Civil War Round Tables are Organizing for Growth

By Wally Rueckel · Originally published October 2017 · p. 33

For several years many Civil War Round Tables have been losing members or, even worse, are no longer in existence. This is sad because we are losing our ability to keep the story of our Civil War history alive and passed down to future generations. This is also surprising because Brunswick CWRT has been very successful in our 7 short years of existence. Given our success, Mike Powell our President and I decided we should share best practices with other Round Tables. We decided to hold a Forum and invite leaders of all 13 North Carolina Civil War Round Tables. We held the first NCCWRT Forum in Raleigh in August 2016 with approximately 25 leaders present. The first meeting was principally to get to know the other North Carolina RT leaders and discuss problems they were facing. I was shocked that no Round Table leader knew how many North Carolina Round Tables existed or where they were located. They were islands of CW members with little contact with other Round Tables and little change in their actions to deal with declining membership and revenues. All of them wanted to know about why BCWRT was growing. For the first time they were talking to each other and over-whelmingly wanted to have another meeting in 2017. The 2017 Forum was again held in Raleigh on Aug. 5 with approximately 20 leaders attending. This year we focused on sharing best practices and discussing ways to increase membership and revenue. We had 6 Round Table leaders speaking about 1) creating and sharing a list of quality speakers they have had to help others attract good, reasonably priced speakers locally or regionally, 2) low-cost media actions used to attract new members, 3) organizing joint field trips to reduce costs and, 4) creative fund raising ideas. The meeting was a great success. Everyone was energized, asking good questions and sharing interesting ideas. Some

Round Tables are already planning joint field trips with other RT’s, and working on circuit speaker trips to multiple RT’s to reduce travel costs. Interestingly, Round Tables in Augusta, Lawrenceville, and Savannah, Ga., Huntsville, Ala., and Bluffton, S.C., learned about our Forum and asked to attend our 2018 meeting in Raleigh. They have all been invited and we have sent them copies of this year’s meeting presentations, RT rosters and organization metrics. We all are looking forward to next year’s meeting and hope to see improvements in membership and revenues. Sharing best practices and working together should generate positive results. Wally Rueckel is a co-founder of the Brunswick CWRT in North Carolina.