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New member and new realm!

PostPosted: Thu Feb 04, 2016 9:23 am
by Wavo
New member: Hey everyone! I'm Will (or Wavo online) and I've decided to starting getting involved a bit on the forums to learn more about the realm I'm starting. I've been full contact Foam-Fighting for about a year and a half, and I've been doing Belegarth specifically for a bit over half a year. I am originally from SoCal and I learned most of what I know from local groups there such as the Sword at UCI group. Though certainly not an expert, i've brought my passion for Foam-Fighting with me to University and started my own small group of fighters that I hope will grow.

New Realm: As for that group, I am attending Purdue University (West Lafayette Indiana) and as such the group will also be an official Purdue Organization to increase visibility and membership. We have an entire bag of loaners that I and a few others of the realm have created and we are happy to welcome anyone who wants to fight at Purdue to join us! We currently have practices of roughly a half dozen people, but I hope that as we develop more official practice times and player-base we will have larger practices. Realm name and other clerical work is pending but feel free to DM me or respond here if you have any questions, advice, or interest!

Re: New member and new realm!

PostPosted: Thu Feb 04, 2016 9:44 am
by Brutus
Hey Wavo, welcome! You have inadvertently picked a great place to attend college, as western Indiana and especially Illinois are hotbeds of Belegarth activity. I definitely recommend joining the Indiana and Illinois Foam-Fighting Alliance pages on Facebook, and I would look at the Numenor (Urbana/Champaign IL) Facebook group as well. There are loads and loads of great fighters in your vicinity, and I am positive that some folks from Champaign would be up for a caravan to one of your practices.

Welcome to the boards! They are pretty dead as far as day-to-day posting goes (Facebook has taken on most of that burden) but they are still a great, searchable resource for information.

Re: New member and new realm!

PostPosted: Thu Feb 04, 2016 10:15 am
by Sir Thurat
As the founder of a college realm, a few tips:

  • Read, know, and understand the rules that your RSO office has for student organizations, and what your campus will and will not allow, and where activities may be restricted.
  • Post fliers. Lots of them. One of our greatest sources of new members is people who happened to see one of our fliers on our campus' 100+ corkboards.
  • Go do sidewalk chalking. Especially when it's cold. What do people do when they're walking in the wind? They look down. If you've marked up half of the walkways on campus, then you've increased your group's visibility tons.
  • Be involved with campus activities. RSO fairs, quad days, collaborative group activities like barbeques, friendly competitions (frisbee, kickball tournaments, etc), and community projects (canned food drives, philanthropic 5k's) are great ways to be involved in your campus community, and it'll make your group a well known and familiar face, which is great for numbers.
  • Do fund raising. Our campus has about 16k students, and RSOs are allowed to have tables (with prior approval) where we can sell certain types of food and drink. If you're consistent about doing this, you can fundraise a good amount of money in a short amount of time. For example, our school's Equestrian Club does a bake sale every single week outside of the agriculture building. They make about $200/wk just selling drinks and brownies and the like to passing students who forgot to eat. That's a lot of gear you can buy with minimal amount of work. It also advertises your group, and gets your members involved outside of fighting, which creates a great community that makes people want to stay.
  • Schools are revolving doors. People come and go, and students have fleeting interests. Your membership will fluctuate a lot, and if you aren't constantly recruiting and working hard to retain your membership, your group will flounder and potentially die. Keep up on things, and don't be surprised when you lose flocks of people here and there. It's the nature of the beast.

Best of luck to you!

Re: New member and new realm!

PostPosted: Fri Mar 25, 2016 1:00 am
by Lynard