[Ansteorra] Recruiting

[Silly String]

I'm relatively new, so forgive me if this is redundant to some folks
or if I am mistaken in protocol.

There are a few easy ways that I can think of to help recruit people
and get them involved with stuff.

- First local groups could make business cards with the basic contact
information for their group.  These are easy for anybody (not just
Hospitallors) to keep around.  Business cards are easy to hand out to
anybody that stops by.  This gets your information to people with a
minimum of fuss.  No finding a pen, some paper, and scratching down
information.  If you put a pdf of the business cards on your local web
page, anybody could print them out and throw them in their gear (armor
box, scribes box, etc).

- Second is that both as a kingdom and within our local groups, we can
always improve our online presence.  There is lots of great stuff out
there on the web for Ansteorra, but we can always include more.  If
there is lots of information and pictures of what is going on in our
fine kingdom, it is more likely to catch people's interest and get
them involved.   Pictures and information from active guilds is
especially cool - if you pull up pictures and notes of the brewers,
embroiders, herbalists, dancers, etc in action, it makes things more
exciting.  It also helps pique people's interest in all that we have
to offer.  Likewise, events should always have a website that contains
important information (directions, schedule, etc) - it doesn't have to
be fancy.  Folks shouldn't have to be on a mailing list to know what's
going on.  Its not what they expect from the web.  We have some fine
officers working on official stuff, but we can also distribute the
labor with guild web sites, project blogs, and picture galleries.

- The third option is in direct response to the question of new folks.
 The group that I started with always asked people what they were
interested in (and offered a list of activities to clueless folks).
If they had something they were definitely interested in they actively
introduced them to people who were doing that activity.  If they
weren't sure, then they tried to find people who could walk them
around to different things going on and get them quick introductions
to things like the scribes table, the embroidery solar, the fighting,
etc.  I've seen some of this approach locally as well and I think it
works great.  Usually the person ends up with several contacts for
what they are interested in and an idea of the kind of activities that
are happening locally/regionally and how they can get involved.

- Helene von Braunschweig
Bryn Gwlad