Dwindling Attendance? Here's a quick fix!....

Tech49

So here's a real life experience you will get a kick out of.

Our KH has about 90 publishers. Typical meeting attendance during a CO visit is right at 100 or so. The rest of the time, attendance is a dismal 50-60, sometimes 70 on a good week!

Our KH is smaller, but has 180 seats (I counted).

So here's the dilemma.... on your average weeknight meeting, only about a 1/3 of the seats are filled, and it looks pretty pathetic. Several comments were made as to maybe the elders should change something, or liven things up a bit so that there might be a few more that could be "persuaded" to attend. We had a couple of really lame Local Needs talks on meeting attendance, but it does NO GOOD if the ones that need to hear it AREN'T THERE! DUH!

So we go to meeting the other day, and sit down, and my dear wife goes to put her bag down, and the row in front of us is literally like 3 feet away!

She says "whats with this? why are the seats so far apart now?" (We have moveable chairs, not the hard theater-type seating).

I pointed to the stack of chairs in the second school, hiding behind the door in the dark corner...... "because they had the bright idea to remove 3 rows of seats, spread the rest out, so that the KH would look LESS EMPTY!"

There you have it, the easy cure to poor attendance...... take out the empty chairs!!!

Take care,

Jack Harper, Tech49

OneEyedJoe

Haha that's pretty good.

The whole thing about local needs talks on meeting attendance always irritated me too. Who in their right mind thinks that'll work? Of course, those talks aren't really for the people that aren't coming, they're for the people in the seats to stem the tide of people leaving, and to give them cause to feel better than the people who aren't there and thus apply the passive-aggressive judgement anytime they run into someone who's not showing up.

freddo

Ha!

We share a hall with two other congs. I looked at the attendance record on each noticeboard. Apparently the count is now taken half way through so of course half a dozen "Oh God I can't face the Watchtower study err ... "not well" ones leave half way through making the figures even worse!

Ours is 70 publishers and we get about 50 at the hall. Other cong 1 is 100 publishers with about 70 attending. Other cong 2 is 50 with about 35 attending. But there is always a number in brackets which is those listening in who get counted too.

When I was an elder I remember the CO about 20 years ago complaining because we "only" had 90% attendance. Now its about 70%!

stan livedeath

thats all very encouraging lol

sir82

LOL!

At our hall, publisher count is about 110, attendance is maybe 90 on Sunday, 80 midweek.

But hold on! usually 15 or 20 of that number are "dialed in" on the phone, and there are 6-12 in the "back room" so they can take care of their kids.

A lot of times the main auditorium, with maybe 150 or so seats, has 50 or less people in it.

Ha! We ought to remove the chairs entirely and encourage folks to bring their portable beach chairs.

sparrowdown

I'm in a cong of 80 pubs we have an average midweek attendance of 40 so they removed half the chairs and have arranged them really closely together at the front. When you walk in, it's a half empty hall because of this huge gap that was created by removing rows of seat.

Seriously, it looks worse than if there were , more seats and less people, you expect a tumbleweed to come rolling down the aisle. Oh and they have stored them off site at some brother's property out of town. So they don't expect the situation to be improving anytime soon.

At large meetings we were told bring a camp chair to sit on in case more people show up.WTF!

Dwindling Attendance? Here's a quick fix!....

Tech49

OneEyedJoe

freddo

stan livedeath

sir82

sparrowdown

bradford

kairos

stuckinarut2

sparrowdown

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