Intro
By far the most important thing for building student community is recruiting. Everything in my last post is predicated on a successful recruiting campaign. This is because a club’s culture is determined by the people in it. After a club gets its starting cohort, its horizon of possibilities shrinks dramatically. Most clubs understand this intuitively, but they don’t always act in accordance with this reality. Which brings me to the first of our three recruiting problems:
#1: Quizbowl Clubs Focus Too Much on Recruiting a General Audience*
I’m going to borrow some language from this blog post from David Chapman (even though creative subcultures are vastly different from club environments, the core distinction is similar). In any club, you’re going to have members who are more passionate about engaging deeply with the club (geeks) and people who are more passive— mostly there for the vibes (MOPs). MOPs are great, but in the early stages you should primarily be trying to attract geeks. This is because it is relatively easy to find MOPs, while geeks are harder to come by.
The thing is, recruiting geeks is a zero-sum game. There are many communities that a geek might want to join at the start of the year, and most of those communities would be equally happy to have them. A single geek can’t join them all! So most geeks (even ones that would be a great fit for your club) will end up somewhere else due to the sheer number of options. But the geeks that do join will be the lifeblood of your club. These are the people that will bring the energy, plan events, and make stuff happen! In other words, the geeks will make your club a place that people will want to come back to.
This means recruiting isn’t just about raw numbers! A critical mass of members is important, but a critical mass of geeks is even more important. Who’s going to be showing up every week? Who’s going to be playing tournaments? Who’s going to be genuinely invested in the club’s future? This is especially important when it comes to replacing people in club leadership. Any club that fails to replenish its geeks is on a path to decline.
When you host a recruiting event for quizbowl, your goal isn’t to please the average attendee. Your goal is to get a few people to think “wow, quizbowl is sick! I could see myself spending a lot of time on this!”. These are your potential geeks! It’s great if your event happens to be fun for the other attendees, but you mainly want to hook your potential geeks. Everything else is secondary! Six months from now, it’s not going to matter what the approval rating of your event was. It’s going to matter how many geeks ended up joining your club as a result. So make sure to keep them in mind every step of the way!
And this goes for individual recruitment too! If you’re telling a potential recruit about your club, your goal shouldn’t be to get that person to join quizbowl. Your goal shouldn’t even necessarily be to get that person to like quizbowl! Your goal should be to get that person to join quizbowl, if they are someone who would be a good fit for your club. Ultimately, you’re not going to know that without seeing how they respond to the club, and they won’t either! All you can do is be a good ambassador for the club by giving them an engaging and accurate impression of quizbowl.
That being said, you still want to make sure that your pitch has the widest possible appeal among those potential geeks. And that brings me to recruiting problem #2:
#2: Quizbowl Is Bad at the Quizbowl Pitch
Nine years ago, Matt Jackson said something that still rings true today:
> the zeroth step in this process is to be confident. As I’ve said multiple times already in this thread: when talking to each other within the quizbowl community, we all know and see the value of the effort we put in and the organizing work we do -- otherwise none of it would happen and we’d be fine just seeing the game rot away. We’re certain that what we do is immensely rewarding. Is there any reason on earth to let that certainty drop off with people who haven’t seen what we do? I doubt it. What’s more, it seems to me like a lot of the anxiety about talking up quizbowl stems from a fear of negative reaction -- of people saying “you spend all your time on that?
> such fears are not realistic. One interesting thing about social interaction is that the things you talk about sound cooler to other people in direct proportion to how positively and confidently you speak about them. (so in some sense, anxious, eyes-downcast attitudes about one’s own participation in quizbowl are a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you act like people will react badly and mumble rather than sharing your sense of excitement, they’ll ...React badly and not share your sense of excitement.) when talking with other people about what interests you, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Even if there’s no way in any of the various tossupable underworlds that they’d want to do it themselves, high skill at a competitive activity reflects well on a person in its own right, and confidence is a huge component of ‘coolness’ by any metric.
I’m not sure how prevalent this attitude is globally, but many of the people I know in quizbowl get hung up on “scaring people off”. These people advocate for an incremental approach, something like “start with trivia, move on to SCOP Novice, and only then should you bring out *real* college quizbowl”. We’ll call this ideology gradualism. (for the sake of argument, I’ll be making some generalizations about the gradualists. I realize that reality is more nuanced than this!)
I am not a fan of gradualism. You don’t want to scare all newcomers off, but it’s important to draw a distinction between the different ways you can do that. One way you can scare people off is if you come off as weird, abstruse, and/or insular. This should obviously be avoided; make sure that you give off an approachable vibe, and don’t say things that make you sound crazy. But another way you can "scare people off" is if you show them quizbowl and they just… aren't that into it. That type of scaring is totally fine, because let’s face it: quizbowl has a narrower appeal than many activities! It takes a certain somewhat unordinary type of person to want to invest in quizbowl. But like Matt Jackson says, don’t expect those people to treat your interest in quizbowl with any less respect than they would any other specialized interest.
