How not to attract new blood

[gurdymonkey]

This was prompted by a discussion over on callistotoni 's journal about the aging of the SCA and what to do about attracting new blood.

How is a complete newcomer supposed to navigate this? There are twenty four separate links. If the bewildered reader saw the inviting "Are You New?" label on the home page and went here instead, he still has to get through three more places to find his local group, whereupon he has a 20% chance of hitting a dead link, a 30% chance of having to go to an officer page in the group's site which actually defines what each officer is and a 50% shot at an officer list with no explanation as to what a chatelaine is. (Percentage is estimated based on my stroll through the sample for the Principality of the Mists.) 

"Are you new? Please email chatelaine@shireofblahdeblah for information on how to get involved." Am I wrong in thinking that putting this somewhere easy to find would not only be the sensible thing to do but easy to implement?  (Hint: Luddite Me did it in FrontPage 2000 in under a minute. Back in 2003. Which is probably why I have groupies.)

OK, let's see if there are any events coming up and where they are," thinks our Quixotic protagonist. If he came in from the right direction (clicking on "Complete West Kingdom Calendar"  from the home page), he will actually find this. However, if one clicks on the current month, and then tries to arrow forward through the calendar, it leads to a skeleton calendar that barely gets through February. Luddite Me went straight for the monthly calendar instead of the "Complete West Kingdom Calendar, " as you can see from my comment on the other LJ discussion. If I got lost, someone else can get lost.

Accordingly, I just sent the following to the kingdom webminister: 

I recently tried to access the event calendar by clicking on the current month link. Only three events were listed for January (as opposed to seven in the Page), two for February (six in the Page) and no sign of anything after that. I later discovered that it is possible to get calendar information by clicking on the "Complete West Kingdom Calendar" link, however, if I took a wrong turn into an electronic cul de sac, it's likely others will too, particularly newcomers.

The SCA is aging. There is frequent discussion on the subject of attracting new players. I would humbly offer some suggestions toward making the site somewhat more newcomer-friendly.

Assuming the newcomer clicks on the "Are You New?" tab, he still has to read down and find the "West Kingdom Branch Groups" link, sort through the Principalities/Marches links, and then the individual branch groups from there.

Out of curiosity, I decided to flip through the Principality of the Mists local groups as a sample. Three listed groups have no links, and two links (Montaigne du Roi and College of St. David) are dead. While some of the groups actually have a Chatelaine contact listed on their home page, a number of them require the visitor to know enough to go to the Officers' page. Of these, some give the visitor a clue what the outlandishly named officer's function is, some do not. If one does not know what a Chatelaine is, how is one to know that is the person they need to contact.

In a perfect Society, chatelaine contact information would be listed in a readily identifiable manner on an individual group's home page. Of the Mists local groups, Caldarium gets it right. "For more information about activites in the Shire, please contact our Seneshal, Allison de Saint-Loup. Newcomers may contact the Chatelain, Edric Rannulf." As to the kingdom website, perhaps the solution would be to list chatelaine email addresses next to individual group links, and perhaps identify them as something a non-SCA visitor will understand, e.g., "Newcomer assistance."

Otherwise people will give up and go back to their WoW or whatever it is they do these days.

Thank you for your attention.

 In other, completely unrelated news, a real human being with a name and everything emailed me back from Campmor to inform me that they would be happy to accept my Visa gift card. Even with shipping, I'm spending somewhat less for the identical merchandise than I would if I bought it from REI, minus the aggravation. I've got a nice 0 degree sleeping bag and a lightweight, packable tea kettle on order. Even if the bag only gets used at Estrella, it'll be worth not lying awake, teeth chattering and counting the minutes until dawn like I did last winter.

Comments

[hunrvogt.livejournal.com]

I find that including the IT coordinator on web issues sometimes helps. Countess Aurora is pretty fast if it is a simple fix KIT@westkingdom.org

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

She's getting ready to be infested or something, isn't she? ;-D

[hunrvogt.livejournal.com]

Admittedly this week is probably not optimal in terms of expecting a response, but in general she is good (and always interested in specific feedback on the website)

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

I'll lay it on her if the Webminister doesn't get back in a reasonable period.

I feel your pain

[tatsushu.livejournal.com]

This has been a fairly common discussion point out here: we're actually afraid to send newcomers to the website. However, we haven't had good suggestions, yet, on what should be changed. I think you put it far better than we could.

Still, at least it is better than the Far West's website (where Vail is now the "Baroness" and otherwise it probably hasn't changed much in 2 years, so nothing is current).

[firehauke.livejournal.com]

Hm, I'm experiencing an incredible sense of deja vu. I'm an Atlantian, leading a local effort to recruit. We just did an overhaul of our group's website and it's better than it was. Not perfect, but better.

I followed the link to Callistotoni's blog and I am pondering what I read there. As it stands, I'm not sure there's a perfect answer to how we recruit new blood to the game.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, as well as hers.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

There is no perfect answer. People either are motivated to join or not. The only thing we can do is get the information out there and make it as accessible as possible. Burying it under impenetrable layers of SCA-Speak does not constitute accessibility. Oh, BTW, this is West Kingdom specific, but feel free to link to it if you think it is of any use. George won't mind: http://www.wodefordhall.com/georgetourney.htm

[firehauke.livejournal.com]

Thank you, I will certainly use the story of George's adventures.

We have in fact been discussing the idea of winnowing out 'sca-speak' to keep from overly confusing newcomers. Unfortunately, there are small roadblocks, one being "They aren't that hard to understand" to which I always answer, "If you are new, you don't know where to even find the answer!" The folks in my group are 10, 15, and 20 year or more members, and have lost touch with the feeling of newness.

It's an interesting 'battle'.

Agreed....

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

Most SCA websites seem to be designed to help people who already know/know about the SCA (e.g. Scadians who have relocated), rather than newcomers. We tried to avoid jargon on ours, but there are still ways that we could make it more transparent. Your suggestion--a hotlink to the effect of "New? E-mail our Newcomer's Liaison to find out how to get started"--is a good idea, and I've asked our Webmaster to add one ASAP :-)

[ppfuf.livejournal.com]

Out of idle curosity, I checked Wikipedia for the SCA. It's a pretty good article, as things go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Creative_Anachronism