

These ideas all take SOME money. They should be done very professionally. At
the same time, relative to a lot of things we could do, they are, I believe,
much less expensive and much more likely to be successful. Plus, it may be
possible to get sponsors to help develop some of these programs. Would Pepsi,
Fastweb, etc. be interested in sponsoring high-school events?

These are just thoughts at this point. But at first glance they tie together
fairly well to develop programs -- programs aimed at increasing social resources
devoted to chess which in turn work to help us increase our programs and
memberships.

Kevin L. Bachler