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how not to welcome the stranger
The SCA is organized around both specific activities and broader social activities. We have general get-togethers like events, but we also have fighting practice, dance practice, choir rehearsals, brewing guild, costuming workshops, archery practice, and so on and so on. Sometimes people are attracted to the SCA as the SCA, and sometimes they come in through a specific activity. Of the latter, some then broaden their interests and become part of the society, and others remain focused on that one activity and (often) drift away because it can be hard to pursue just the one thing. (Eventually you've got to start going to events, which can be a shock if you haven't been prepped.)
Except for fighting, most of the activities that people enter through have non-SCA analogues. My husband, for example, was an experienced folk-dancer and entered the SCA through dance practice. Our choir has had several people over the years who wanted to sing in a choir and renaissance music was fine. We've gotten people who do costuming at SF cons who want to learn about medieval clothing. And so on.
The important thing to remember, when dealing with such a person, is: this person isn't already sold on the SCA. He just wants to fence or dance or make beer or whatever, and if the SCA turns out to be hospitable he'll stick around. But it's not as sure a thing as when, say, someone moves in from another group and is looking up the locals. (Yes, you can blow that too. That's not the focus of this essay.)
I was recently contacted by someone who participates in a particular activity mundanely, had heard we do it, and wanted to be hooked up with someone local to him. I talked with him a little about the activity (how the SCA tends to do it) and about the SCA in general (he already knew what you can know about us without actually meeting us; in fact, he'd even done research on the medieval forms of his activity of interest). The activity has a weekly gathering local to him, so I then sent two pieces of email. The first was a private message to the person in charge of that activity saying (essentially) "yo, I've got an interested mundane for you" with a little more background on what I knew. The second was a message sent to both of them making introductions and asking the SCA person to include the newcomer on his distribution list for activity-specific announcements. In that message I was careful to use no SCA jargon, and I used mundane (not SCA) names.
The SCA person responded and welcomed the newcomer (good). He also said something akin to "practices are at the duke's house" and suggested the newcomer join the local group's mailing list (which is a discussion list, not an announcement list, and covers many topics not related to this activity). He signed his SCA name.
*cringe*
I suspect that wasn't the best way to make a good impression. Was it so bad that the newcomer will punt? No, I doubt it -- but it would have been easy to be more accessible, and seeing this reminded me of just how bad many SCA people are at being accessible. Newcomers who show up at events don't fare much better; we assume they share a context, know what the jargon means, understand the social norms, etc. We've gotten better at arranging for loaner garb and telling them to bring their own dishes, but we still have a way to go to bridge that gap between committed SCA folk and not-sure-about-this curious visitors. Sigh.
I'm not suggesting that we hide what we do. The SCA is about much more than any specific activity; we should not over-compensate for fear of weirding people out. But you can ease them into it and increase the odds that they'll think this is interesting. And small changes can be immensely more welcoming: for instance, when sending out announcements about practices, is it so hard to send it both to the group list and the small set of people who want to be directly notified? Especially if the alternative is to bury the newcomer in discussions of Robin Hood movies, BoD antics, the new rules about children's activities, and the college of arms (to choose just a few)?
I can, of course, take this up with the specific individual involved (who is a good and generally-clueful person). But while one incident prompted this ramble, the issue is much broader. How do we encourage SCA people, as opposed to this SCA person, to put themselves in the shoes of the newcomer before responding to inquiries? Are there lessons we can learn from other "weird" subcultures, like fandom? (Fandom is probably a bad example because it very much organizes around the convention, not the sustained local activity. But there might be sub-fandoms that are different, or other groups.)
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At some level. It's not the most important thing, but it's an important thing, particularly when the target is younger folks (college students et al; I don't mean schoolkids).
In practice, it varies a lot from local group to local group and from person to person. But even when active recruiting isn't the goal, I've generally understood it to be a shared value that when new people seek us out, we try to help them out. Not at the expense of what we're here to do more generally -- some events or meetings are really bad ideas for newcomers and we aren't likely to try to change those to accommodate -- but otherwise, most folks try to give a newcomer a hand.
(Hmm. That's been my long-held impression, but now I wonder if "most" is accurate.)
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I've asked them why, including the "was it too weird for you?" option and the answer's been the same, "Kinda cool, just don't have time. Not really for me."
