1:00
Alan Foulds, 33°: Hello everyone and welcome to the first in a series on Valley innovation. We're going to be looking at ideas coming from the Valleys and possibly to be used throughout the jurisdiction wide on membership retention as well as satisfaction. Today we'll be talking about a program called the Scottish Rite Experience.
It was invented by Illustrious Edsel Emery, 33°, of the Valley of Steubenville. He's with us here today to talk. Welcome, Edsel.
1:26
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Thank you Illustrious Brother. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm so very excited to share my ideas and what we've done at the Valley of Steubenville in developing a membership program.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Explain to me what that's all about.
1:39
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Well, when I became deputy’s representative, one of the things that we really needed to work on was developing a solid working membership program. Uh, we had canceled a Reunion. Things were going very slowly, and what I wanted to do was find a way to rebrand what we do in the Valley and give it a different name. And reach outside of our temple into the various lodges in our Valley.
2:09
Alan Foulds, 33°: Well, it sounds like maybe one of the reasons you did this is because things were becoming stagnant. If that's true. What did you do to go about making it all happen?
2:17
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Well, we had to take several steps. First of all, I needed a new membership chairman. I wanted to bring in some fresh blood and somebody that I could work with carefully. [2:28] I Identified somebody that could do that. And we sat down and talked about how we could reach out, how we could get out of our temple and reach into the different lodges. I did an analysis of the Valley, identifying the different lodges that feed into the Valley and, from that, we were able to see where we were getting members and where we weren't. And that was a real eye opening thing to us too because I really believe in taking data and facts and using that to make decisions.
3:03
Alan Foulds, 33°: Now, I think it probably had an added benefit of getting new people involved as well.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Well, it certainly did. We found that several of the lodges weren't, if you will, productive. They weren't bringing in new members. And we had to find a reason why and reach those Valleys. Maybe we had ambassadors that weren't productive, that were just sitting back and maybe there weren't any ambassadors there. So, there was a lot of work in getting those types of things in place before we even started the program.
3:39
Alan Foulds, 33°:
Now even some of these people who were brought in as new membership chairman and so forth. There’s another way of getting new members. I, uh, not new members, but new positions for people. Get them more involved in the organization?
3:50
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°:Yes. Get people involved. We sat down and had a luncheon with them. Talked about the idea of where we were and what we wanted to do, and we wanted to reach out. [4:00] Supreme offers a great resource with the DVD videos. Now they're on a stick, but we still have the beautiful degree work.
And the younger members that we're trying to attract are very interested in getting degree work presented that way. It was something different to them or not, it was something that they're familiar with. So, the idea was we'd go to different lodges. Our valley's 80 miles long, follows the Ohio River, and we would bring DVD degrees that night to different lodges.
And the first year we went to two lodges. We identified one in the north and one in the south and went to those lodges.
4:48
Alan Foulds, 33°: Was that a deliberate thing or was it just something that happened because you needed the space?
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: No, the idea was that we were actually going to replace a Reunion that year. What we wanted to do, or what I wanted to do was take our Scottish Rite experience of being in a meeting at the Scottish Rite or being in a reunion and take it to a home lodge. And we went to two different lodges that year. We asked them if we could come to their lodge and meet in their room on a night when they weren't having a meeting, and that we would take it from there.
And what we did was, uh, we brought in DVD degrees. [05:30] We set up and held a sort of a mini reunion type of experience. We stamped passports. We opened the lodge of the Valley open, and then we went into the degree work. I always give them a present or something like that. Yeah. But, uh, that was the point.
5:33
Alan Foulds, 33°: Are the lodges happy to do that?
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Oh, at first it was like, uh, what are you guys trying to do? It was something totally different, but it's become very receptive now. And lodges are excited to have us come.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Well, everybody's proud of their own lodge, so I could see that being an advantage.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: It is. And, and the other thing too is that it's a good experience for [6:13] me to go and visit these various lodge rooms and go around and see all the different places.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Now Masons don't like a lot of change. How did people feel back at the home temple?
6:25
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Well, they buy into it because I'm trying to sell it. But, the idea of going out and taking what we're doing is really caught on fire. We see people coming into these lodge meetings or Valley meetings that we've never seen for a long time, and I've had Brothers come up to me and say, I'm so happy to be able to come to a Scottish Rite event because I could never make it to a Reunion.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Well, just because of geography you're helping.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Exactly.
