This post is officially our platform post about recruitment, but in reality it is so much more. This post is really our shared vision over the future of the Community and Marketing Manager (CMM), which has an impact on almost everything else that may come up in our different platform.

A brief review of how we got here:

• Phase I: 2007-2018. MAC (Marketing and Advertising Coordinator) created. A single-person, Executive Assistant role (although by the end of this period, some MACs were taking on an unofficial assistant), focusing on various ways to market STF and connect with other RP-ing clubs. This phase had a collection of active and passive MACs, with debate beginning about what the role was and even if it was still needed.
• Intermediate Phase: 2018. During an election, the winning ticket identifies two separate issues: (1) the need for a very good MAC to increase the health of the club, and (2) the need to have someone organize the community’s events and social issues. During the ensuing term, discussions lead to merging this with MAC, and a six-month experiment begins with MAC taking on community event organizing and recruiting volunteers to assist.
• Phase II: 2018-Present: The experiment is declared a success and the MAC position is replaced with CMM. Over the next two years CMM significantly grows to respond to its new responsibilities and the increasing reliance that STF places on CMM. Not only does CMM now always have an unofficial assistant, but it has an ever increasing roster of volunteers working on different and specific projects to organize both the club’s community events and the marketing. The growth of the position in the last two years is amazing, and a credit to all those involved.

The CMM’s impact on the club’s overall health cannot be overstated. For example, during a multi-month period when CMM wasn’t actively marketing, the club’s new membership numbers significantly dropped and the Personnel Department was raising concerns the club’s current membership may not be sustainable. So it’s vital that CMM continue to get the support it needs, has the necessary volunteers, and not be limited in its growth within STF’s administration.

Two things have occurred to Nathan and I:

1. With the introduction of the ship spotlight idea currently under discussion in Command, and Sarah’s observation in Command that CMM can be grown around the ship spotlight proposal, CMM has the potential to see a major growth of organization, coordination and impact on the club, and a need for more volunteer resources.
2. CMM is limited in its grown by essentially being an Executive Assistant with no structure to support those resources, a reliance on ad hoc volunteers (who do great work!), and a limited presence on STF’s site for institutional knowledge/memory and planning.

Therefore, Nathan and I have a vision for Phase III of CMM.

We envision CMM becoming a pseudo-department. Not an Executive Department, as it will still be headed by a semi-permanent EA who can do long-term planning, instead of a QDir that could change from term-to-term. It would have its own presence on STF’s site for organization purposes - Ten Forward would remain a social area under CMM’s leadership and administration. An assistant would be mandated by bylaw. CMM would be authorized to create written mandates for an organized team below the CMM. There would be a place for CMM to link to their static pages, with the ability to document roles and responsibilities, and create institutional knowledge and memory for the various things CMM is responsible for. It has the potential of creating a new platform to recruit volunteers from the membership into clearly defined positions with documented guides/policies to support them.

The vision Nathan and I have is of a growing and supported CMM role that has the potential of becoming one of the largest and most important admin teams in STF that can then face the new challenges and projects coming down the road, such as the ship spotlight project.

With this additional growth and support, Nathan and I would then also want to work with CMM into venturing beyond just marketing through our current social media, like Facebook and Twitter. We have some additional ideas of where we could reach out (although we’re not experts on this, and would rely on CMM’s knowledge and expertise to make sure it is the right direction), which can be done with this additional support we envision. A growing and more supported CMM will only benefit the club’s recruitment (and retention), circling back to this post being officially our election platform on recruitment :P

Thanks for your time in reading this.

Daniel and Nathan: Two guys and a club