It took me a while to really crystalize what my hopes and goals with this entire schtick was and what really helped was one question during a discussion on Discord not too long ago. At the end of a discussion about advertising and recruitment and so on Cale posed a question to the room and no one had an answer.

Her question was “Why STF?” What is it about STF that makes people want to join it? Or why should they join us over any other Star Trek RPG club? When she asked this question I said to her that I might have the answer, then it was more a feeling about what the answer should be but now I have it. So I’m going to make this answer the theme of our campaign.

The answer is just two words “Oh WOW” and i do need to explain that. This is something I can remember saying to myself over and over when I was looking at a website for the to date oldest continious Mech Warrior clan on the net and thinking about joining it. I remember they had a I wouldn’t say slick website, but it was custom built, a little twitchy but signature. It was filled with RP and Lore and history from battles fought in many leagues across various incarnations of the mech warrior franchise. And I remember looking through the site as I was filling out my application to join (7 years later I’m still in that clan btw) geeking out on the sheer WOW of the place.

Now can you honestly say that about STF? I can’t, but I want to be able to. That’s what I want new people who come here to think when they look through our site. Oh WOW. Look at all the history and the expertise and the content. Look at all this shiney stuff for me to geek out on. This is interesting because after coming to this realisation I was watching a video on SEO and it talks about to be heard and seen you can’t just have a good unique website with custom content. You need 10 times the best in the field to get that number one ranking.

Achieving “Oh WOW” won’t be easy, we have a great deal of institutional inertia and it will involve some growing pains and I can’t promise it’ll go according to plan and be instantly all awesomely better all the time. But it is worth it, because it’ll mean more people to play with, different avenues to play and new opportunities to have fun.

So the goals of my presidency if elected would be

1. Governmental reform - slimming down a bloated beaurecracy by innovating, optimising and streamlining various roles to eliminate others.

2. Content Utilisation - We have a rich rich history, packed with content in our sim archives, the reference and technical manuals as well as the instructional material in the academy. We have to take that content off the dusty shelves and reintroduce it back into practical everyday usage.

3. A Complete overhaul of the new member experience

4. Overhauling key practices to introduce motivation for RP excellence

5. Introduce self and assisted skills development programs

To sum up our goals are - To decrease the administrative burden, to increase numbers through actionable changes to the often ignored retention aspect as well as recruitment, and to increase member satisfaction by delivering increased versimilitude through better skills development and operational practices.

In the next coming few posts we’ll unpack these into more detailed action plans dedicated to a single point.

Matt and D