As I said, we open up. [06:59] We come and, you know, it's a Scottish Rite event. We wear our jewels; we wear our hats. We open the Valley up. I gave the Master or whoever the representative is, uh, a nice gift that night. A, a small plaque of appreciation.
Alan Foulds, 33°: How about the new members themselves? How do you recognize them when you come again?
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Oh, if we have a guest [7:23] in the room, you know, first of all, we know who they are. Yeah. And we ask them to rise and talk about themselves a little bit. And, you know, we really go out of our way to welcome these new guys that are sitting there and put the fourth degree on 'em right away. And then we show a couple of degrees.
Uh, we take a break, we come back, do a degree [7:44], no more than three a night. Yeah. That's all we do. And then we, then we pay for refreshments.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Now are you giving them a pin or some sort of recognition when they come?
7:55
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Just this year my committee, now that I have a committee, designed a new pin.
We call it the Scottish Rite Experience Pin, and we only give it out to people that attend one of the Scottish Rite Experience events. We grew from two lodges to this year. We went to four different lodges throughout our area of our Valley, and it's been very exciting.
8:19
Alan Foulds, 33°: Now, is this the third year you're just completing?
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Three years. The first year was slow.
Alan Foulds, 33°: And how has it progressed?
8:26
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: It's, it's really become very organized now. We have a traveling kit that we travel with. We found we needed, well, we had to have audio visual equipment. We needed a data projector. We needed a sound box. Then we wanted to make sure that we had the power strips and everything because you don't know what you're walking into, into a lodge, right? We bring our own projection screens in case they don't have them. Uh, so that eliminates all of that, that problem. We bring our registration books; we bring our gifts that we're going to give away.
I love giving away gifts, the more that we give away, I think that we get something back.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Okay. I'm a brand new Scottish Rite member coming here for the first time.
9:09
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Mm-hmm.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Just walk me through the whole process. What's going to happen?
9:12
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: If a Brother so desires to join as a Scottish Rite Mason all he has to do is show up at a Scottish Rite experience event or show up at a Reunion. They have to sign a petition form that's the Supreme supplies.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Okay.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: And that is just part of the formality. And then there's also a sponsor involved. Most often though, it would be, I would invite you. And usually, the way it works with me, I would approach 'em and it's somebody at a Blue Lodge meeting and it would be like, Welcome Brother. We're glad to see you. What we're doing here tonight is going to be a Scottish Rite Experience for you. You're already a Blue Lodge member and you know, [10:00] I'm sure you love your lodge. And ask the guy something about his home lodge. What's your home lodge and where are you from? And is this your home lodge or are you visiting?
[10:11] What we're going to do is something entirely different than what you experience in Blue Lodge Masonry. Scottish Rite is more about developing friendships between Brothers from various lodges, and it's about enhancing your Blue Lodge experience. You’re going to get an overview when you see the fourth degree video.
And then we're going to show you a couple other ones that'll be something entirely different you've never experienced before.
10:38
Alan Foulds, 33°: How about follow up? What happens after this? Do you have pictures in your newsletter or your website? How do people know that this has taken place and get them excited about coming to the next one?
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: I jump all over social media. I work very hard at our Facebook page. We'll have pictures of the event the next day or that night on Facebook. I will make sure of that. We have a newsletter, but it comes out quarterly, so that isn't as immediate as Facebook.
11:10
Alan Foulds, 33°: I’m the editor of a quarterly magazine.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: So, you understand that. And so, on Facebook we have a Twitter feed linked to Facebook. And we always make sure that we get those guys – you know, like our Facebook page, you'll see it. And that helps to follow up on it. And we try to travel.
This year we found we'd linked it. [11:29] You couldn't get a 32nd degree by just coming to one Scottish Rite experience. You had to come to two. By coming to two, now you've traveled with us. Now we showed it at four different sites, so they could do that. And then we also had, we made it convenient. We did a make-up time at the temple.
[11:51] We've set up a video room where people can come in and say I need to pick up a degree. Well, we'll show the 18th degree on DVD. And, and you can go in there and, and watch the 18th with the secretary.
Well, one problem we have with these recruitment projects is getting them to come back again. So it sounds like you've addressed that. It sounds like you're getting people to, to buy into more than just once, but continue to come back.
[12:22] Well, again, we'll get you here. You know we'll put the 32nd on you. And we always do a live 32nd at the end of the degree process. But one of the problems, and I mentioned this to you earlier when we were talking, is that, and every Valley has this issue, if a guy comes in, you get a nice class of members.
