Recruitment vs high standards

[msmemory_archive]

This is a half-developed notion. I have this theory percolating around my brain that the SCA's recent higher standards in many areas are in fact a barrier to recruiting new members.

Thinking back, when I joined the SCA, it was very much a do-it-yourself group. Nobody minded if you made a polyester velour tunic, or made a surcoat out of brocade curtains from a yard sale. We all politely ignored the pickle bucket armor, webbing folding chairs, and nylon tents, instead collectively imagining ourselves lords and ladies in samite and fur, living in bright pavilions, sitting on thrones. College students, young adults, and the poor could feel welcome, for their fantasy was just as good as anyone else's.

These days, all the trappings are available to anyone with enough money. You want turnshoes, sheepskin bedding, snowy linen robes, shiny armour? Just plunk down enough dollars and Poof! instant status. That random 19-year-old scholarship student, who would have been a shabby but respected herald in 1982? Well, now he's just shabby.

We've recreated class differences, and based them on modern incomes. No wonder we aren't bringing in or retaining the peripheral, young, or poor members who historically have been the SCA's lifeblood.

ETA: I'm not claiming innocence here either: I am at least as guilty as most of spending my "look! no kids!" income on finery while that early garb molders in the attic.

Comments

[rosinavs.livejournal.com]

Yes, we need things like this. In other places where the main sources of new members are not boroughs, these are called demos. People who are new do not have to dress up (which was almost a reason I didn't do this) but they can still watch and try out the stuff we do. I went to one in my former shire after I had been to about 3 events. It was a great chance for our very small shire to try to recruit more people. It was also a great chance for my friends to see what I was getting into. I also started learning tablet weaving at that demo. Some of my colleagues at my current job have expressed interest in a demo. They want to know what I do but they don't want to dress up. However, there is always the chance that someone will decide that the dressing up is not so bad and try it. People will mention a demo that we had in the Boston Common. That was several years ago now. Why are we not having non-borough demos yearly? Especially when our chatelaines are reporting more new members from suburbanites than boroughs? Sorry if I'm ranting, but the lack of recruitment outside boroughs is a sore point for me.

[baronessv.livejournal.com]

This brings up and awesome question:

Why can't we do a demo in the Common? How many hoops need to be jumped through?
They can do political demonstrations...why not a different kind?

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

We did that back in 2005. I don't have a sense of how successful it was or wasn't in terms of recruiting and retaining new members as I was pretty wrapped up in grad school at the time, but perhaps someone else remembers.

It would probably be more successful in the long term - both for visibility purposes, and for keeping people engaged in reaching out to newbies - if we did it or something like it yearly instead of as an occasional one-shot.

I also think we might do well to target more town/neighborhood events that will let anyone apply to be visible there (like Watertown's Faire on the Square, which is happening today). In other baronies, people march in 4th of July parades and things of that nature.

We keep a close pulse on when the colleges are doing demos (or at least we/I try to), but I don't know how much research, if any, has been done into compiling a list of regular town events we might be visible at.

[rising-moon.livejournal.com]

Dreda and I ran one two years ago. :)

http://rising-moon.livejournal.com/2005/04/10/

Not many hoops, as it turns out: an insurance rider, a fee in the early hundreds, and forms submitted to Boston Parks & Rec. Each of Carolingia's active guilds staffed a popup and demonstrated their crafts martial and artistic. It was wildly well-attended. We were very pleased.

However: It was wildly well-attended by folks who typically traverse the Common. The event served our public image (and Carolingian morale) extremely well, but I don't know that it had a positive affect on our membership numbers.

[rising-moon.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear. I just did that thing I hate when other people do it... I read your great idea and then told you it's been done and it might not work. Yikes! I'm turning in to one of those people! I apologize.

Let's talk about it in person -- this medium is lousy for brainstorming -- and figure out a way to do a demo on the Common, better than the last one.