Bullet Points on Recruitment and Retainment

[McWolf 3,114]

Hey, I totally forgot theme week existed. And this one is an unorthodox one, too. I don't really have a clear idea of how to approach this and I doubt I have a 500-word idea anyway, so let's do bullet points, I don't care.

 

- Reddit recruitment has been going strong for like 2 full years now. That's how that big wave of recruits joined back in S62 (@Enorama, OG r/EHM buds) and easily the biggest recruiting drives since then have come from Reddit too. In 2 years, we've probably hit every hockey-related subreddit that exists. What's next with that? Are there more subs? Are there subs we hit once that would want us to even post again only a year or two after the previous post. At some point, this avenue will be dead and the sites we have tried haven't been nearly as efficient in bringing quality members to the community. We need a new million-dollar idea. I have no idea what, YouTube failed and a lot of other ways that initially seemed brilliant failed.

 

- Retention might not be talked about much when we talk about recruitment, but they should go hand-in-hand. Bringing new members is cool. Keeping the new members until they become relevant, until they reach the VHL, until they become GMs or whatever, that's even cooler. But it's harder to do. Right now, the heavy weight of new member-retention is pretty much all on the shoulders of the GMs down in the VHLM. Some probably do it well, some probably don't give a shit, it's tough to say from a distance. I try to not micromanage the other GMs around, so I don't know how it's going in other teams, but I'm proud that Saskatoon is rostering something like 10 first-gens, with a good bunch of them on their way to reach the VHL in a season or two. @Doomsday and @Kachur have been a good help for me, in trying to set up a nice welcoming atmosphere on our Discord, so new members feel like they belong. But that's small scale.

 

- My biggest issue right now with the retention side of this, is the main Discord server of the league. My team has a nicely setup LR, its own server, and I'm sure most teams got the same running on. Tightly-knit communities that help each other out, point out each other's good moves and helping with stuff like point tasks and player build. But then you go in the #general channel of the VHL Discord server and, let me tell you, it is not a welcoming place for newer members. Sure, there is a #newcomer-help channel, where the few that actually try to help our rookies direct them before they are buried under a sea of trolls. I may be exaggerating the matter a bit, but in the end, these interactions are the first ones some of our members will have with leaguemates, and I don't think it's a good look on the league, when the first people they meet in the league are borderline racist trolls. I might not have come back myself if I was new and that was my first interaction here.

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, McWolf said:

- Retention might not be talked about much when we talk about recruitment, but they should go hand-in-hand. Bringing new members is cool. Keeping the new members until they become relevant, until they reach the VHL, until they become GMs or whatever, that's even cooler. But it's harder to do. Right now, the heavy weight of new member-retention is pretty much all on the shoulders of the GMs down in the VHLM. Some probably do it well, some probably don't give a shit, it's tough to say from a distance. I try to not micromanage the other GMs around, so I don't know how it's going in other teams, but I'm proud that Saskatoon is rostering something like 10 first-gens, with a good bunch of them on their way to reach the VHL in a season or two. @Doomsday and @Kachur have been a good help for me, in trying to set up a nice welcoming atmosphere on our Discord, so new members feel like they belong. But that's small scale.

 

Anytime boss I'm happy to do it.