Say you've got 25 or 30 guys. [12:47] But how do you get them to come back after the Reunion? Right. It's always the problem.
And this is another step that I developed. I came up with this idea of a Black Hat Program and the Black Hat Program is a way to [13:00] kind of fit a guy's needs coming back.
We all wear hats in Scottish Rite meetings, but I wanted to give the guy a reward.
[13:12] When they get their 32nd, we introduce the Black Hat program and we say, Look, look, Alan, if you come back to seven events during this year, I'm going to give you a black hat.
There are some states that don't have caps, Massachusetts being one of them. For the, for the people who don't know what you're talking about, explain what that's all about.
[13:31] And this is something that's really interesting to me. In Ohio we wear Scottish Rite caps at our stated meetings and at many of our events. The hat colors indicate your membership when you become a Sovereign Prince, a 32nd degree Mason, you're entitled to wear the black, Scottish Rite hat at any event that indicates that you're a 32nd degree Mason.
[14:01] They're really nice and they’re satin and then they have like a gold eagle on the front that says 32 on it. If you become so honored as to get the Meritorious Service Award, you are awarded the red cap of a Meritorious Service award winner, and you're also entitled to wear the jewel of a Meritorious Service Award.
If you become a 33rd degree Mason, you're entitled to wear the white hat of a [14:30] 33rd degree Mason and the 33rd jewel.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Oh, okay.
14:33
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: So, the black hat indicates that you're a 32nd degree Mason, they're expensive. They run about $65. So your average guy doesn't ever buy them and we thought that that might be an incentive.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Sure.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: To come back to the meeting. If I go to seven events in Columbus, I think it's 10 events, the Valley will pay for it. And on the back, all you have to do is fill out that you came to the fish drive.
15:02
Alan Foulds, 33°: My next question, how do you keep track of this?
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Basically, you keep track of it yourself. Yeah. We're Brothers. I'm not going to check on you.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Sure.
15:08
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Just fill it out. Just, you know, take the card. This will fit in your passport. You can carry it around with you. You show up at the fish fry, you show up at the next stated meeting. You show up at the Feast of the Paschal Lamb. If you show up at seven events during the year.
Alan Foulds, 33° - It's seven events. It doesn't even have to be the experience itself, but anything-
15:27
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Anything in the Valley. Because, my theory is, once we get you in the meetings, once we get you into the events, we're going to set the hook and you're going to enjoy Scottish Rite and you're going to keep coming back, and it's worked.
Alan Foulds, 33°: How often do you run the experience itself?
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Once a year.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Once a year? And then all of these other events, of course, just like in between.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: That's our standard operating procedure type of things, you know, membership or family life or whatever we're doing.
Alan Foulds, 33° - Now you are saying the proof is in the pudding. How has this worked? We got three years now, how is it going?
16:01
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: The first year was slow. Of course, Mason’s notoriously resist change and I even felt like the lodge were a little standoffish in that, well, let's see what these guys are trying to do. You know, or they are trying to poach our members, or, and, and we don't try to make anybody feel that way.
[16:23] We had a class of 10. The first year we had nothing but from that 10, I think we got maybe three from the Scottish Rite experience. The second year we had a class of 11, but I feel that four or five of them came from the experience. Last year we had 32 come in and-
Alan Foulds, 33°: Oh, it's heading in the right direction.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Yeah. And it just keeps going. It keeps rising. And another thing that you said about this, we have started meetings in the Valley. Our stated meetings had dwindled to where you were lucky to have 12 or 15 guys at a meeting. [17:04] Now I look around at meetings and I see 30, 35 men sitting in the chairs. I don't know some of the names of these guys.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Right?
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: They're new people coming in, and I love that. I walk around and I have to introduce myself because they were a guy from the last class. They want to be there to get their black hat.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Sure, sure.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: And they're trying to fill their card, and then we're getting them involved in degrees and on committees.
Alan Foulds, 33°: I suspect you're getting some of the older, you know, well long term members to come back more often than they used to as well.
17:34
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: I see a couple of them around. It's nice to see.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Yeah.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: You know because they've heard something's going on.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Sure. Right.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: And they've heard something's going on, so they want to see. And then, you know, it's funny too because I'll see them looking around like, who are these people or what's going on here?
