[Ponte Alto] Recruitment

[james barker]

Thank you Sir Thomas for posting these facts.



Bianca

Being the chatelaine I cannot know to contact a person without them making a 
first contact with me either by email or my phone number which is listed. If 
they get a hold of me I send emails back and forth with them and most get an 
email back from me with in hours except on the weekends. They also get 
emails from me every month, normally twice a month, pushing our new comers 
meetings.

I am sure some people will give up after one try but again without knowing 
they tried what can we do? Email is not perfect and people make mistakes. If 
they try a few times at least one email will reach me and I do not ignore 
emails.


BTW I didn't get your post directly I read it in Sir Thomas's reply to it; 
the PA list didn't send it to me.


Thanks
James de Biblesworth


----Original Message Follows----
From: thrid at aol.com
Reply-To: The Barony of Ponte Alto <ponte-alto at atlantia.sca.org>
To: ponte-alto at atlantia.sca.org
Subject: Re: [Ponte Alto] Recruitment
Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 15:51:53 -0400

   Greetings all,

  From reading many of these e-mails concerning Ponte Alto's level and 
quality of recruitment, I would have believed the barony was disarray. That 
Ponte Alto was losing its members and failing to recruit new people, that 
its officers were not doing their duty. Luckily I know this is not the case 
at all. In the last 5 years the Barony has grown by almost 60 people. 5 
years ago the baronial polling had less than 150 people. Through the hard 
work of its officers, the current Baron and Baroness, and the baronial 
members at large, the barony has increased its membership significantly. By 
last count the Barony has 205 members. Over the last 5 years the Barony has 
grown by approximately 40%. At the heavy fighting practice, we have grown 
from 2 to 3 fighters at a practice to regularly having 10 fighters and 
periodically having more than 20 fighters. The numbers who fight at Pennsic 
under the Ponte Alto's banner have grown from 2-3 to 25+. We have a rapier 
practice which is the envy of the kingdom and our archery has begun to grow 
and is becoming very competitive. The barony's members excel in the arts, 
the sciences, and in its service to the kingdom. The increase in our 
barony’s size and its activity level far exceeds the kingdom and the 
Society as a whole. For a barony this size, the increase it has experienced 
in the past 5 years is something for the whole Barony to be proud of.

  I have provided the above facts to help put Ponte Alto's "problems" in 
some perspective. This is not to say there are no problems or room for 
improvements. Clearly opportunities at recruiting new members have been 
missed. And clearly SCA members who have transferred into the barony have 
not always experienced as organized a welcome as our barony would have 
liked. Recruitment is the group's life blood and based on the comments I 
have read, there are clearly elements of our current system that need to be 
fixed or at least improved so we can become an even better more welcoming 
barony.

  I still feel it is important for all the readers of Ponte Alto's e-mail 
list to understand where we were and how far we have come. This barony is 
far from perfect, but I believe it has tried its best to be as welcoming to 
its new and potential new members as any group with which I have been 
associated. I would encourage anyone who is on this e-mail list, but has not 
been active with the barony, to seek its members out at one of our regular 
activities listed on our web site, or at our monthly business meetings, or 
best of all, at our monthly newcomers meetings.

   Thomas of Calais

  -----Original Message-----
  From: icychaos at msn.com
  To: ponte-alto at atlantia.sca.org
  Sent: Fri, 4 May 2007 1:10 PM
  Subject: Re: [Ponte Alto] Recruitment

   Greetings,

I concur with both of the following notes, really I do.  It just seems that
the main point is still being missed........ 'People' are concerned about
recruitment.  'People' ask what can be done to recruit and retain new
members.  'Someone' informs People that emails are going unanswered.  People
then explain that Someone should keep writing because People are aware that
there are known flaws with the Main Contact List out there yet People
blithly leave the flaws in place.  Simply put: then People have no right to
complain about not getting new People when People know there's a flaw in
their system and ignore it, _expecting Someone else to deal with it_!!!

Getting on an email list is a good idea, true, but what if you don't know
enough about the group to even know if you want to be getting their 10+
emails a day?  It can be very intimidating to write to a list where you
don't know how many people may see your post when you know there is an email
address provided for the exact person who could answer your question
instead.

It just boggles my mind that the bulk of the responses have said, to the
effect, Yeah WE know WE have email troubles so YOU should keep trying.  To
get NYer for a minute, "What the $%@# is the point in having email contacts
listed on the webpage if they don't work and you know that and don't care
enough to fix it???  Forget about it!!!"  *NY mode off*.  Seriously, I
promise you that newbies aren't going to keep trying when they think they've
been dismissed already.

Think back to when you were all newbies... It takes a lot of guts for
someone to write to people in positions of authority in a group that they
don't know!  They did everything they should have: went to the Official
Contact List of Officers.  Wrote to said Officers.  Waited for a response
and got nothing.  Decided to write several more times.  Still no response!
They did everything correct in faith and the Barony did nothing to help
them.  If you want new members, you have to make certain that you are doing
everything you can to welcome them.  You can't wait around for them to give
up on getting responses to emails, decide to call instead, and then be told
to join an email list of people who have seemingly been ignoring them.  I
ran a college group where folks could easily go play with the neighbors and
I can PROMISE that the bulk of the contact effort needs to be on YOUR end,
NOT the new person's end.  To greatly paraphrase what Sabine said: you have
to kiss their ass, not the other way around.  Otherwise they'll pack up
their toys and play in someone else's sandbox.

The goal is to fix things to, as Lady Luce said, put an infrastructure for
retention in place, not to blame the newbies for being shy newbies.
Ciao,
~Bianca

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