Join the new world

Hi guys,

Okay I’m glad to see people are finally getting active again on the forums. I have a bit of a concern around activity levels that I’ll address a little later. This is just a quick update on where we are as a party, what has happened in the last couple of weeks. I’ll be focusing on 3 main areas: Recruitment, Congressional Elections, and Activity levels.

Before I jump into that, Enoch has started an awesome Facebook group for the SAGP. If you are okay with us knowing who you are in RL (I’ve already promised to stalk greyhunter when he joins) then would be very cool if you join us on there!

http://www.facebook.com/groups.php#/group.php?gid=278539647557


Recruitment:

The SAGP for the months of December and the first half of January were experiencing a decline in the nature of the AGW. We’d cracked 100 members at the end of November, but then with low activity levels we’d dropped below 90 and were slowly bleeding members. As a result we initiated a new Article and advertising based recruitment campaign. You should all have seen the SAGP Gold coin advert popping up advertising our party for a while now. Since we’ve initiated this campaign we’ve gone above the 100 member level again, reaching as high as 108 members during the height of the congressional elections. The advert during the first two weeks of my presidency of the SAGP has had 100,000 instances, which cost 10 gold.

My issue with this form of advertising is that it costs about 1 gold per day (sometimes less, sometimes more) to keep the adverts running. And I don’t really know how effective they are. We did boost membership by running the campaign. But we also had some good congressional candidates writing good articles and encouraging people to go the SAGP route. So I’d be interested in looking at some alternatives, potentially including as Enoch suggested, direct mailing of new players at level 5 just before they can join political parties.

In order to keep the adverts going we are going to need to find a new source of gold. I’ve spent ten gold of my own on this, but I am unwilling to fund it by myself. We now need a party effort. If every party member donated a single gold, we could keep the adverts running for 3 months straight. I realise after the recent spate of wars people are feeling a little bit poor, but I’d appreciate it if members who could spare a gold (potentially even buy a gold using ZAR) would donate to the Party.

Enoch is working on a new proposed distribution system for messages to our members, which any volunteers can assist with below (link in the activity section!). We’re also going to use that for messaging new players with party info.

If anyone has any other suggestions around recruitment, please pm me or list them below.

Congressional Elections:

I think we had a good set of results considering how organised we were for the election. All of our experienced older members got elected. What concerns me is a lot of the newer active members did not manage to get elected, which was frustrating as we had 22 more votes than the next closest party and still only managed to get 1 more congressman elected than they did.

I am going to take responsibility for the lack of organisation during this election. I agreed to let someone I did not have a lot of faith in ‘organise’ the election, when I made as a promise in my Party Presidential election campaign to ensure we went into these elections very organised. That promise means even though I did try to organise things, I was doing it all too late, and from a back footing, and failed at that. All I can say on this point is that simply put this party isn’t a dictatorship and I wanted to involve people in areas they want to be involved in. We need people to be involved with the vital functions of the party in order for us to be a real party and not just an elitist organisation run by a few people without the rest of the party being able to influence it.

I also want to take a moment to thank those who provided much needed assistance during the election. Particularly to Ari who was a life saver on the day. He manually mailed every single party member with instructions on voting during the latter and critical hours of the election, and as anyone who’s tackled massed manual mailing before know, he deserves a huge thank you. Also to Karl Bauer who happened to return from his month of absence on election day and still wrote a better article than I did Appreciate your intention mate, even if it did give us a scare. Also to all the dedicated members, those who ran for congress despite some not getting in, those who wrote good articles, those who organised voters and those who were the vital mobile voters! You guys all rock!

So to sum up the elections. We did okay, but we can do a lot better. I probably won’t be in charge next set of elections, but we really do need to get organised properly before the day to make sure we perform as well as we should. And that means a dedicated organiser. It means invitations well before the day to encourage the full number of candidates. It means a continuous daily stream of newspaper articles, starting a couple of days before the election. It means good organisation on the day, both on the forum and via messaging in game.

Again apologies for not getting it right this time, but we all learn and hopefully we’ll remember the lesson from this election and be ready to walk over the next one!

Activity Levels

This is an area of great concern for me. We only have an average of 11 people who look at the forums on a daily basis. We don’t have people taking on vital roles within the party. We need an active member base rather than just a large mass of 2 clickers. I’m not sure exactly how to encourage more member participation. We have got policies up which haven’t really been debated by our membership. We have positions available for people to get involved in. If anyone has some good ideas how to increase activity whilst keeping the game fun, I’d appreciate them letting me know, either in a PM or in comments below.

I would like to advertise a few positions I’d like to see fille😛

SAGP Media Director – In charge of the SAGP Communications department and responsible for getting articles on the SAGP out there.

SAGP Recruitment Director – In charge of recruitment for the party. To work closely with SAGP Media director – Not actually available, currently held by arqam.

SAGP Fund Raising Director – In charge of getting funds into the party. We need to start generating funds for the party to use.

SAGP Mentorship Director – In charge of creating a sustainable mentorship program within the party. This includes both writing informative articles on useful topics, as well as directly liaising with new party members to make sure they get any information they require.

SAGP Military Preparedness Director – Bit of a random slot, especially considering we’re an economy focussed party, but I believe we need to start getting more information and more experience on the military side. This person would be able to write a certain amount of their own job description as I’ve said again and again, I don’t really know enough about the Military.

SAGP Elections Director – In charge of managing the SAGP election efforts, particularly around Congressional elections, but also in charge of informing the party which presidential candidate we have decided to support and why, as well as organising with the SAGP Media Director to publish an article when it comes around to Party President elections.

Also we are looking for Group Leaders to assist with information distribution. If you are interested please sign up here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dFB5YW9zTFhOX2xUSEpvM1VBbUJlcFE6MA


If you are keen on any of the above positions, or would just like to help out in any of the areas covered by the above directors, please pm me. I’m hoping to have options so I may ask for a bit of a blurb on what you plan to do with the position and what experience you have, in order to help decide who gets the positions. PLEASE if you think you could assist, YOU CAN!!!

Conclusion:

To end off I’d like to say things are going well, we’ve got some exciting stuff coming up in the near future (Country President elections!) and we’re in a new era with SA regaining 1 of its home territories. Hope everyone is excited by all of this going on as I am. Oh and I’m pushing a new motto out (GO-4-GOLD is still awesome, but as a sign off this is almost better).

“Working together, we can do more”

-H

p.s. If anyone can teach me how to format this @#$@^1@# thing I'd appreciate it, because I can't make ANY formatting appear 🙁

( 😛 Formatted it up for you, Hamilton - Enoch )