Posted by Sarah Hemenway in Personnel Department Report - June 2019

Posted by Fleet Captain Geoff Joosten (Gamemaster Director) in Personnel Department Report - June 2019
Snip of Doom

I absolutely know I’m going to regret giving in to the urge to post in command…

The current CMM staff (Krys and I, with Steve Siegl and Kate O’Neill handling the newsletter) have an excellent relationship with the PDept. I regularly speak to all members of the department and we have had a large number of productive conversations.

Given the recent commentary concerning the CMM that Krys hasn’t been able to fully address because of her LOA, I will point out that Krys and I are always willing, eager, and able (where available) to talk about our activities and ideas.

Krys’ focus has been on internal marketing to enhance the player experience with the book club, infotainment posts, writing guides and such. My experience is with digital marketing, social media management and search engine optimization (SEO). Krys and I have suggested a great many things that we would like to do to boost our online profile among both the larger roleplaying community and general star trek forums. We have also put forward some ideas to optimize the site for Google in particular, boosting our ranking to enhance clickthrough. In particular, we’ve expressed a number of ideas to use deep linking, latent semantic indexing techniques, keyword density, and backlinking to boost our referral traffic.

Some of these strategies are more realistic than others, eg referral traffic, and keyword usage. I am skeptical that LSI is a worthwhile maneuver for reasons that don’t really enter this discussion. Regardless, some of what you describe here would require TECH’s assistance - outfitting the site’s technology is not within CMM’s scope, though I can see where it would be a natural partnership (and this is outlined in the CMM bylaw as well). The biggest recruitment strategy for STF has been and likely will always be word of mouth from our own people going out into conventions/other events to spread the Gospel of STF. When it comes to a club as niche as this, WOM will significantly beat SEO (in my judgment). All of that leads me to…

I have privately explained some of our more recent activity (or lack thereof), and in the interests of not misrepresenting the CMM, I will point out that support has not been what it could be for our recruitment and profile-boosting plans - certainly not what we would like it to be. We would certainly welcome input from the membership at large as to what they would like our direction to be, in terms of our recruitment plans, and encourage other government departments to weigh in with their own thoughts. Our inboxes and DM’s are always open.

Andy
ACMM
<SNIP - not because I disagree or am not interested, but because I want to dig into Andy's response a bit.>

I have privately explained some of our more recent activity (or lack thereof), and in the interests of not misrepresenting the CMM, I will point out that support has not been what it could be for our recruitment and profile-boosting plans - certainly not what we would like it to be.

Can you expand on this, in particular? The CMM reports to - and only to - the President. Is this indicating to me that the President has directed the CMM to disengage from direct recruitment of members? The revision of MAC -> CMM last year shifted the position in focus to absorb many of the internal events that had previously no real point of contact, but it didn’t disabuse the CMM of recruitment completely. In fact, one of the core requirements of the position continues to be: “Coordinate with outside resources to host events and/or represent STF” which seems to be what was recently discussed as has not happened. I believe strongly in an “if you build it, they will come” approach to communities, but it doesn’t very well work if we have no points of contact or outside engagement.

This may be getting away from the PDept report and might be better suited as a follow up to the CMM report which I’m sure is upcoming, as the last one I can find is from January 19.

Thanks,
-Thomas

I’m not sure that if you build it they will come actually does work without something more as you suggested. After all we aren’t a baseball field, we haven’t got something physically there people will see and be drawn to driving by on the street. Hands up here I don’t understand what Andy is suggesting we do exactly so I would appreciate someone explaining it to me in small words I can understand and also someone to explain to me if implementing any of it would be a huge hassle and why. What is the involvement and work load cost? It would involve TECH obviously but is it a potential avenue to look at for increasing our drive by so people might actually see it and come?

Cale

So I can’t see the google doc that was linked because I can’t from the computer I am currently on, so if this question is reflected there I apologize, but what is our drop rate?

How many members are we losing, per month, to AWOL or iLOA?

Geoff

That’s a really good question that I don’t think the PDept tracks beyond the new member statistics.

Toward the end of my last stint in STF, a census ran each month to monitor this kind of data. Is that something that’s done anymore?

Sarah
2APDir

We moved to a live census, which then broke :). There is a behind-the-scenes link that lets you track the membership numbers.

That being said, while the PDept doesn’t track overall club retention, last summer I I began doing a three-month tracking of new members. That is, activity levels at the end of the calendar month they were placed, the second calendar month, and the third calendar month, and started putting those numbers in my reports.

I am cautiously sharing a chart based on those numbers. I am “cautious” because there’s a lot issues with relying on these numbers:
1) Active means not being AWOL in any way, even 2 days late in posting. So there are potentially some new members that may not be counted as “active” because every time I check in on them they are 9 days out or something…
2) Inactive members may become active in the following month. In one case it is noticeable on the chart (May’s placements initially had a zero retention rate, but then one of them became active in late June). So that may happen after the three-month tracking.
3) This past winter’s “spambot referral” issue that threw off the placement numbers leads to a similar problem with that period’s retention numbers (i.e. most of those new placements didn’t stick around because they didn’t mean to join STF).
4) The crux of what led to this discussion is the lack of new member applications. Retention is an important, if, in my opinion, a somewhat different issue. Why people leave STF doesn’t necessarily help with why people don’t apply to join at all.

With those cautions in mind, here’s a link to the three-month tracking chart: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eWsLiPpVX5jhHMsP7bTqwbKrCT4nY9WIbrbjQpcPr1A/edit?usp=sharing.

What I think is very interesting is up until April 2019, regardless of the number of placements, our actual number of new members stuck around stayed the same for the most part (about 3-5 from each month’s placement group). However, April 2019 things hit a snag, and we aren’t reaching those same number. If I was to hazard a guess, it is because we’re working with a much smaller group to start off with. That is, if we’re only bringing in 3-4 new member applications, we aren’t going to have 3-5 of them sticking around…

Not that I’m saying the retention numbers were good, but it still seems that we’re having an issue with new member applications.

Sarah has put together some charts using different data sources that she might also share.

Daniel