Kinda missing the point, I think

[jducoeur]

Another week, another desperately flailing attempt by the SCA, Inc to deal with recruitment and retention. The latest announcement is that they are searching for a Deputy Seneschal for Market Research. (After recently setting up a big Social Media Office.)

And y'know, all of this feels like they're missing the crux of the issue. We (well, no -- here I mean the Powers That Be, and I am very much not part of that) keep treating the members as a market, or as customers, or as demographics. There is a persistent, horrible sense of thinking of the Society as this freaking *product* that we're trying to sell to people. And that attitude is, I think, a goodly part of why the Society is having so many problems.

What the Society really needs is sharing information about how to work with *communities*. Moreover, it needs recognition from the very top that the Society *is* a community, and that the community is the important part. You can't dictate community with dictat or paperwork. You can't issue manuals of hard-and-fast rules for how to make a community work. You have to recognize that each bit of community is distinct and different, *but* you can strengthen communities if you understand the right principles to follow.

Of course, the most important of those principles is Empowerment -- giving the members enough authority over their own interaction with the game to feel like they are steering their own lives. And unfortunately, the most consistent and pervasive trend in the SCA is Disempowerment: steadily and constantly *removing* local and individual authority, on the theory that, God forbid, someone might make a mistake.

Centralizing and bureaucratizing everything is, of course, safer in many respects, and that's why the officer corps keeps doing it. But it also kills local branches by slowly suffocating them, not giving the members enough authority to find their own way. The fun of the SCA has always been its inventiveness -- in my book, that's why the "Creative" is important. But that creativity is being ever-more-tightly hemmed in, in every possible direction.

*Sigh*. I confess that this is one of those weeks when I feel rather acutely that the Society is doomed in the long run, between the various messages I'm seeing from Corporate and Kingdom. (Note: this rant is *not* about the law changes at Curia, which I think were generally well-discussed and measured. But some officer reports were more worrying.) Lots and lots of well-meaning people are ever-so-gradually strangling it, one rule at a time, and no centralized bureaucracy is going to reverse the resulting decline. Until and unless the Corporation wakes up to the fact that *it* is what is killing the club, not much is going to be able to help things...

Comments

[marysdress.livejournal.com]

The new deputy seneschal for social media has a good outlook on things. Don't despair. I see potential.

[jducoeur]

I hope you're right. I know that folks are trying, but there are weeks I have a terrible sense of one step forward, two steps back -- and that often, the attempts to make things better in one way often make them much worse in others.

Humph. Just in a slightly bleak mood today, for some reason...

[umbran.livejournal.com]

*shrug*. I think you're on the right track, but pointing at the wrong culprit.

I do barely anything in the society these days. But, I don't feel any corporate policy was responsible for my drifting away. I have been drifting away because the folks I used to play with drifted away, because of life, and because there's not a whole lot I find interesting going on locally.

The only thing you could point to is how corporate policy is somehow preventing things I find interesting from happening on my local level. I think you'd need to be far more specific than just waving your hands at rules in general. Name specific rules that keep interesting things from happening, and I'd see an argument.

[jducoeur]

I'm fairly worn-down with the whole thing -- this is a "nibbled to death" sort of deal. It's not a new complaint for me, and you'd probably get a different example every month.

The trigger *this* week was a new rule that, far as I could gather from the description at Curia, local branches in the East are no longer going to be allowed to run their own official websites: everything *must* be on the EK servers. And you're not even allowed to have a branch-personalized site without jumping through hoops first: each branch gets an identikit website, and has to be warranted before they can do anything to it. This implicitly forbids a variety of things one might want to do with a site, and will likely wind up restricting experimentation.

(Most personally to me, of course, it means that it will be illegal to even try to run a local site using Querki, which is a pity -- I'm pretty sure I could do a lot of useful stuff once things are up and running, not least making a site much easier to manage. I'll be curious to see how much they hem in the definition of a branch's website, and whether they eventually try to demand that all ancillary services be hosted on the EK servers as well. I don't think they are saying so yet -- but many of the arguments advanced would seem to apply fairly broadly.)

All of this is for particular reasons, of course, and I'm sure there are a host of stories that motivated it -- nearly all bureaucratic rules are well-intentioned. But like I said, they hem folks in, inhibit creativity, and make the Society increasingly cookie-cutter.