I think the SCA, and any weird subculture, requires that the participants have... let's call it the "weird gene" - that thing that makes you go, "COOL" when you instantly see it.
It might be something of a disservice to "ease" people into the SCA -- we're a weird subculture after all and I think we should be upfront about it -- it will allow people to make that "COOL" vs "Not Interested" decisions fairly quickly.
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I've got a colleague at work who is in the SCA and she was surprised to learn that despite my decent knowledge of major events I'm not a member and never have been interested in same. Much more important for me to have passing knowledge of it... BUT I have to admit that a mention of a choir just made my ears go "perk!" ...
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We also have an instrumental group (which primarily plays dance music). We are musically blessed.
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But I think there's value in making the initial contact as non-weird as possible. I think email can make us sound weirder than we really are, and that some people who would in fact say "cool!" might never come because the email response was off-putting.
When you, as an autocrat, call up a new site to ask about rental, how do you present the group to them in that first phone call? I'm betting you moderate it some; if they say "yes" or "maybe" you'll then go into more details about how you'll be using the site, but you don't start by saying the duke wants to hold a day of combat. I'm suggesting that a similar degree of moderation is called for in that initial outreach to newcomers.
Or think of it this way. Think about your favorite SCA mailing list. Now think about the most annoying topic and/or poster there. Until the newcomer actually makes it to a practice, that is the face of the SCA to him if the answer to an inquiry is "join our mailing list".
Latching on to one tiny piece ...
No, not really.
There's a social mailing list of rather long standing that wound up being used as the main medium for party invitations among the group of friends, friends-of-friends, and friends-of-people-you've-heard-of-from-friends that the list membership comprises. But before LiveJournal stole away some fraction of members' attention spans, it was also a rather high-volume list. (It's still not exactly slow -- about thirty messages a day last month.) And not everybody who is a member of that social group has the time or inclination to deal with that many messages a day. So, some time well before I joined, they created a second mailing list, specifically for things like party invitations targeted at "the usual suspects", and made the original mailing list a subscriber of the newer one.
So if you're announcing something like that, you needn't remember to send it to two different mailing lists or to subscribe to two lists: if you just remember to send it to the correct mailing list for announcements, it gets delivered to all the members of the discussion list as well as the members of the announcements list. Clean. Simple. The only problem is when somebody mistakenly replies to the announcements list, having forgotten to change the destination to the discussion list when replying. (There are solutions to that problem which aren't a good fit for the lists in my example but could work well elsewhere: make the announcements list moderated, or rewrite 'Reply-To:' on announcements, for example.)
(So effectively the messages on list S are a subset of the messages on list E, and the membership of list E is a subset of the membership of list S.)
Re: Latching on to one tiny piece ...
[1] Actually, I'm "sort of" on the discussion list; I run a moderated feed of that list for interested subscribers, because the discussion list gets a lot of noise sometimes. So I have to see all the noise to do this job, but my subscribers don't. In case you're wondering, I rewrite the reply-to line to force discussion back to the discussion list, so there's no fragmentation.
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I mean I agree with Illadore. The best way to decide whether the group is going to be your thang is to show up to some events (be they small-subgroup events or major get-togethers).
My first SCA experience was a Barony meeting, when we were swarmed by well-wishers, which was a great intro. The first full event was boring because we didn't know what was going on (and it was a low-key event without major activities). But when we went to fighter practices, we /knew/ we were going to be sticking with this.
The point: the only way to see whether it's fun is to try it out. When newcomers arrive at a practice, they are generally treated with enthusiasm. Getting them there for that first try is what's most important.
I think that using SCA names with newcomers is actually more appropriate -- if most people in this group are going to call me Byron, that's what I want the newcomer to expect. It's /less/ confusing.
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*ding ding ding* :-)
Once he shows up to a meeting, he can decide for himself. If he would have thought we were cool but the email deterred him, we'll never find out. (Generic "he".)
Names: once at the practice, yes, use SCA names. In that initial contact, use the name by which you'll answer the phone (which for some people is the SCA name, true). I actually tend to sign both names, but I make sure that "Monica" is in there, and not just because most people are intimidated trying to pronounce my SCA name (sigh).