Alan Foulds, 33°: Right. Right. Yeah. What are the next steps? What do you see in the fourth year or fifth year?
17:56
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Well, you can't keep doing the same thing. You really can't, no matter what you have to, you have to change. We’re looking at, actually, one of the things that we saw happening at one of the other Valleys was a table degree kind of thing.
And we're going to try that this year too, where instead of portraying the degree on DVD or on stage, we got this from the Valley of Firelands, where we sit around and have dinner. And we're going to read through the degree that evening. It's going to be performed from guys that are seated at the tables.
18:40
Alan Foulds, 33°: One thing I like about the name, the Scottish Rite Experience, it really can be anything.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: I mean, it's, it, it almost implies it's going to change every time you come. So it's well suited.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Thank you. Thank you, it really did catch on. I think that what it did was it let people realize that we're not a bunch of old Masons sitting in our temple [19:00] and putting and portraying our degrees on stage, but we're coming out and we're taking our Core Values and we talk about that, right? We're taking our core values out to the lodges.
Again, you have to recruit people.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Sure.
19:16
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: And you have to sell Scottish Rite. And now Scottish Rite has a whole lot of new materials coming out and I really like a lot of the stuff that's coming out of Supreme. The new membership kit is awesome. One of the things that I wanted to do early before any of this came out was to, how can I hook a guy in the Blue Lodge?
Alan Foulds, 33°: Right. Right.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Depending on the state. But when a guy is raised and becomes a Master Mason, there's that point when everybody is welcoming him to the new lodge. And I had our ambassadors, we made up a card that congratulates the Brother on, on becoming a Master Mason. And on the card we attach a blue lodge pin.
[20:04] So the idea is to say congratulations, glad you could join my lodge, and we'd like to give you this. This is from the Scottish Rite. On the back of the card it says, it has our statement.
Statement, Yeah.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: And underneath it is an invitation to join Scottish Rite. Please contact me. I'm the, you know-
Alan Foulds, 33°: You’ve got the name and the phone numbers-
20:31
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: -name and phone number on there. The idea is that when the guy goes home to tell his wife about becoming a Master Mason, he says, You know, this guy from the Scottish Rite gave me this really nice pin.
[20:42] We've found that the Black Hat program and the PIN program have caught on already in a couple Valleys in Ohio. We're, you know, they've seen our success and I know that I saw in the Valley of Canton and the Valley of Columbus have already instituted black hat programs. My son's a member of the Valley of Columbus, and he's just filled out his black hat card in Columbus.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Well, the great thing about this is that we can not only use it in your own Valley, like I stated at the beginning, it's, you can pass it on to other, other Valleys.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: I want to change, I want to share ideas, and if you've got an idea that happens in your Valley, I want to see if I can use it in our Valley because I really believe that, that [21:32] we all have solutions that we can share.
I joined the membership committee for the state of Ohio. And I go to those meetings and listen to what other Valleys are doing. And if Cincinnati has an idea or if Toledo has an idea, or if Cleveland has an idea that I can use in our small Valley in Steubenville, I want to use it. Their solutions may be different then-
21:57
Alan Foulds, 33°: Sure. What works in one Valley may not work in another, but on the other hand, you’ve got a new idea here that I could see being tailored around the jurisdiction in several Valleys.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: One of the things that comes to mind when we're doing this is that one of my problems is how does the Valley of Steubenville, which has 26 lodges, roughly compete against large Valleys, like the Valley of Columbus, the Valley of Cincinnati-
Alan Foulds, 33°: Yeah. Right.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Who cover 26 counties.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Yeah.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: And a hundred lodges coming in. And we have to find a way that we can reach out to those people, but we can be, I guess, more nimble if you will be by being mobile and going into the lodges and becoming their friend and making sure that they understand that the Valley is not some temple that's sitting in the middle of a town that you have to come to. [23:01] But we're bringing our experience and our love for the Scottish Rite to you.
Alan Foulds, 33°: We talked a little bit about recruitment, but how about satisfaction, membership satisfaction? How has this helped that?
23:13
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Well, as I said I see it in the meetings. I see it at the events. Our attendance is way up at stated meetings. Our attendance- one of our big events in the Valley of Steubenville is the Annual Feast of the Paschal Lamb, which is one of our Scottish Rite ceremonies that a occurs during the Holy week and, and we're getting a greater attendance at that. We're having more people involved coming back to Scottish Rite events.