And I'm sure that not everyone shares this particular beef. As a life-long service wonk, I'm just especially sensitive to the service-y aspects of the problem...

[rosinavs.livejournal.com]

Well, that kinda screws Quintavia, because we just ditched the EK server because the EK web office a) screwed up our site and b) was so unresponsive to our efforts to update our site. Well, that's a chunk of money we spent on a domain name and webhosting we won't get back, although that's minimal compared to the headaches this has been causing our webminister.

This makes me want to host all pages for our upcoming event on etherial's website rather than use the page on the Quintavia site that I was going to use.

[rosinavs.livejournal.com]

I will admit that in some cases some consistency may not be a bad thing, as I once tried to look up the website of an OOK barony whose gate at Pennsic looked particularly lovely. The only way I was able to find where they were mundanely located was by finding the street address of their fighter practices. That's a front page item IMO, and it was not on any of the pages where I would expect to find it (front page, chatelaine page, baron/ess page(s), about us page).

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Just to be clear: I don't argue that the new policy is a good one. I'm just unconvinced that this has anything much to do with the decline of activity and membership on the whole. Building and maintaining the community is a major issue, but I don't see how bureaucracy has been really in the way of that in recent years.

Ultimately, the community is built and maintained by having cool and interesting things happening, and cool and interesting people there to do them with. Show me how those core things have been prevented by rules, and I think you'll have a point.

I also find it amusingly ironic that, in discussing how we should avoid bureaucracy and its rules, folks are pointing out how this issues was brought up in the wrong place in bureaucratic process! Ironic both in the, "Folks who don't want bureaucracy want bureaucracy to be followed," and the, "Bureaucracy, in instituting more bureaucratic rules, cannot follow it's own current bureaucratic procedures properly," senses.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

No one hates good marketing. Good marketing is like a genie at your service, showing your message in the right way to the right people at the right time and for the right price.

Good marketing is good, and every corporation and product needs it.

Bad marketing, no one ever needs.

Good marketing will, if done PROPERLY, focus on the unmet needs and desires of both existing members, and potential members alike. It is research based, and makes organizations very highly responsive.

I'm surprised that you are unhappy with the step, rather than looking to see if it is going to be a well-executed step or another in a series of clumsy barbarisms that the SCA has committed. Perhaps you know more than I do about the potential for this step.

Thing is, of course, that I firmly agree with your analysis, and I also understand (and oppose) the natural and expected reasons why the SCA has created the problems you are addressing.

For example: let's say we create an organization with wide-ranging amounts of local control. If that local control is properly managed and executed, the success which are achieved are not lauded, but considered normal operating procedure. It becomes, if you will, room temperature.

Then something bad might happen - will happen, because not all officers are top 10%, and events that are untoward can happen anyplace. At that time, the organization can do a relatively surface-level assessment: freedom and local control produced X bad outcome, but lead to no remarkable good outcomes (because of the silence becoming the "ambient temperature".) So the temperature deviation is prevented at the cost of local autonomy that "no one was using anyway".

And it isn't the first of that sort of decision that makes the ambient temperature shift in the wrong direction. It's the many-th one that does. But at that point, the guiding principle of the organization ("centralize to preserve and defend") is ingrained.

Good marketing can actually upend that: by actually measuring, if you will, the ambient temperature.

My expectations are as low as yours, frankly - but not because of the nature of the beast. My expectations are low because the SCA Board is a low-functioning organization with a dysfunctional history.

[jducoeur]

Oh, I'm not unhappy with the fact that they're taking marketing seriously: I agree that a good analysis of the SCA from a marketing perspective would be worthwhile.

I just suspect it's going to have the wrong focus: it's likely to take a rather top-down perspective, when I think the Society's actual *problems* are very bottom-up -- indeed, I think that much of the problem is that very tendency to think of things top-down.

I could be wrong, of course -- I can certainly hope for an analysis that really gets to the root problems. But given my personal experience with the Board's disinclination to even ask the hardest questions, I'm not hopeful...

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

I hope, once this Wicker Man is chosen, that you will share this observation with him (or her).

Certainly, in our crowd (active and not) the prevailing wisdom is much as you've said.

