A Need for a Younger Generation

Details: Created on Wednesday, 20 April 2016 14:30; Written by Julia Rose

ST. JOHNSBURY-- The 66th Annual Kiwanis Auction kicked off on Monday, with tonight being the final night. Throughout the years, the Kiwanis Club has gone through a lot of changes since their start in 1950. One of the biggest struggles the club faces now is the decreasing number of members.

"When I first joined the club back in the early 90's, we had probably 25 to 30 people who were really active in the auction, now we're more like 10-15," 2016 Chairman Brent Beck said. "So instead of having 20-30 people to contact for items, today we probably have 40-50."

The auction originally began as a radio auction held on WTWN -- now known as WSTJ. Later, the broadcast moved from radio to television on KATV, where it has been held since. In the last few years, the club started to use the internet to increase their growing popularity.

"We introduced the internet bidding a few years ago, and that seems to be getting better," Wes Ward, the club's president, said.

The idea behind having a bigger online presence is to attraction a younger generation to the club.

"We have a Facebook page now this year and we are doing the online bidding," he said. "So we're hoping to get a little bit of a younger crowd. Ideally we would love to have this auction continue on. So we need customers to keep coming to us."

The club introduced their Facebook page this year. Club member Carolyn Haggett runs the page and has been trying to boost its popularity.

"When we started really getting into working on this Facebook page, and working on the Auction page, we started sponsoring it onto Facebook and boosting it and so we saw a huge increase in likes and followers on our page," Haggett stated. "I have been working on an Instagram and I will also be starting a Twitter account as well and trying to integrate all of those."

As of April 20, 329 people liked the group's Facebook page.

"[Haggett] is running the Facebook and is actually forcing the Facebook to get it out to the surrounding areas," Beck said. "It's amazing or it's been amazing to Carolyn how many hits that we are receiving on these force issues."

However, even with the addition of a club Facebook page and online bidding, the number of members in the club is decreasing each year.

"The auction as it is today, with the number of people we have to put the auction on, is getting harder and harder," Beck said.

"Just a few years ago, don't laugh at this; I was the youngest person in the club," another club member, Robin Jacobs said. "However, this is an organization that focuses on children and what we would love to see is parents of the children who go to the pool become members and become involved, because we're not going to be here forever."

The need for the club to attract a younger generation to continue the auction on isn't the only problem though, they say. Most people in the community are switching from cable television providers to satellite dish, but the auction only airs on cable.

The club is now starting to look into ways to reach out to people; one idea was to have an in-house auction during one of the three days. People could come in and auction in person and see what actually happens.

"The other thing that we have talked about, and could conceivably work would be sort of like an EBay auction. You make bids online and we never, we don't have to pre-position these articles and the logistics of moving them back and forth and all that entails," Beck said. "We wouldn't have to rent the Father Lively Center so to speak. So we can save money there. There are other costs savings that would actually make it work in sort of like an EBay kind of environment where we would be just getting the high bidder online." There has been no word yet if this will actually happen.

Regardless of what the club plans to do with the auction next, this annual event is important to the community.

"It's history. It's a part of our culture," Jacobs said. "People love what Kiwanis does for the community and for the children. They love that we've got hundreds of thousands of safe swimmers in this community. And the donors and the bidders alike are supportive of everything that we do."