Rebuilding Now in the NED – after a challenging 18+ months.

See the shared chapter/chorus ideas, updated now below <HERE>.

After this long haul of intensely altered chapter meetings and chorus (and quartet) singing, or maybe not meeting at all, from Zooming to keep “in-touch,” one way or the other, to singing alone or muted — it’s time to move onward and upward! Plus… let’s help each other out! Let us sing, talk, listen and really hear the echo of great opportunities within our members and chapters. It is time to share ideas about reopening our lives through singing and share the strategies of rebuilding choruses, singing together and growing chapter membership.

So, the NED is offering an incentive to your chapter and chorus to participate in this endeavor – some really cool “incentives.” We’ve teamed-up with some great, well-known providers – who have offered their expert services and resources to help you and your chorus perform! We’re being mum on the “prize” details. Building anxiety...

Below - the sharing of a chapter’s original, new plans or strategies for reopening and rebuilding.

Submit anytime NOW through December 31, 2021:

GUIDELINES to follow:

  • Open to any NED chapter and chorus.

  • A chapter must participate every month beginning July 1 through December 2021. It’s a minimum of 6 submissions – to keep the ball rolling – both with you and your readers

  • Plan must include two immediate chapter rebuilding strategies:

    • how the chapter plans to execute each strategy

    • expected duration before seeing forward progress

  • You cannot submit the obvious strategy to “contact lapsed and past members in hope they will return.” This is a most likely first goal for all of us. We’re looking for your next two new strategies in the planning process. Marketing? Advertising? Performances? Collaborations? Community involvements?

  • Submit a monthly progress report for each strategy – anytime or by the end of each month, including if it was modified, why and new intent/direction.

  • Chapter plans will be shared in a “Forum” page online at the NED web site - with all other NED chapter submissions with the hope that sharing ideas will help encourage other chapters in their rebuilding efforts.

To become part of this opportunity for success, send your chapter plans and monthly updates to:

Let us know how it is going – and if you need any help! We’re all “in this together” - here to help each other as well as try new thoughts and ideas.

We can help each other move forward and grow barbershop harmony. Let’s collaborate!

Glass up: Here’s to rebuilding strong choruses, chapters and the NED... one idea at a time! Thank you!

REOPENING plans and Ideas, Resources - sharing with you

1. Saratoga, NY — Racing City Chorus / submitted by Stephen Dyer - 7/11/2021 / sdyer12019@hotmail.com

Community. The Clifton Park rehearsal location (a church social hall) is, hopefully, more permanent than a trial basis. Rehearsals are the 4th Tuesday (as usual) of each month through at least December. Our next rehearsal is 8/24. We are hoping we can continue that for 2022. Our first rehearsal was the same evening as a men’s group meeting, so we were able to perform a couple of songs for them as a way to introduce ourselves. The church has provided us with publicity in the last two weekly bulletins and will, hopefully, continue to do so.

Recruitment Idea. “Barbershop on Broadway” (BoB) is a performance program that’s been in place for over 10 years. This takes place 6 Thursday evenings during the thoroughbred racing season. Our goal is to raise funds while providing folks on Broadway with a memorable performance experience. We know many are from out of town, but we also know there are people from the Capital Region who may be interested in checking us out. In fact, we have a prospect who, after seeing our media notification, attended our rehearsal Tuesday night and our Barbershop on Broadway performance Thursday night. He indicated he would come to rehearsal again this next week. We also count on businesses connecting us to their followers on social media.

Update 1, 9/22:

(Community) The Clifton Park rehearsal location - Our next rehearsal are 9/28, 11/23 and 12/21.  No rehearsal there in October as it is just before the NED contest.   We are hoping we can continue this pattern for 2022.

 (Recruitment Idea) “Barbershop on Broadway” We did 18, 30-minute performances this year to very appreciative audiences.

