How to Grow Your Chorus: A Success Story

- by Zack Dunda, VP of Marketing -

If you've been in chorus leadership for very long, you know the age old question we all keep coming back to. How do I get more members to join our chorus? How can I let people know we even exist, and once they do know, how do we convince them to visit?

My chorus Atlanta Vocal Project struggled with this question for many years, as have most choruses at some point. Atlanta is a pretty transient area, and since it started in 2005, AVP had mostly stayed roughly the same size, gaining just as many new members as the ones who left or moved away. Covid of course threw another huge wrench in our recruitment attempts, and we were left wondering what we could do differently that might turn things around for our numbers. Then, a few years ago one of our guys suggested a new approach to membership marketing, and we thought we'd give it a shot and see what happened. Well, what happened was an over 40% increase in membership in the years since the Covid break, with most of these new members extremely talented but brand new to our barbershop style of singing. So now I'd like to describe what we did in the hopes that it can help other choruses potentially grow too.

First, a disclaimer. This strategy worked for us. What works for one group may not work for another group. There are tons of factors to consider when deciding your own path, and certainly there are plenty of other ideas that could work as well or better than this. But it's easy enough to plan and implement that it really can't hurt to try for yourself even as a supplement to other things you're doing.

After saying all that, here's what we credit to bringing us so many new quality members: the Open Audition.

After years of lightly attended guest nights, lackluster attempts at personal invites, and different methods of community exposure, we decided to pivot away from these things for a bit and try this Open Audition model. Here is how that went:

In October 2024, we held a special audition event during one of our normal rehearsal nights. 19 guests showed up, 14 of which were first time guests. 5 of those first time guests eventually became members, all excellent singers. In spring 2025, we held another Open Audition night, which unfortunately had heavy rainstorms that likely kept many guests away, even a good amount who had RSVP'd, so it was less successful, but we still had 5 guests, 2 of which ended up joining. Then in early 2026 we tried it again, with 10 new guests. 2 of them have joined, and another few may end up joining soon.

Does this account for all of our recent growth? No, but it was one of the most successful recruiting initiatives we've ever done, and there was probably a snowball effect, where these new members helped attract more new members throughout the year. In spring 2021, we were down to 31 members, some of which weren't even very active. By spring 2024 we had bounced back to 41 members, and now as of last month we're up to 54.

Here is how we marketed the events:

We frame it completely as an Open Audition special event, with the intention to draw in experienced local singers who would be familiar with auditions and other musical groups. The marketing text highlighted the quality and prestige of the group, and images/videos showcased some combination of professionalism, fun, and engaged excitement, while also reflecting the diversity of both our members and our repertoire.

We did put in some financial investment, though not too much when you look at the big picture. For each of these event nights, we spent around $200 in paid ads split between Reddit and Facebook/Instagram. The FB/IG ads turned out to be much more effective than Reddit at bringing in guests (which is interestingly the opposite of what we've experienced with some ad campaigns we've tried for other things). For the ad settings, we target men in a certain geographic radius (~15 miles) of our rehearsal location, and where possible add interest targeting for as many related keywords as we can come up with. We of course push members to share promo materials online/physically as well, directly invite people who may be interested, and post to any group bulletin boards (physical or digital) to which they're connected. We even got a TV news interview one time to promote the audition, but although it was fun to do, no guests came from that.

For other free marketing methods, we posted in relevant local FB groups, Nextdoor, Meetup, and event sites like Eventbrite, Evvnt, and some city based ones. Most of the guests saw us from FB and Google searches. But the more places you find to post online, the more likely people searching Google will come across it.

Overall, the actual audition concept is just a rebranding of our normal audition process, but expedited to do initial skills based assessments on the first night, with the rest of the audition in following weeks. And it is targeted toward more experienced singers who are more likely to pass the audition anyway. A handful of music team members were tapped to do the one on one skills assessments spread throughout the evening. We had a landing page on our website with details and a signup form to collect their info beforehand. Additionally, these Open Auditions were scheduled strategically before some major performances so we could promote that new members could sing with us on these performances.

I'm excited for the new opportunities our growth has opened up for us. If you've read this long detailed post, my hope is that it might be a useful blueprint for another chorus to try in a similar situation. Copy what we did, add your own ideas to it, ignore what you think won't apply, and see how it goes! Of course, once they're in the door, you have to have built a culture that keeps them interested and engaged, but that's a different topic for a different time.

Finally, I want to admit that we are far from figuring everything out. If you have any success stories of your own, or other strategies that might be good to try, contact us and let us know! One of the things I love about the choral and barbershop community is how supportive and cooperative everyone is toward each other. I think the world at large could learn a thing or two from that.