This is the first in a series of articles that I categorise as MAdmin, as in “mad admin”. Like those stupid little signs that say “you don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps!” Except that to be an admin for a public bulletin board, forum, newgroup, mailing list or whatever you really do have to be mad. A special kind of mad. The kind of mad that looks at an often thankless task – worse than thankless, sometimes actually abusive – and decides to do it again and again because there’s a sense that somehow it’s worth it. Recognise yourself in that? Then this series of articles is for you.
My plan is to post something once a week. If I can do twelve of those then I’ll split this off from my personal blog and create a sub-domain and blog for itself. That’s three months of content. Let’s see how that goes.
Still, the subject here is herding cats.
Who are these cats? The members of your community, specifically a particular set of those members. Sure, there are a number of different kinds of people who visit any given community but there’s a bunch who are, for various reasons, interested in your community and have a wish to be active and involved but somehow seem to stall at anything that requires anything more than button clicking effort.
I’ll relate this to the community I currently manage, TheHavenNet, aka THN. THN is a community centred around games and, to a lesser extent, gaming technology. Really, though, they’re interested in playing games with and against each other. The average age of the full board population is around 21-22 years, with a minimum of around 13 and a maximum around 50. That puts many in the school or student demographic. A number of the rest work in IT. Broad generalisations, but that’s a fair start.
So, given that these people want to play games, how do you get them to play a game that you’re interested in? Looked at a different way, you want to organise an event around a particular topic, so how do you get people to come to that event? Particularly, how do you do that exclusively online?
I’ll talk this one from the perspective of a forum community; THN uses vBulletin but this could equally apply to any other bulletin board platform I’ve used (phpBB, UBB, YaBB, Discus, etc).
First thought goes to email. Easy to put together a list of email addresses and fire out a quick announcement. Unfortunately, people’s email communication channel is full. With the quantity of spam floating around the ‘net thesedays, broadcast emails, to my mind, estrange more people than they attract. They spark the thought “did I ask for this?” and when the internal answer comes back no then the email is clearly spam. Who wants to be spammed with an announcement about everything going on? Pretty soon they tune that out and, if they’re tech savvy, your email is piped straight to /dev/null without passing go. Thus effort expended for small gains and probably net loss.
Exact same problem for private messages. Overuse that channel and it becomes analogous to email, and it won’t take long for your well meant “hey, there’s a cool thing going on” to drive a user to disable those announcements.
You’re not forcing this information on your members. And what right do you have to do that anyway? They’re visiting ’cause they like the place. Make it so they don’t like it so much and they can just as easily head for the door because, ultimately, the door is just one click away.
So, you’ve got these members. They’re like cats. They want to play when they want to play. They want to sleep when they want to sleep. Tell them to do something and you’ll see their behind waving at you as they disappear out the catflap. But fail to provide food for them and they’ll be out that same catflap. Feels like you can’t win, sometimes.
What other options are available to you? First, you need to stay in context. Forum users come to read posts; after all, that’s all a forum is really there to provide. It’s a context they accept by visiting the forum at all. Thus forum posts are acceptable to them as a means of communication. Post away!
But what to post? And how? And how often? How do you get these indolent cats motivated to not just play a game but to play a game you want them to play?
The trick is in two parts.
First, enthuse, cajole, remind, badger, enthuse some more, but never ever demand. The petulant “you guys never play my games” or “where were you all” posts receive apologies at best and ridicule at worst, with a sort of embarrassed and unhelpful silence somewhere in between. Keep your language positive and avoid dwelling on past failures. Avoid “shame no one turned up last week” as an opening to your event. Try something more like “looking forward to trying this again” or, better, “feel quite excited about this”. Enthuse. Enthuse even if you’re feeling peeved that you tried this last week and it didn’t come off.
Second, persist. If your first event gets three people and you needed eight then find something good to do with the three who turned up. Don’t sweat it. But thank them for turning up and arrange the exact same thing for next week. Or next fortnight. Or month. The timing depends on the activity and the amount of effort required to get into it. But do it again. Maybe you get less next time. Don’t sweat it, no matter how irritating it is that you turned up to be by yourself for a half hour. You’ve been stood up but remember that, online, people are inherently more flighty than they’d be face-to-face. Arrange it again.
I’m of the opinion that it can take six to eight instances of an event occurring before it penetrates the consciousness of a community and becomes something that people will drift into doing almost without thinking about it. It’s almost as if their world view shifts to recognise this event as a thing that they can get involved in and that, given it’s been around for a bit, it might be worth trying out.
Enthuse. Persist.
I’ve seen evidence of this a few times over, now. A particular success has been in getting THNers (as we call THN members) involved in the i-series LAN events here in the UK. It has taken around six visits by THN members for the wider crowd at THN to “wake up” and realise that they too could go along and that this isn’t somehow too hard. From a crowd of 4-6 attending every other event, the i37 event will be attended by 15 THNers. Why? I assert this is because it has passed the persistence threshold while maintaining a suitable level of enthusiasm before and after each event. People see that a small number of fellow members had fun, and then had fun again, and again… it’s as though the fun becomes safe and they can partake.
There’s more to be said on herding cats but I’ll leave that for another week.