New Goal:  Holiday Video Performance.  We are planning on doing a video of our usual Holiday performance that we can use for Senior Centers, Nursing Homes and other venues that don't allow in-person performances at the moment.  This will allow us to entertain these important communities in spite of COVID affects.

2. Lowell, MA — Gentlemen Songsters / submitted by Jesse Heines - 7/19/2021 / jesse@jesseheines.com

a. Challenge. Learned a very challenging song for the chorus because it has tons of syncopation -- and to polish repertoire in person that we learned and have only sung virtually.

b. Community. Re-establish contact with various places where we have performed in the past to line up potential gigs.  The challenge here is to find out who is now booking activities in these places, as many of our old contacts seemed to have moved on to other jobs when activities were essentially halted during the pandemic.

Update 1, 9/17: 

It seems that senior living facilities have not yet restarted bringing in outside talent for entertainment.  Most are not even returning calls or answering emails in response to our queries.  This task is thus an ongoing challenge.

We have, however, booked a chorus gig for September 26, when we will be performing at a luncheon for widows of Aleppo Shriners in Wilmington.  This is a 45-minute gig which has required us to polish virtually every song in our repertoire.Our quartets have also managed to find some performance opportunities.  For example, Synchrony performed at the Hollis Old Home Days just this past Saturday (September 11th).

NEW goals:  Another major goal that we’ve been working on is nailing down a new contract with our Chorus Director.  That goal is in progress, and we hope to have the contract signed by all parties by the end of September.

A fourth major goal that I believe is getting men who have expressed interest in joining the chorus actually registered as members.  This is non-trivial.  Like all choruses, we welcome people as guests, but getting them to “pull the trigger” and “sign on the dotted line” can be difficult.  We have three men in this category, two of whom were former members of the Society whom we are working with Customer Service to get reinstated.  The third is new to the Society.  Like our Director’s contract, we are hoping to have all three new members fully on board by the end of September.

Update 2, 10/13:

a. Challenge.  We have paused working on “Still the One” to focus on holiday music, as we are moving ahead with plans to host our Holiday Cabaret as an in-person event.  Our show will be on December 11th at the Mt. Pleasant Golf Club in Lowell, so we need the time between now and then to polish up songs that we haven’t sung for two years.

b. Community. Some of the senior living facilities that we have performed at in the past are opening up again and welcoming groups such as our chorus to perform for their residents during the holiday season.  We have one gig booked at this time and are looking to book at least a couple more.  Tom Bissonnette, our Chorus Manager, is working hard to re-establish contacts.

The luncheon performance that we did for widows of Aleppo Shriners in Wilmington, MA on September 26th went very well, and one of our quartets did a birthday party gig at a local restaurant just this past week.  So clearly things are opening up, slowly but surely.

On other fronts, we now have a new contract in place with James Ham, our Chorus Director.  This has been duly signed by James and Geoff Bird as our President, and we are very pleased that we have this finalized and that James will be our director for the foreseeable future.

The three men whom I mentioned in my September update as potential new members of our chorus are all now full-fledged members.  As I wrote previously, two are reinstatements to the Society and one is a completely new Society member.  All three have now paid their dues and received new membership cards from the Society.

3. Hartford, CT — Hartford Men of Harmony / submitted by Harald Sandstrom - 7/31/2021 / soc3w@comcast.net

Collaboration. We established contact with Sea Tea Improv in Hartford several months ago with a view to collaboration between arts organizations. This followed the promulgation of Sea Tea Improv’s Plan of Action, a remarkable, progressive statement which we encourage chapter leaders to discover.  We also inquired re. possibly singing for/with Sea Tea at one of their shows. Its Director responded positively to both offers.

More collaboration. We have begun contacts with Greater Hartford CT Senior Residences, some repeats from previous years, some new, so that a schedule of performances can be developed over the next few months, hopefully one per month at least. Most will be fee based to provide income beyond grants and our annual show.

