Posted by Cale Reilly in Questions for the candidates - All candidates
Hello candidates,

Over the last few elections and in this one too the discussion of member experience and retention has been brought up, quite often in regards to new members. With this in mind and considering not only my real life work issues and experience this term but also the recent post in command by a returning member I have the following questions:

1) What to you is the “stf member experience.”
2) When does a member cease being a new member after a year, a month what?
3) What specific actions do you have planned which you think will increase member retention and is this in general or geared towards existing or prospective members, if geared why that particular group?
4) How would you support a member hit with real life issues that impacts posting etc as a) a cadet, b) a Main ship JO, c) a DH, d) an XO or CO (with a member retention hat on)

I may ask follow up questions based on your responses.

Thank you in advance

Cale

Absolutely awesome questions Cale.

So I’m going to copy your questions and then respond to them just to make it easier to coalesce my thoughts and ideas to a coherant response as these answers can be pretty complex

1. What to you is the “stf member experience.”

To me the member experience is the all encompassing club activity a member does right up until you get into administrating the club. For ease of reference I like to think of that as the Administrative Experience. There are some practical reasons to seperate here but for the main part doing so allows me to focus on all the activities 95% of members will do on a day to day basis. I define the Administrative experience as anything that even smells Executive Assistanty or governmental.

So the member experience is a combination of Writing, Role playing, Member Development and Socialising. Now that’s not to say that each category doesn’t have a variable amount of one or more of the others but it’s a simple description for sake of reference.

1. When does a member cease being a new member after a year, a month what?

So this is a hard to answer question, alot of people have very different perspectives and benchmarks based upon when that shinyness starts to dull. Me I tend to think that a member is new up until they no loner think of themselves as being new. When that happens is different for every body. However from a statistical point of view during research into retention and loss rates of new members I defined that process as beginning somewhere around the three month period and usually ends in the 9-12 month range.

1. What specific actions do you have planned which you think will increase member retention and is this in general or geared towards existing or prospective members, if geared why that particular group?

Sorry about the wall of text on this one, I’ll try and be as brief as I can. So first of all, before we can take action with regards to your concerns we first have to understand why people leave in the first place. Now for a long time a lot of people have said well that’s impossible to do so without having people fill out detailed surveys, which is impossible cause well these members have quit they don’t want anything more to do with the club. Frankly I think that’s a cop out and is lazy thinking that allows us to essentially get off the hook by pushing the issue into the too hard basket.

Plus there are people who think that the way things are right now is all fine and dandy and there is fundamentally no need to change anything. I find this kind of thinking appalling, it’s anti star trek imo. The idea that things are as good right now as they will ever be is poppy cock. Human history shows us that things can always be refined and improved upon. Indeed Star Trek is all about striving for that better future and saying that things are as good as they could ever be right now is the intellectual equivalent to shoving your head in the sand and hoping that by ignoring time it will ignore you. But I’ve wandered off topic.

Essentially membership retention is a mathematica/Logic equation.

IF Fun is > or = to Effort THAN (rl stress - fun) = probability of leaving
ELSE (effort - fun + rl stress) = probability of leaving

It’s the measure of fun derived from the activity vs the amount of effort or energy required to get that fun balanced against the pressures of the members regualar every day lives.

Ok so now that we have conceptualised why people leave the club it boils down to some very simple avenues for improvement.

1. Increase the amount of fun derived from the primary activity
2. Decrease the amount of effort necessary to carry out the activity

So with regards to increasing fun, there are a few options but I want to just talk about fun within roleplaying for this post, which is all about versimilutude (the suspension of disbelief) ie it’s about geeking out on the Trek, the characters, the stories, all of that. And the primary way to increase versimilitude is to increase and deepen the big three skill sets - Writing, Roleplaying and Treking.

One of the major thrusts within my presidency if elected will be to work extensively with the Academy to revamp the ciriculumn to include more basic and extensive skills development as apart of the academy process in these three major areas. As apart of this I recently conducted a survey of Academy members who had graduated within the last three years asking them about their academy experience and how they thought it could be improved. 66% of people who took that survey wanted significantly more skills development of all three major areas and if you included the number of those who wanted some increase but were divided on how much that number rose to if memory serves more like 75-80%.

This would be a major change and it doesn’t require much if any in the way of legislative action.

Secondly we can decrease the effort involved and effort is probably not the best catchall word. It includes alot of different things but shall we say difficulties/frustrations/ annoyances. The conversion to Exodus has helped out alot with that, making STF more accessible to smart phones. But this is but the beginning and part of the reason to modernise and audit the governmental procedures, processes and departments is about increasing efficiency, and decreasing turn around times.

I presented a statistical breakdown of retention for new members to the command group last term showing that we loose a decent percentage of all new applicants simply due to the time it takes PDept to process the applications and I theorised that it’s due to the fact that the stated “guaranteed” turn around time of 72 hours is letting us down. The result of that presentation to date to my knowledge was “hmm....interesting”. No change to officially stated processing times has been announced by PDept so far as I am aware.

These are the kinds of actions that I as president would take, redefining, announcing and codifying necessary changes in procedure. A common misconception is that major change = major legislative change which is plain wrong. It starts with a stated expectation and the will to uphold and enforce that expectation for better outcomes for members. Once again kinda got a little carried away but to simplify Cale.

Governmental auditing and improvements to procedures is of benefit to all members, but alot of the stated academy improvements and changes while initially slated at new members would provide a flow on effect towards regular members as I’d also like to see a advanced or extension series for regular members.

1. How would you support a member hit with real life issues that impacts posting

So this is interesting in that as President directly there’s not much you can do yourself. However what I surmise is that it’s about support networks and once again it comes back to the membership equation. If your being fulfilled and STF is rocking you in places you’ve never been rocked before then STF will be higher on your priorities. Since I haven’t thought about this, I’d probably have a think tank about ways to increase support to people struggling with real life issues. However there comes a time when Real Life just outweighs any accomodation or support structure and there isn’t much that can be done about that.

This support structure obviously as to be top down, with FComm’s working to support CO’s to stay in position and so on down the line, that would definately be something for the mentoring and leadership discussion. (coming to a post near you soon)

I’m looking forward to your follow ups if you have any Cale. Working on retention and improving the member experience is the biggest priority of a Matt and D administration.

– Matt/D