For example, I could never see myself getting into crocheting. My fabric manipulation skills are not great, and I’m not a huge fan of yarn-based items on an aesthetic level. But if someone showed me told me about their involvement in a crocheting club, I wouldn’t think “wow I could never get into crocheting, they are so lame for that.”. I’d think, “well crocheting isn’t my cup of tea, but it’s exciting to see that they’re so passionate about it!”. Even if the person you’re talking to would never do quizbowl, you can still be an effective ambassador if your passion shines through! So explain your interest in quizbowl with pride! Good energy is contagious.
If people aren’t interested in quizbowl, it’s better for them (and you) if they figure that out sooner rather than later. People try out all kinds of stuff in college, and most of that stuff won’t end up being their “thing”. Again, if people don’t like quizbowl, that’s okay! No amount of gradualism is going to conjure a love of quizbowl out of thin air (more on this at the end of the post).
Ultimately, we just don’t want to be misunderstood. We want people to understand that yes, quizbowl is hard, but it is possible for you to become good at it. Yes, the range of subjects is intimidating, but it is okay if you only know about a couple. Yes, quizbowl questions can be convoluted, but they give you such a rewarding payoff in return. We don’t want potential recruits to come away from our pitch thinking that it’s for “people who are not like them”.
But we shouldn’t address those concerns by giving an overly “safe” representation of the game. Rather, we should strive to be even more authentic. What role has quizbowl played in your life? Why do you love it? What about it speaks to you? So many quizbowl pitches lack soul. My own elevator pitch compares quizbowl rules to balancing a video game and tossups to newspaper articles, but the style is uniquely my own. I’m not sure if others would have any luck emulating it, because so much of it is grounded in my experiences and what I find easy to talk about. Ultimately, you should pitch quizbowl in the way that allows you to start a personal and interesting dialogue with others. Don't get overly hung up on impression management!
This “interesting dialogue” part is important. Don’t get bogged down in thoroughly explaining every rule of quizbowl. All you have to do is show enough of the game to pique their interest. If they really care to know more, they can find out on their own! If you’re introducing quizbowl to a specific person, then you can try to guess what will pique their interest specifically. In other words, maybe don’t always go for the same approach! When I show quizbowl to people who played sports, I emphasize the competitive spirit of the game: things like the fast pace and conference rivalries. But when I show quizbowl to professors, I try to emphasize the scholarly element, focusing more on question writing and its similarities with academia. Your quizbowl pitch will always be a work in progress, but they only way to improve it is to go out and give it!
#3: Quizbowl Clubs Don’t Always Promise Social Connection
One of the most (if not the most) common reasons that people don’t come back to a quizbowl club is because they don’t see a place for themselves in its social scene. Most people join a college club for a sense of community. And here’s the thing: a quizbowl match is a terrible setting for meeting other people. So on the first day of practice, please don’t just go right into tossups. You want to have some kind of mixer activity, at least for the new people in your club. If numbers permit, get all the new people into a separate room. That way, veterans can enjoy practice as usual without interfering with the newbies. I won't prescribe a specific mixer activity, but I will advocate for keeping things small. Don’t have people introduce themselves to the whole room; everyone hates that, and no one remembers those introductions anyway. Instead, break people into smaller groups of 2-3 and give them some space to connect with each other. Even if some groups are a bust, just seeing other people form connections provides that valuable promise of social connection. Remember, people will stay in a club if they can see a social future for themselves there. If they make a friend on the first day, even better!
Speaking of friends, here’s another advantage of high school clubs in general: often, their geeks come from a single friend group. I’ll call this type of club a Friend group-Based Club, or FBC. In FBCs, you don’t necessarily need the club to be a space for connection, because you have already bonded outside of quizbowl. When you know each other, playing quizbowl together can also be quality time. But that can only be true if you get to know each other outside of it.
The other type of club is a Confederation-Based Clubs, or CBCs. This type of club may have a large friend group contained inside of it, but a significant portion of its members are either other friend groups or just individuals. In a CBC, social time spent not doing quizbowl now becomes necessary.
So a micro-reason that college recruiting fails is that clubs try to be FBCs and adopt a club structure that is designed for FBCs. To be fair, FBCs can develop at colleges, and sometimes they do! Competitive college quizbowl clubs often blend into a friend group by necessity, and sometimes people who knew each other in high school quizbowl will join college clubs as a unit. But most of the time, college clubs are CBCs. We see more CBCs in college because college life is messier than high school life. There’s not as much structure, and people have a wider variety of things to do. People are just living a broader range of lifestyles. This is something you should consciously account for in the design of your club.
