Page 24 - Marketing Times v1

“Members feel more engaged in the mission of RGS, evident by the increase in chapters doing more activities such as habitat work.”
—John Eichinger Ruffed Grouse Society President and CEO
CORAOPOLIS, PENNSYLVANIA
Committed
to a Mission
Ruffed Grouse Society
BY JILLIAN LACROSS
THERE’S NOTHING BETTER FOR
THE MEMBERS OF THE RUFFED GROUSE SOCIETY THAN BEING OUTDOORS AND WALKING BEHIND A POINTING DOG IN THE SEARCH FOR TWO OF NORTH AMERICA’S FAVORITE GAMEBIRDS: RUFFED GROUSE AND AMERICAN WOODCOCK. The executives
and staff of RGS feel the same way, counting down the days to the season open.
The individuals who make up RGS – members and staff – also share an important mission: helping these gamebirds thrive by working to create the best possible habitat, all while passing on the tradition, and thrill,
of a good day’s hunt.
COMMUNICATING
A CHALLENGING MISSION
“The biggest challenge is communicating who we are and what we do,” says John Eichinger, RGS president and CEO. RGS is
an association of 15,000 members that has been doing work for more than 50 years.
The association does many things that support not just the gamebirds in their logo, but
other wildlife and the forest ecosystem as a whole. For instance, biologists provide seminars to private landowners and foresters about wildlife management and conservation.
But there wasn’t a succinct, simple way of communicating this. Then RGS decided to team with Village Press. “We crystalized the three main components of our mission into
six words: healthy forests, abundant wildlife, sporting traditions. These words communicate very effectively what we do and the kind of organization that we are,” says Eichinger. This tagline can be found on every communications and marketing effort, via every channel.
Matt Soberg, the director of communications who works very closely with Eichinger, agrees: “We retooled our communication plan, everything from the mission statement to the purpose statement, and VP put us in the right direction of how to communicate and what to communicate to our members and the public. We made an internal decision to incorporate this into everything we do, so it ends up
getting repeated a lot.”
Another important step RGS took in
developing its messaging, marketing, and communications strategy was surveying current members and expired members, electing to let a third party conduct the survey on their behalf to get a true, more accurate re ection of how people really felt. “We did
a current member survey because we needed to know what we were doing right and what we were doing wrong,” explains Eichinger. “We wanted to keep on doing the right things and make changes to x what needed to be xed. For members who left our organization, they had a reason. Sometimes they are
due to life circumstances or age or they just don’t hunt anymore. Sometimes, it was related to RGS. We wanted to know the reasons so that we could serve members better.”
24 Traverse City Marketing Times • Fall 2014
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