[dlevey.livejournal.com]

My personal perspective, as someone who was once active and became inactive (and seems to be slowly starting up again):

In SCA terms, I "grew up" in Carolingia. It was a fairly self-contained group at times, and certainly seemed semi-autonomous. There were years where I could go to 1-2 events a month and never leave the area. Nonetheless I *did* go elsewhere also. One of the things I liked about "elsewhere" was exactly that quality - the "elsewhere-ness" of it. They played a bit differently, even when it was the same game, and we could all still get along.

Yes, life started to interfere. There were too many things I needed (or wanted) to do, and little enough time to do it. And many of the things now require more time. Staying out late on Saturday (or Thursday) isn't as easy as it used to be. My standard of living has changed, which then requires an additional investment of time and/or money in order to be able to do whatever I'm doing in a way which I now find pleasant. And, unlike many, I have not been as comfortable being responsible for the conduct and enjoyment of my kids in this scenario at the expense of my own enjoyment. Arguably, that's very selfish, but there it is.

Corporate has no responsibility for that part of things. However, having started the way I did, I feel rather resentful of someone else trying to tell me how to play "my" game. For example, while I realize that there are good and solid reasons for it, I resent an outside body telling my group how long we can retain our titular ruler, and how we choose said ruler. If that rule has been enacted at the local level I would have (almost) no problem with it at all. That it came from somewhere else struck me as unwarranted meddling. This is not the only example, but it is the one which is most salient to me now.

Corporate didn't drive me away, but they always managed to come up with a reason to make me reluctant to return.

[jducoeur]

Yaas. To be fair, I tend to use "Corporate" as a convenient but somewhat inaccurate shorthand for the bureaucracy in general. That takes many forms at many levels.

And yes, the externally-imposed term limits thing is another little frustration along these lines, albeit from a different source. (No single frustration is *individually* large for me; it's the sum of them that is gradually wearing me down...)

[dreda.livejournal.com]

Wait - I thought the externally-imposed term limits came from Lucan and Curia, not the BoD. Am I remembering that incorrectly?

[negothick.livejournal.com]

Justin, I couldn't agree more with your initial observation: the idea of "marketing a product" seems all wrong to this former SCA member as well. Judging from outside observation at least, one problem from my day still exists: How to get participants to actually join the national organization. Today even more so than 30 years ago, newbies have to be asking "What benefits do we get, other than a discounted rate for events?"
First the Web, then Facebook solved the problem of people finding the SCA--hard to believe now that it used to be so difficult, but it was. But once they've found the SCA, what will possibly motivate them to stay and to become members?

[jducoeur]

And that's exactly what has finally gotten the Board's attention, far as I can tell. After altogether too many years of declining *activity* in the SCA (which is what really matters), we've finally started to see declining paid *membership*.

It's not a crisis yet, but it's pretty easy to run the numbers and see how many years we have before there's a major financial problem (for real, this time). Hence, the relatively sudden scrambling in the past few years to try and Do Something...

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

I keep telling them what to do, and showing them the numbers.

Courage is lacking.

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

The focus on "membership" rather than activity is part of the backwards approach that corporate has. My current hiatus is partly due to disgust with corporate policies, and a refusal to pay their fees, when they give me no meaningful input, and keep making decisions I disagree with.

This weekend, I'm going to my first event in a couple years, because a friend asked me to help her in the kitchen. For the privilege of working in the kitchen for several hours to help feed 150 people, I have to pay $5 to Milpitas. Gosh, I can't imagine why I don't do this more often. (The site fee, which goes to support the local group, and the pay for hall rental, I have no problem with.)

[dragonazure.livejournal.com]

Over the last several years, there does seem to be a strong urge to centralize control at various levels. To state my opinion in over-simplistic terms, the Internet is to blame. I am basically extrapolating from how we tended to communicate 25 years ago versus today. Instant communication allows the chain of command to constantly look over your shoulder. During my brief stint as a seneschal just 10 years ago, it was a *requirement* that you had to have *daily* email access to be a seneschal in Atlantia.

Micromanagement. I don't put up with it in my paying job, why should I put up with it in a *hobby*?

Requiring daily email access isn't unreasonable

[pryder]

As seneschal, you're the ultimate point person that has to deal with crises, some of which may need to be addressed quickly for legal reasons. Requiring you to be available is a job requirement, not an unreasonable imposition, and in the modern SCA email is our primary means of communication. If you held just about any other office I'd agree, but I think you're wrong this time.

