PROPOSAL: Reddit Membership Drive

The Pokemon Ultra RPG Reddit Membership Drive

Friends in URPG,

I am leading an effort to leverage Reddit as a resource to attract new members to URPG, and I would like your feedback on how best to proceed.

The following are my goals:

1. Create and maintain a subreddit (/r/PokemonURPG) to attract new members from Reddit.
2. Draft a letter to the mods of /r/Pokemon asking permission to advertise on their subreddit, either once or on an infrequent recurring basis.
3. After receiving approval, create a thread on /r/Pokemon encouraging new players to join the URPG.

It goes without saying that /r/Pokemon, with over 400,000 subscribers, is an extremely popular subreddit that gets plenty of foot traffic. If we can make ourselves known there, we could see a significant increase in URPG activity. In order to be successful, we must present ourselves in a professional and enticing manner. To that end, I am asking you to help me decide what kind of content we can host on the Pokemon URPG subreddit which will be most likely to attract new players without overwhelming them.

The following topics are in scope for this discussion:

- Subreddit design, including header image, CSS styling, and sidebar links/content
- Sticky posts which will contain links and content describing the URPG
- The content of our eventual advertisement on /r/Pokemon
- Other ways (besides advertisement/subreddit design) that we can use Reddit to attract new players

The following topics are not in-scope for this discussion:

- What will be done with the subreddit once the membership drive is over
- Other events to bolster activity during the membership drive not directly pertaining to Reddit

There will be plenty of opportunities down the road to turn the subreddit into something that will be useful for URPG players in general, but for now we should be focused on what will be attractive to new players. I'd like to see other events/new initiatives developed for the URPG to encourage current players to be more active this summer as well, but those sorts of discussions belong in other threads.

I would like to target the date of June 7th to have the subreddit finished and to float our first (and perhaps only) advertisement on /r/Pokemon. I settled on this date since it is the official beginning of WAR on Pokémon Crossroads. WAR is generally a period of increased activity on the forums, which means it will be easier to show any new players that we are an active community. I would like to have subreddit design and content figured out in the next two weeks so that I can use the following two weeks to set it up and make everything look good.

To spur discussion, here are a few of the questions I would like to present for your input:

- Should we promote all three forums equally, or encourage Redditors to go to one or the other?

On one hand, Bulbagarden is the most active forum, so it may be the most attractive to new players. On the other hand, this may be a good opportunity to drive traffic to the other forums.

- What content should we promote on the sidebar/sticky posts? Should we compile a post full of links to important threads (the Starter thread, Reffing Encyclopedia, How to Write Stories)? If so, which threads are the most important and most pertinent to new players?

- What are the best stories/artwork to feature on the front page?

- How much discussion (and of what kind) should we promote among members in the subreddit during the membership drive?

Please offer your feedback on these questions, and submit your own questions for discussion! I know you guys possess a lot of talent and great ideas, and every little bit counts! If you can help with subreddit design on the coding side, or by providing artwork for the header, I would appreciate that as well.

Please feel free to message me here on the boards or on AIM (rhotick2) if you’ve got any questions or comments.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from everyone!

 

I'm gonna reply because likes don't do any good. Comments in bold. As a separate side note, what sort of users go on the Pokemon Reddit? I'm not well versed on Reddit, so I figure this would be an appropriate time to ask. If we're going to get a bunch of cocky fucks, I feel like we should avoid it even though we could use the activity just because I feel like the communities would clash, but if it's a laidback kinda deal, then by all means, let's do it!!! I really just want to have an idea of the type of community we're about to advertise to, so that we know what to expect.

 

You'd be hard fought if you wanna censor redditors to pg13.

Personally I think we should postpone reaching out to r/pokemon, it's community is far too large (getting easily more than ~10,000 unique hits a day) and potentially hazardous to our community. Instead, like we talked about when this was brought up in the chats, we should aim our sights on smaller subreddits about pokemon fan fiction, competitive battling and role playing. I haven't found ones for RP or writing yet but r/stunfisk could be a good target for battling.

 

I think it's a good long term goal and something we should look into eventually, but we should take it one step at a time. Once I'm done with finals, I'll get a few threads up for the YouTube initiative so we can get started on uploads there.

 

I agree with swift on this. I myself use reddit a lot, and it would be great for the urpg but on the other hand it does get a outrageous amount of activity, as it stands right now the urpg does not have enough man power to handle a flood of new users on a scale that big.

 

I'm hearing a lot of concern about two factors that would suggest /r/Pokemon is not the right place to begin recruitment efforts on Reddit.

1. There are simply too many people for URPG to handle.
2. The people on Reddit aren't the kind of people we want in URPG.

I'm definitely not gung-ho 100% committed to advertising on /r/Pokemon right from the get-go. I'm a little more optimistic that it wouldn't bring URPG to a grinding halt. Still, those who have been around more recently may have a better perspective on that question. If we're going to go with baby steps, on the other hand, there are a lot more questions to answer, such as:

• Which subreddits are good targets for recruitment?
• What kind of advertisement would those subreddits be open to?

For example, Fawkes brought up /r/Stunfisk. It does look like an active community, but I'm not sure they'd be open to our recruitment efforts in the same way that /r/Pokemon might. I feel this way because they seem to be dedicated solely to competitive battling, while /r/Pokemon is more of a general-interest sub. I don't know much about them, however, so I may have misunderstood their purpose.

Let's say we did advertise directly on /r/Pokemon. What kind of increase in activity do you all foresee? And what level of increased activity do you believe we'd be able to effectively manage? Remember that on average, our thread is likely to only remain on the front page for a day or so. Even if /r/Pokemon gets ten thousand unique pageviews per day as Fawkes suggested, what fraction of those users are likely to even click and read our thread? And what fraction of those people are likely to click through to one of our forums? And what fraction of those people will be willing to go through the trouble of creating a forum account and actually requesting a starter? And what fraction of those people will be willing to create an AIM account and participate fully in URPG? And what fraction of those people will stick around?

Finally, what kinds of people do you think frequent /r/Pokemon? Even if they seem unpleasant on Reddit, do you think that sort of personality is likely to carry over into our community? I know I've made some not-so-nice comments on Reddit that I would never have made in URPG. Our community is a different kind of place than Reddit, and I think people will sense that instinctively.

That being said, I think these are both very valid concerns and I'd love to hear more input. In the meantime, I've had one more idea for a "baby step" that people can take to boost recruitment:

It seems like /r/Pokemon is the main hub for art submissions. While we develop a strategy for directly recruiting from there or elsewhere, it may be worthwhile for members to submit URPG art to /r/Pokemon. I'd recommend that anyone who regularly submits art to URPG create a DeviantArt account for their art submissions. You can link your DA copy of the image on /r/Pokemon and put something in your image description like I've got on mine, directing people to URPG. I'd be happy to give you the exact HTML text if you want, even.

 

Advertise HM01 Cut in /r/trees?

Seriously though, I think this is a good idea.