Update 1, 9/17:  We also had a very successful chorus gig – a one-time event - at the New Britain Museum of Art's Musical Sundays. All in the 50+ audience wore masks, as did we upon entering & exiting. We're rehearsing indoor with a new vaccination-or-weekly-test policy. Guys are starting to come back. So far, we have lined up chorus gigs at retirement homes for Oct., Nov. & Dec. + 3 quartet gigs for next week. We are in intense planning mode for our annual show either Sat. Nov. 20 or 27. More info to come.

NEW Goal:  The Hartford Men in Harmony came up with the novel (we think) idea of hosting an informal outdoor quartet contest that would encourage singers with no contest experience to step up to the mike: The Second-to-Last Annual Novice Quartet Contest. For full explanation of the concept, please go to https://hmih.org/novice - and please ignore the booboo of listing the date as August 29, 2020! … But briefly, it was open to all-male, all-female, and mixed quartets in 2 categories: TRUE NOVICE: Quartets containing at least one member who has never competed in a Society-sponsored quartet contest AND no members who have sung together in a quartet contest, and NEW TO US NOVICE: Quartets may have up to two members who have sung together previously in a Society-registered quartet. Only singers paid (“Lucky” $13.00), all expenses having been covered ahead of event by grants and donations. The first 45 min. were for meeting singers, forming quartets, & choosing names, the goofier the better (e.g., “Vowel Movement”) to go along with the event title. Many singers ended up in multiple quartets. A grand “coming back to singing” time was had, and we made a few bucks. We hope to repeat next year, with participants from all over NED. We need to market the event better to fellow singers.

4. Providence, RI — Narragansett Bay Chorus / subm. by Mike Savard - 8/14/2021 / michael.w.savard@gmail.com

Community Involvement. PVDFest.  We've been cultivating a relationship with PVDFest, the biggest annual music festival in Providence, for three years now.  We started by having quartets strolling in the festival grounds the last two years the festival was held.  It was cancelled last year, and has been postponed until the fall this year, but PVDFest has started up pre-festival performances in local parks.  Due to our prior relationship, I was able to secure a performance spot for NBC and some local quartets on August 26th.  This will be widely publicized by PVDFest, and should expose us to a new audience, and hopefully new potential members.

Marketing & Education. Learn to Sing.  We held a successful "Learn to Sing" program leading up to our Holiday Show in 2019.  We hope to replicate that this year if we are able to hold a Holiday Show.  We invited people to join our rehearsals for one hour for the four weeks leading up to the show.  We provided them with a thumb drive with the chart and learning tracks for one of the songs we would be performing in the Holiday Show.  Each participant got a free ticket to the show, and were invited up on stage to perform that song with us.  We had four participants in 2019, and two went on to become members of the Chapter.

Update 1, 9/17: 

  • No new news on the holiday show/learn to sing front.  It appears that our normal holiday show won't happen (it's a joint show with Coastline Show Chorus, and they just went back to Zoom rehearsals), so we'll have to back burner that for a while.

  • NEW Goal:  Another approach we've had success with of late is doing fundraising shows for local non-profits.  The idea is that the non-profit provides the venue, and they do the show promotion.  We provide the talent/entertainment, and we split the gate.  We've done this with several churches, with the Westerly Armory, and the Lion's Club.  We're reaching out to Masonic Lodges as well, and we're in the planning stages with a downtown providence social services non-profit.  These shows serve to meet our 501(c)(3) obligations, and provide access to new audiences/potential members.

Update 2, 10/18:

  • Our PVDFest in the Park performance was very well received by the PVDFest staff that attended.  As a result, we are likely to receive an invitation to perform at next summer's big downtown Providence PVDFest on one of the big stages.

  • We are going ahead with a Holiday show, so we will pursue the Learn to Sing program again starting in November.

  • Our fundraising shows for nonprofits are getting back in gear.  We'll be performing at a Lion's Club fundraiser in Tiverton RI on Nov 13.