Not our Guild
As some of you probably know I run a World of Warcraft guild called Needs a Hug. The name was chosen before I started but it is awesome. even better is the fact that in that game your guilds name appears below your own so our member named “Who” proudly sports the text “Who Needs a Hug” over his characters head. The guild is a social/casual raiding guild on the Ravenholdt server for anyone who is interested in WoW. Now this post isn’t directly about our promoting our guild but to talk about a little problem that we have run into. As the guild master I am lucky that I have found a group of officers that make my life easy. Each one has a role to perform and they do it with a capability that belies the casual nature of our involvement in the game, they, while still being human run like a well oiled machine. The one thing that causes me pause and seems to be a never ending problem for us is communication.
As a causal guild we can not ask a lot of our guildies, these are people who have joined what is when you get right down to it a social club. We rank somewhere between the weekly going out with friends and soccer practice in importance to our members. But we as officers and myself as a guild leader often have to communicate information to this group. In a months time we will be holding an entire guild meeting. So we need to get this info out to the guild and we have only 3 ways to get this out to our members, Guild message of the day, the in game calendar, and the website. Each of these has the massive disadvantage that they are all require participation, WoW has unfortunately made our job a lot harder, and our inability to enforce real rules with real consequences for breaking those rules has me stumped as to how to proceed. For those of you still reading what we are coming up against is this, each way we can communicate with our members requires our members to take some action that they don’t do on a regular basis.
The original fix for this was a nice little feature that Blizzard ( the company who operates the game ) added called the MOTD ( Message Of The Day ) this was a short little message that is sent to all the members when they logged in. A perfect place to put things like information about this meeting. Unfortunately someone at Blizzard realized that they also could use this to communicate important information to the players which resulted in the MOTD being pushed off the screen almost immediately. If you blink you will miss it. So this is not a good way to get any info to the player. Now some would say that the fact this info is also on the guild page of the social menu is ok, problem is that is again that is a participatory act someone has to think then click instead of being shown the info.
The second thing they added was an in-game calendar. I really love the in-game calendar as it allows us to present the type of info a calender contains, date, time, place. What it does not do is let us give more than a snipit of info about what is happening. Unfortunately this also has the problem of requiring the person to take an action before getting the info.
The third option and one that we continue to try is the web site. On a guild website like ours at Needs a Hug it hard to get participation. As a casual group, people don’t have a high priority on another website they have to check each day. Even tho we have tried to provide an easy to use and informative site we often find ourselves with no participation and with that no communication. Also the website has the added downside of the requiring not only clicks within the game, but the guild member to take time out of their non game playing time to check the site. Again a communication fail.
So I am stumped. As a guild leader I am not sure what I can do short of talking to every single person in the guild every time we have an event. If anyone has suggestions don’t hesitate to leave a comment. And until then I have to go log into WoW and start hunting down every member of our guild.
Semiautomagic 