[snip]

Bumping this final original HQ post as well for new members

The next campaign post Louis and I would like to discuss with everyone and our plans for it is the oh so regular Membership Retention/Recruitment plot. This is something that comes up every term with a presidential hopeful. Louis and I have given this some thought and our personal view is that while membership numbers are down to around +/- 90-100 or so active members, this is still a healthy number when you consider looking at other sites which have a different style of posting or interaction with their members, not to mention also how they rate ‘active’ vs how we do. To judge our club ‘health’ based on Club XYZ is not a fair comparison we think. After all there are other clubs out there who have been in existence far less then STF has and still have less members then we do.

To this end Louis and I will say up front we don’t have any magic bullet or deep plan which would gain us huge member numbers once more. What we do plan on doing through the Club Membership Engagement is bring activities as mentioned elsewhere to make stf a fun place to interact and be. Yes, this club is a roleplaying and posting first club but that does not mean we can’t come up with other events and avenues that could attract members or retain longer those we already got.

While STF’s posting and writing is and always will be our core value of entertainment we also as a club need to accept that if we stagnant on these values then we will only find things grow worse. This is why Club Membership Engagement is so important to us most often the two big things which seem to generate us membership growth is Search Engine/Social Media hits and word of mouth encouragement. Bringing forth these new activities among others as well will I hope set us apart from other clubs among the finite number of Star Trek Roleplayers.

The second part of Membership Retention/Recruitment is an effort to create a STF styled FAQ intro guide for use in new applicants and site viewers, while this would be similar to STF’s current welcome email it would be a longer document in format complete with pictures and the like. Creation of this document would be a group effort among the Cabinet and Fcomms with a central writer/writers figure who volunteers to help with their free time. This FAQ document would include examples of our posting style, our AWOL speed limits, our brief history, a basic layout of our government style and ship setups, and a regularly updated list of current STF point of contact members for further questions, these could come from either the Personnel Department or another appropriate and time willing entity/person.

Robert Archer & Louis Harvatt (Keeping It Stupidly Simple)