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And no, I mostly *don't* want them. While they're frequently good people, they are often a net negative to the club, promoting fragmentation along specialty lines because they don't understand the social glue that holds things together. They're sometimes a short-term benefit to the activity, but a long-term problem for the branch.
The people I want to attract are the ones who are looking for the whole package: the ones who think the *SCA* is interesting, and who develop a specialty later, often by accident. Those are the ones who get seriously active, who attend events and help out, who later move into leadership positions.
So I think the response described above was completely appropriate. Yes, it's a bit of a shibboleth, but that's sometimes just the right thing to do: it's a way to tell if this person is going to be turned off by the *Society*. And as someone who runs a bunch of specialty practices, I want to know that upfront. It can be pushed to too much of an extreme -- there is a point where openness becomes counter-productively freaking the mundanes -- but nothing you describe above obviously crosses that line. Frankly, it sounds like the kind of response I might send, and I'm one of the most successful recruiters the SCA has.
And yes, I think your feelings about going out in public in garb are entirely related -- it shows a shyness about looking weird that is counter-productive where recruitment is concerned. Consider: I was out in public in garb just yesterday --
Frankly, this is a huge problem in Masonry: being too shy about what makes it interesting. The single thing *most* killing Freemasonry today is that most guys are very shy about the weird esoteric stuff -- which is precisely the stuff that used to draw men to the organization, once upon a time. So instead, it projects an attitude of being more normal, safe, approachable -- and dull and uninteresting. No wonder it's having recruitment problems.
The same is true of the Society. At our core, we *are* a strange, geeky activity. Trying to make ourselves look ordinary and safe is not a way to bring in the kind of people who will help the club thrive...
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A local group or an individual SCA person can reasonably make different decisions about that trade-off at different times (to say nothing of variation from person to person or group to group). My own local group, for instance, has been in decline for some years, so were something like this to happen here, I would want to err on the side of drawing the person in. A group that already has more people and activities than it knows what to do with would choose differently. Perhaps I am projecting too much of my concern about my local group onto the broader organization.
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"For some reason?" Unless your local reality is a lot different from mine, the reason is that dance practice is a social gathering, not a specialist gathering. And when such people "join through dance practice" it's not because they were dancers who wanted to learn renaissance dance (take a class!), they were dancers who thought we might be fun people to dance with. Cause I gotta say, most people (mundanely) into dance qua dance don't find anything interesting in the dance at an SCA dance practice: it's taught at too basic a level, and it's not very interesting or challenging forms.
I'm with Justin on this one. Experience taught me that mundane specialists looking for a music group with no interest in the whole package were bad news. In particular, mundane musicians who joined rehearsals, and then went to their first gig at an SCA event often had bad culture shock and didn't return. I developed the policy that I wouldn't admit anyone who hadn't been to at least one local SCA event, and preferably had heard us in performance.
I'd like to agree with you, in that I think most Scadians are terrible in public-facing communications, including communicating with prospectives. But my criticism is that they are unclear or dishonest. You are complaining that they are unattractive (too weird seeming), and not only don't I think that's a problem, I think you goals run directly counter to mine. I think we should be far more upfront about our weirdness and far less apologetic.
My own local group, for instance, has been in decline for some years, so were something like this to happen here, I would want to err on the side of drawing the person in. A group that already has more people and activities than it knows what to do with would choose differently.
Drawing in the wrong people is not actually superior to drawing in no people. It can actually be worse.
Pouring more water in a sack with a hole in it just makes the hole larger.
Trying to make up with volume --
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Yaas. That's harder-core than me, but I think the problem has always been more acute on the musical side. There have never *been* many specialists drawn in for the dance, so I've never had to make a point of it -- pushing people into events after-the-fact suffices. But on the music side, I suspect you're much more prone to having people who are specifically seeking out the specialty.
I think we should be far more upfront about our weirdness and far less apologetic.
Just so. The Society is, by and large, too *defensive* about our own weirdness. Folks miss the fact that that defensiveness is the biggest turn-off, more than the weirdness itself.
(This is why the "garb in public" argument always makes me twitch. Too many people conflate it with Freaking the Mundanes, and assume you're simply going to turn folks off. In practice, it's all about body language and tone: if you're open, casual and not defensive/aggressive, people are *far* less bothered by it, and it often turns into a fine smidgeon of publicity.)