23:46
Alan Foulds, 33°: Well, you've had three years’ experience at this now. Do you have any final thoughts? Anything that you would've- you may have done differently or how you see going forward?
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Well, you know, it's just like anything that happens when you start something new. There's going to be ups and downs and, and you'll make a mistake. And that was what we found out at the beginning. We were a little discouraged at the beginning because we had such a slow response and we had to maybe, well, what can we do to add to it to make it more smooth? That's when we developed the kit.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Sure. Oh, you first time through. Obviously they're going to be mistakes.
24:28
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Well, you get there, and you find out they don't have any kind of video projection materials.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Right.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: And now what are we going to do here? We do it on the fly or we don't have the correct cabling to connect anything. So, we made sure we had everything. But we found that we got better at it and it really did help to go over it a couple of times.
24:51
Alan Foulds, 33°: Any advice to somebody that is starting this up and maybe is experiencing growing pains or roadblocks?
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: There are so many good things about Scottish Rite and all we have to do is be prepared to sell it.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Right.
25:08
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: And if we can go to, I don't care, you know, Hiram Lodge, who is a, you know, a great member, but they're 25 miles away from the temple, and you talk to the Master and you say, you know, we're full.
We'd love to come to your lodge. And you meet on Tuesday nights, could we come in on say, Wednesday or Thursday and make you a part of the Scottish Rite Experience? And all you have to do is just open your lodge up for us and maybe let us use your coffee pot .
Alan Foulds, 33°: Yeah.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: And we'll take care of it.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Some of a follow up on that, it’s almost like a degree team. You must have a team that goes out.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: We do.
Alan Foulds, 33°: How many people are involved? What are some of the jobs?
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: There’s me, there's our secretary who carries a lot of the stuff out. And there's our membership chairman and that's it. [25:59] Now, what do we travel with? There's something else that's important to me. We always carry the Scottish Rite banner.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Okay.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: That's carried. And we had to get a new pole for it. But we carry that with us, and we set that up in the east In each lodge. We set our own Bible on the altar; we have our own altar jewels. As I said, we wear our hats and jewels when we're there.
We want everybody in the room to know they're in a Scottish Rite meeting.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Sure.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: This is not a Blue Lodge meeting.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Right.
26:33
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: We open the lodge up with the declaration, with the pledge, and we make sure that everybody is aware that this is a Scottish Rite event.
And usually I'm in the east. And then I step out and I bring up either our Commander in Chief or our Most Wise Master, or the Thrice Potent Master or whoever one officer is with us that day and they do the closing. And you know, in between each degree, I make sure that all of our brothers intermingle.
They're going out and talking to everybody there. We don't want to just focus on ourselves, but we want to go out and meet these people that we're visiting.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Sounds great.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Thank you.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Any final thoughts before we close?
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Well, again, let me go back to my thoughts about Scottish Rite. One of the things that I believe is our strength [27:31] is that we are a larger world. If you and I are Blue Lodge members, and I love my Blue Lodge, and I sit there and I know these men, and I've known them for 30 years, it's a comfortable home. When I first joined Scottish Rite, I met people from lodges that I would've never met before, and they became my Brothers. And I realized that there was such a larger group of Freemasons.
[28:02] And then when I started becoming active at the state level, and now I've got friends all over the state of Ohio and now and through Supreme, I've become members or friends and Brothers with Brothers from all over the country. And I think that's one of the powers that Scottish Rite can bring in is that open group of people. Your world becomes bigger as a Mason.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Well, thank you Ed, for coming by. This has been a great discussion.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Thank you for having me.
28:33
Alan Foulds, 33°: We've been speaking with Illustrious Edsel F. Emery, 33° of the Valley of Steubenville. He came up with this great program called the Scottish Rite Experience. It's a way of enlivening, not only his own Valley, but it's spread throughout other Valleys within his state. And I can see this going across the jurisdiction. This is exactly the reason why the Supreme Council is presenting such programs.
Brother Edsel Emery, 33°: Well, I'm so excited about this. I can't tell you how much we like doing this [29:00] within our Valley. The Supreme Council has offered us such great resources through the video degrees, and I'd like to work with anybody to share this idea. So, if you have any questions, contact me at the email address shown on the screen, and perhaps we can work together with your Valley to help make things happen.
Alan Foulds, 33°: Thank you everyone for watching and good night.
Looking to download this video for use in your Valley? Visit this link and click the button "Download" beneath the video to export the video directly to your computer.