Howdy, everyone! Welcome to Emissary Report #4. Instead of going over news per se, I wanted to give some insight into how the Emissary Staff have been tackling our core responsibilities, and ways that you can contribute if you choose.

If that isn't your thing, feel free to pass on this report; you won't miss any major announcements by doing so.

Social Media

Social media is one of the most visible aspects of the Emissary Staff's work. That makes it one of our primary tools for getting ourselves noticed by the internet at large, and in turn, for attracting new members.

Currently, our main social media accounts are on Instagram and X/Twitter . Nora has been posting content from the Highlights channel on Discord to those accounts regularly. We're also working with the Herald Staff to organise more art content for our socials, as that usually gets more traffic than plain text posts. If you have accounts on those platforms, follow us, and we'll follow you back. Every follow, like, and share makes it more likely that the algorithm will boost our content!

Our next priority is to expand into more activity-focused platforms like deviantArt, fanfiction.net, Twitch, and Wattpad. These platforms don't have the same reach as major social media, but they're better at one major factor.

Recruitment

At its core, the Brotherhood is based around participation. People come here to actively do things. Your average Discord discussion, let alone actually creating art, playing a game, or writing, requires much more participation than just following #StarWars on social media.

That's where the platforms I mentioned before come in. deviantArt, fanfiction.net, Twitch, and Wattpad are all geared towards people who create content. Those people are more likely to participate in club activities than someone who passively scrolls through social media, which makes those platforms better for targeted recruitment.

To take advantage of that, the Emissary Staff is planning to increase the Brotherhood's presence on those creator-focused platforms. We're still discussing what those efforts will look like, but direct outreach to other creators will play a major role.

New Member Onboarding

Getting new members in the door is one thing, but getting them settled in the Brotherhood is another matter entirely. We've long faced challenges around helping new members navigate the club in their first days with us. Making that process easier is a joint effort between Clan Summits, the Emissary, and the Headmistress.

The concerns new members and their Summits have identified most often are the sheer volume of information they need to absorb after joining the Brotherhood, and not having enough easily-accessible activities focused on lower-ranked members. The former will require the Emissary and Headmistress teams to find ways to make the new-member info dump more digestible. Clan Summits and other competition-organising members have been a big help with the latter, making sure there's always something for people to do.

A few members have also proposed we run Journeyman-only competitions. We're on the fence about this, mainly because past attempts at Journeyman-only competitions have gotten really low participation numbers. However, we're also looking for alternatives, such as competitions open to all members but requiring the character to be JM4 or below.

Retention

Retention is a tricky subject. For one thing, retention often gets lumped in with or even mistaken for recruitment, despite being different goals and requiring different approaches. To put it simply, recruitment means getting people into the club, while retention means keeping them as active members.

The second tricky part is that even though retention is nominally "my job" as Emissary, it's really the unit leaders, community leaders (Exarch, FIST, HRLD, VOICE), and the members themselves who are the most directly responsible for member retention. Retention is about keeping people engaged with the club, and that engagement comes from those people having fun—something built on daily interactions and activities, not some Emissary policy handed down from on high. Thus, with a few notable exceptions like Zuza's Discord hangouts, the Emissary Staff focuses on supporting others' ability to improve retention instead of spamming activities ourselves.

The main way the Emissary Staff contributes to retention is to gather member feedback and pass it on to the relevant leaders. Remember the suggestion box, feedback form, and mailing list I've mentioned in previous reports? Those exist so members can tell us about things they'd like to see changed, especially things that don't fit neatly into another leader's responsibilities.

More generally, the Emissary Staff advocates for initiatives that will benefit Brotherhood members. Other Councilors will confirm that I pester them about "retention issues" on a near-daily basis. :P

Closing Out

I hope this post has given you some insight on what the Emissary Staff are doing to expand the Brotherhood's numbers and make sure our members have an enjoyable experience. If you have any suggestions, please don't hesitate to contact us on Discord or via one of the links below.

See you all next time!

Links

• Brotherhood Leadership Feedback Form: Click Here
• Emissary Staff Google Group: [Log in to view e-mail addresses]

• Emissary Staff Suggestion Box: Click Here

• Instagram: DJB Official Instagram

• X/Twitter: DJB Official X/Twitter