Trying to make up with volume -- jducoeur, are you listening -- lack of stickiness in your club just makes your club look, to people who might actually be interested members, like second-hand goods.
Oh, well aware of it, and working on it. As with most such problems, it's systemic, and fixing it is a tricky process: the Barony has fallen prey to some particular pathologies that have hurt us over the years. We're actually not doing *too* badly overall at the moment -- that is, I think we're making progress -- but I'm afraid that the boroughs are, by and large, in deep trouble. That's a tad depressing, but my leverage to fix it is somewhat limited, so I'm doing what I can and broadening my focus a bit. (The grey hair coming into my beard finally drove home that I'm simply too old to be point-man at the borough demos any more. Probably should have backed off ten years ago, but it was a hard realization...)
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Be careful here to distinguish your populations. I mean, I understand the dance practice equation quite well: it's quite possible that I've been to more dance practices than anyone else in the Society (nearly every week for almost 25 years), and I've run it for over four years. Dance practice has always been my home in the SCA.
The thing is, the people who really get into dance practice are *rarely* specialists, in my experience. Some are -- but those are precisely the ones who tend to get fed up with it and leave after a modest period of time, because a well-run dance practice isn't aggressive enough for them.
The ones who stay are usually the people looking for the *social* side, not the dance-specialty side. The thing about dance practice is that it is the most social practice the Society has, in most cases. That's true of us, just as it was in period: dance is social lubricant, and folks who are into dance are usually half there for the dancing, half for the people.
So it's true that I *do* push dance practice as the place to start -- but not because of the specialty. I push it as a place to meet people and get to know them, and to learn an SCA art in a very forgiving environment. It's true that dance practice isn't too threatening: it's not in garb, and it's missing the trappings of an event. But half of us still call ourselves by our SCA names, and the conversation is, to say the least, pretty geeky. So I don't try to sugar-coat the weirdness. Rather, I try to pre-screen at the point of recruitment, make a snap judgement of whether this person is plausibly going to enjoy the SCA as it is, and if so I encourage them to try out dance practice. (Or fighting practice, or whatever seems to suit them. Dance practice is basically my default if there isn't a more obvious place to send them.)
(cont'd...)
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No, it's a fair concern: my take on it is that recruitment is off Society-wide. Certainly, I'm quite worried about it locally. There are a lot of reasons for that, both intrinsic and extrinsic -- mistakes the SCA has made, as well as general cultural shifts.
But I don't really agree with the prescription. Drawing in more people, if they're not people who are actually going to *enjoy* the club, simply dilutes it. I push recruitment harder than anybody, but more is not always better.
IMO, one of the biggest problems the Society has is aging, but it's a subtle problem. I mean, people simply being older isn't *not* necessarily a crisis: we have a bunch of older members (some in their 70s) who are still active and vital. No, the problem is burnout and dissipation.
The SCA, by its nature as a very romantic organization, requires passion as its main fuel. When people are fired-up and passionate, it can be downright magical. By contrast, when too many people are self-absorbed or burned-out, it feels quite flat. Fomenting and fostering that passion is, therefore, one of the most critical parts of recruiting.
AFAIK, I have yet to meet anyone who was a *true* specialist who had that passion for the game or ever developed it. There are some borderline cases, to be sure -- people who superficially looked like specialists but weren't, who were attracted in through one field and broadened. But in all the cases I can think of, they were at least quite *tolerant* of the weirdness from the beginning, even if they were too shy to openly embrace it at first.
Hence the utility of at least a *little* bit of open weirdness. Frankly, if someone is going to be so turned off by the use of SCA names in public that it prevents them from checking us out, odds are that they're not ever going to become serious and passionate: they're never going to broaden out of their field to the point where they become useful and productive members of the Society.
Or to summarize the point with one of my usual practical recruiting tips: when a college group is trying to recruit on campus, I do *not* encourage them to try to bring in 100 new members. (We actually had that happen once; it was a disaster.) Rather, I encourage them to find the *right* 5-10 new members: the people who want and need the SCA. That's the way you foster a group to be passionate, and a passionate branch is, almost by definition, a healthy one...