In my experience, the secret sauce of every CBC is an active online space. If you think about it, greater quizbowl is its own sort of CBC. And look at our online spaces! When I was in high school, we had ILQBM on Facebook. Nowadays, players have the quizbowl and hsquizbowl Discords. And this isn’t even counting the weird and wonderful universe of private online communities lurking beneath the surface. This is where so many players outside of the traditional competitive circuits come to feel at home. If I never went online, I never would have felt connected to the wider quizbowl community. I see this contrast when I meet people who played in high school but didn’t have an online presence. Even though many of these people were solid players, they had no idea that there was such an active national quizbowl ecosystem out there. Deep social connections within a club are common, but it’s only the extremely online high schoolers who are able to build deep connections across school lines.
Now you don’t need (or want) everyone in your club to become extremely online. But the thing about something like a Discord server is that it allows people to keep tabs on your club, even if they’re not able to come for a while. And this is important!
Just to get a sense of the scale of our club’s Discord activity, we have sent over 74k messages just in the #chat channel since December 2020. We have 23 users in the 1k messages club. And the activity of the server is only growing. 56k of those messages were sent just this school year. This makes us the most active server at our university, ahead of the most active RSO (21k), the general UW server (14.5k), and even the general quizbowl server (20k). The quizbowl server at USCD, which has had a similar club model and trajectory to our own, has a similar message count. This activity is critical to our club’s health, and I credit it with most of our success. Bonds aren’t formed in the midst of a practice game but in the channels of our Discord server.
Of course, just having a server isn’t enough. People won’t just participate on their own unless something interesting is happening. And creating an online environment that is vibrant without scaring off new users is tricky! You can’t force the emergence of an online community, but two things that have really helped in the past are 1) fine-tuning the onboarding process and 2) having passive ways to participate.
I can’t overstate the importance of a welcoming onboarding process. At minimum, make sure that a bot sends new members a message explaining how to use the server. But if you want to go above and beyond, put someone in charge of welcoming new members. Most people join servers on a whim and never participate, but those people are actually pretty likely to at least respond if you personally send a message. During this interaction, you want to 1) deliver them information about the club as quickly as possible and 2) answer any reservations that they might have about the club. With that in mind, it’s helpful if you can link them to a club website (or even just a Google Doc) that gives them a rundown of what to expect. Here’s UW's website as an example. Don’t feel obligated to persuade them to join, just make sure that they feel acknowledged and have any resources that they might find helpful (and if they do express interest, try to get them to commit to showing up to a specific practice).
It helps if your server has passive ways to participate. You want new users to be able to do something, even if they don’t feel like they can have anything to add in #general. Quizbowl geeks tend to be introverted, so it’s helpful if they can do something w/o having to talk to a stranger. For example, our server has three channels where you can have a bot read read bonuses to you (and get points). These channels have 356k (!) messages total from users. We also have a #music channel for this same purpose, which allows you to compare your music listening stats with other users. These only impact things at the margins, but we’ve certainly had people “cross over” from passive bot participation to more active participation in the club’s social scene.
This also applies to people who have 1) left the club for a bit, 2) wanted to join earlier in the year but couldn’t, or 3) can’t participate as regularly as they would like to. You should emphasize that no, members don’t need perfect attendance; yes, you can always come back; and yes, there will always be a place for you in the club. Make sure to keep those people in mind, especially ones with significant participation in the past. If you’re running a tournament or some other event, maybe shoot them an invite! People appreciate that, and it shows that you care. The bottom line is that you should leave the door open for people to join (or leave) the club at any time.
Online communities are not a panacea for a lack of community. You can’t build an online community without a foundation. But they act as community amplifiers. They grease the wheels during times of stagnation, and they make it easier for people to stay in a community over long periods of time. I’m sure people who still read these forums know this to be true.
Key Takeaways
- Effective recruiting is by far the most important thing for building community.
- Go for quality of participation, not quantity. Focus on attracting people who will actually invest in the club.
- Don’t get hung up on whether people will find quizbowl “lame” or “uncool”. If you display your genuine passion with confidence, people will give you the benefit of the doubt.
- Make sure that your club promises social connection. If people can’t see their own social future in the club, then they’re probably not going to come back.
- Accommodate the broader range of college lifestyles via an online community. Make sure everyone feels acknowledged and that the barrier to participation is low.
- Be a welcoming presence, always.
But before that, I want to revisit gradualism. We shouldn’t ignore gradualism because it comes from a place of valid concern. No one tells people to become gradualist; it’s a position they adopt based on personal experience. Maybe they had a negative experience trying to share their love of quizbowl with someone. Maybe they watched some people get super discouraged after hearing some tossups, and maybe those were even people that could have gotten into quizbowl under different circumstances. These scenarios are unfortunate, and they deserve a closer look. I will argue that showing them college quizbowl was NOT the source of the problem in next week's post: Some Thoughts About Gradualism.
*=I am NOT saying that quizbowl clubs focus too much on retaining a general audience. The opposite is true, which will be the subject of my next post.