how not to welcome the stranger

[cellio]

The situation I'm writing about occurred in an SCA context, but the principles generalize at least to any "unusual" community.

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.)

Comments

[kayre]

This reminds me quite a lot of church life-- which leads to my first question with your situation. Is recruiting new members a conscious goal? That has to be the first step.

[rani23.livejournal.com]

So, I've brought several mundane friends to local practices and they've always had a good time, said they enjoyed it and that they would come back -- and then never showed up again.

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.

Latching on to one tiny piece ...

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

"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?"

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.)

[gingicat]

Back when I was an active participant in the SCA (I've long since decided that an activity requiring a persona is just Not My Thing) people would commonly send email signed "SCA name (mundane name)." I think knowing that many people choose names and personas is an important thing to know about the SCA right off the bat. Certainly at demos, people are more likely to introduce themselves by SCA names to the new folks.

[byronhaverford.livejournal.com]

I'm going to side with Monica on this one (Hah! Now you're in trouble because I /didn't/ use her SCA name! So there!)

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.

[jducoeur]

Honestly, I disagree. I think that, by trying to look more actively normal, we *do* tend to attract more newcomers -- but they are, by and large, the wrong people. It tends to attract specialists who are mainly interested in the specialty, but not in the club: the people who come to practice every week, but never come to events.

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 -- msmemory and I needed to grab a burger at the on-campus joint during the dinner break for the Black Rose Ball. The result? We had students coming up to us, asking us what was up, chatting for several minutes and learning about the Society. I don't think those specific girls are going to join -- they're not "typey" for the SCA -- but if they go spread the word, and maybe that gets in the ear of the right kind of geek, it will have been an outing well-spent.

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...