[dragonazure.livejournal.com]

*Today* my opinion is different, and I agree that email has become the default communication medium we use (and I blame the Internet for that, too). 10-13 years ago, daily email access was not universally available nor was it "free". I happened to have it because I could afford it and knew how to use a modem. At that time, being available by telephone should have been sufficient.

If you were in a metro area, more opportunities for access to the Internet were available (e.g. the library). In rural areas, not so much. A library might exist in your town, but it probably wouldn't be open every day, much less during hours that are convenient to your work schedule. Heck, even today there is a branch of the county library about 7 miles from my house that is open late enough ONE day a week that I *might* be able to get there after work if there isn't a wreck on the Interstate.

IF there is a legal issue that has to be resolved right away, the telephone is still the best way to communicate with follow-up by email for documentation purposes. Also, daily access doesn't necessarily equal immediate access. I have found there are VERY FEW day-to-day things in the SCA that can be considered such a big emergency that anyone must be constantly available to address them. For me, the issue is now purely academic.

PS: I *have* held or performed just about every other office the SCA offers (except MoM, Constable, & MoL) Being Clerk Signet required more Internet access and constant email contact (primarily with the sitting Royalty and Their staff) than being a local seneschal ever did.

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

I think "Deputy Seneschal for Market Research" is a nauseating title in about five different ways, and makes me feel like someone's got to go file their TPS reports. But does it make you feel any better about the idea, to know that Liam is applying, and to envision someone like him in the role?

[jducoeur]

Well, less bad anyway. But I still have a suspicion that it's the wrong job for the moment, and will be steered in the wrong directions. With someone like Liam it would be unlikely to be *harmful*, but I still worry that it's likely to be *ineffective*.

Look at it by a close analogy to demos. We collectively spend a great deal of effort on demos -- direct "marketing" in a sense -- and are sometimes flustered to realize that they are almost wholly ineffective in and of themselves. They're still important, but only because they serve our actual effective outreach, which is word of mouth. Demos keep up *awareness*; recruiting happens at a personal level.

Similarly, a well-honed marketing effort could be helpful to build up awareness of the club. But that's not actually all that useful unless we have *healthy* local branches, that are dynamic, interesting, fun and empowered enough to effectively draw in those folks who are now aware of us. That's the bottom-up side of the problem that I think consistently gets mishandled.

More simply, in the terms that the Board seems to be using: better brand awareness can't fix a bad product. We need to put a lot more effort into fixing that product -- making the game more fun, more dynamic, more engaging. And they need to recognize that appropriate local autonomy is a *very* important aspect of that for any volunteer-based club...

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

::Devil's Advocate::

Marketing does not have to be external-facing only. In any business you both serve and retain the customers you have, and simultaneously look to find pools of customers you can attract.

The only difficult part is if the marketing shows results that you do not care for, and one is faced with making undesired changes. (I have in mind, but don't want to discuss, the conversations I had with Steffan about "instant Masonry" (as I call it).

You seem to have this assumption that the SCA will perform only useless or bad marketing - either because you lack faith in the SCA (me too) or because you can't seem to picture what good marketing might look like or accomplish.

Moving away from the Devil's Advocate position, I have many of the same qualms that you do. That the SCA will either find a poorly qualified person, or put so much into a "world-shatteringly good one-off, never-need-another" marketing research (think SCA Census) that it will find itself trapped.

But here's the thing: the SCA now has an opportunity to do something it very much needs to do, and the opportunity to do it very very well. The "thing" is a thing, and it could be a good thing or a bad thing in the long run.

But it is not the case that the idea lacks all merit, or is doomed to fail. Even if you and I BOTH hear hoofbeats and think horses.

[lanome.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it might be worth it to ask the Webminister in question and/or the Crown to clarify the policy?

Thoughts on the more substantive matters are too mushy at the moment. I'll let you know if I'm able to structure them.

[jducoeur]

Perhaps it might be worth it to ask the Webminister in question and/or the Crown to clarify the policy?

Probably, but at the moment I'm a bit too cranky about the subject to be polite.

Really, though, that topics's a bit of a distraction from the larger point that I was focused on -- it's the broad trend that is actually what worries me. Few individual changes are terribly important; it's the aggregate weight of them that is, IMO, very slowly train-wrecking us...