Posted July 10, 2019, 2:16 p.m. by Rear Admiral Daniel Lerner (Personnel Director, EGO) (Daniel Lerner)
Posted by Admiral Joe P (Librarian / TECH Chairman) in Proposal: a fun, rewarding referral program
Posted by Rear Admiral Daniel Lerner (Personnel Director, EGO) in Proposal: a fun, rewarding referral program
ProblemFor reasons stated in the last Personnel Department report and in subsequent posts, we’re not recruiting enough members to STF. While that discussion is also raising issues about what the cause of the problem is, and why it may have occurred suddenly, it does not change the fact that we need to be thinking ‘outside-the-box’ when it comes to ways to get people to join the club.
One area we really need to take advantage of is our own members’ ability to sell and promote STF.
Proposal
I am proposing a referral system, where there’s some kind of in-club reward to members for making a referral (either a reward based on number of referrals, or based on a referral staying active for at least a certain period of time - the details can be worked out).
There’s lots of room to brainstorm what the reward will be… Some ideas I’ve discussed or heard privately include some special tech for one of your characters to get to use in an upcoming sim, some special Federation medal on your profile, etc. Again, the details can be worked out.
Discussion
Some useful discussion topics:
1) Is there any downside to this at all?
2) Who should be in charge of the referral system? (My suggestion is the PDept since we are basically tracking all of this info anyway.)
3) Should whoever be in charge of the referral system have the authority to set out the reward(s) or should that be set out more formally?
4) On a related point, there may be a few logistical issues to some of the rewards. For example, we might want the EDept to put together a list of “reward in-character tech” in consultation with the GM Dept. We may need to consult with TECH if we’re going to add things to people’s profiles. But I really, really want to avoid this getting bogged down in details and nothing comes of it…
Daniel
So… I don’t have a strong opinion about this… but I had some thoughts.
Shouldn’t the incentive for recruiting people be that you get to do something fun with your friends? Why do we need an incentive on top of that?
Do we know that there actually is a pool of people that could be recruitable but isn’t right now because there is insufficient incentive to do so? I mean, I think Amber DeSadier (there is a measurable membership spike of like 10 people in December 2012 that is entirely attributable to her) and Amanda Mercer have recruited large numbers of people into the club, but I think they’re outliers.
An in character thingy as a reward seems like it’s very difficult to do, because that would involve coordinating with lots of people to come up with something useful. Plus, it doesn’t seem very valuable, because you can almost always make up some cool thing that your character has anyway. Why not an out of character reward, like a promotion or something?
Joe
There may be a situation of people just not thinking of referring people. Having a sort of unique incentive may create some additional referrals from people who never considered it before. Even a few referrals every so often may help, and by increasing those who are incentivized (may have just made up a word?) to refer people they know increases the spread of sources of recruitment.
In terms of rewards, I’m just giving some examples of possible ways this could work. If there’s enough buy-in to try this out, and if it is the PDept who takes responsibility, I think the next step is some brainstorming threads in the PDept board about possible incentives and levels for different incentives. That would then lead to an actual plan to try out.
This shouldn’t be the only proposal coming out of the discussion. It’s just the first “out-of-the-box” idea I thought of that didn’t seem too hard to try to put in place.
Daniel
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