08-31-2021, 07:12 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-03-2021, 08:51 AM by Tesla. Edited 1 time in total.)
Recently the Recruitment Head position changed hands from the outgoing Tylus and the incoming CC, despite this position not being advertised I made an effort to apply for it regardless. I obviously did not win the bid for the position, and I wish CC and the existing team there the best of luck in their endeavors to find new users for our community here... that being said, I am but a poor, poor sim league user, no longer having access to that sweet GM pay and therefore will milk the following application for all it's worth, especially now that 1.5x media has begun. I had considered editing this some, and maybe scrubbing it a bit, but this is media baybee: More words, More good.
I'll also add that all ideas below are free for the taking, and I am happy for any league members to take them and run with them should something be of interest to you. Upon learning I did not receive the job, I have since committed myself to a separate endeavor, and therefore lay no claim on anything below... if you see something you like, feel free to steal it and run with it! And so without further ado, here is what my application for the recruitment head position was.
Application for the position of Recruitment Head
By Sylphreni
With my recent departure from GMing in the league, it has come to my attention that the position for Recruitment Head is soon to become available, and this document is my application to pursue the role within the league. I personally view recruitment as the lifeblood of the league, and while we’ve had some very bad luck on that front in recent times (thanks Capitol asshats), I’m confident that we can take action now to better establish us long term as a league with a hopefully sustainable source of varied recruiting means.
While it’s true I do not have any experience with the existing Recruitment Team, I have plenty of real life experience in that area stemming from a past career in sales, finance, and advertising. I have worked in a management capacity in real life for roughly the past five years, and have been successful in those roles. I hope to bring that success to the Recruitment Team, while also embracing the foundation the team has already in place. I know it is typical when the United States has a president take office that they have a platform for their first 100 days in office, and what they hope to accomplish. It is my intent to cover what my goals would be to accomplish over the course of my first 100 days in the position, and give some insight into how I will seek to achieve those goals. This of course will not be a comprehensive list, as I hope to work within some of the existing frameworks of the department, as well as hear what ideas they might have to improve our current recruitment processes.
I can almost guarantee that while reading this, you’ll see some ideas you may really like, and some you'll absolutely hate. That’s fine, this is meant primarily to be a framework by which we could outline the role I’m applying for, as with everything all of the suggestions below are just that… suggestions. That said, I do hope they outline the level of thought and overall care I’ve given to the position of Recruitment Head, and help give some insight into what my aspirations for the position and for the league at large might be. So, without further ado….
Proposed Actions for First 100 Days in Office
Action: Conduct individual interviews with each existing member of the Recruitment Team.
Intended Result: Gain an in-depth understanding of each member's strengths and weaknesses, as well as their current workload and expectations within the department. Find out from them what they feel is working within the current constructs of the department, and what things need to be changed, updated, or discarded.
Action: Update or create job roles for each member of the Recruitment Team and analyze potential hiring needs.
Intended Result: Clear expectations and communication are key to any well run operation. Work with the members of the team to play to their existing strengths and develop or clarify their roles within the team so they have a better understanding of what’s expected of them. Makes it easier to rate their performance in the position for the Head while also streamlining and making the entire department more efficient.
Action: Dedicate one user specifically for the purpose of maintaining our existing relationship with r/nfl and overseeing our regular recruitment with them.
Intended Result: While this partnership is largely the reason most active users are in the league at current, we have seen diminishing returns on it over the past several recruitments from them. My focus with this relationship would be to maintain it, but to attempt to flatten our recruiting curve across the board, rather than holding out hope for a large class once every 3 seasons. I'd look to make improvements to the recruitment post itself, but I’ll address them later here.
Action: Work with the PT team to have one of the PT’s posted for the season be the following: Written Option: “What has the ISFL been/meant for/to you?” Graphics Option: “Create a one page advertisement for the ISFL that you might see in a newspaper, including whatever you feel might interest or draw in a potential new user.”
Intended Result: The wording can be cleaned up with these, but the idea being we use the written responses to develop a testimonials page that we can use when posting various recruitment posts. Likewise, we can work with the PT team to determine the best graphics submissions to determine what information we might need or want on an ISFL advertisement to also be used on recruiting posts. Once we’ve narrowed down what that might be, look to contract out the creation of such a document from either some of the better submitters, or a known graphics artist in the community.
Action: Work with the Graphics team to develop an ISFL graphics Twitter, and hire somebody for the position.
Intended Result: One of the best resources and assets the league has is all of the fantastic graphics work that our various users create for the league, and yet most of it is never seen by the majority of the league. Such a Twitter account would not only display these graphics on the site's homepage with the existing Twitter widget, but would also give us an account where we could promote the league’s graphics artists across our recruitment posts. I’d also explore linking this account to the league’s subreddit to see if we could post new graphics submissions to the subreddit as individual posts for people to see and follow.
Action: Work with the Rookie Mentor team to seek ways to better improve new user retainment between recruitment efforts and the DSFL draft.
Intended Result: Knowing Schwarz, I know she already has ideas for this and so I’d seek to work with her to implement some of the things both she and her team think would improve our overall recruitment and retainment rates. If we’re going to put all this effort into attracting new members, we damn well need to keep them. Initial ideas might include: Updated video tutorials for new users, a late recruitment “second push” prior to the DSFL draft, “catch-up TPE'' opportunities for late creates, etc.
Action: Work with the Dotts team to develop a portfolio of their best work.
Intended Result: Dotts is one of the coolest new additions to the league over the past year, and for a new user the idea that you can potentially collect your own card (and soon trade them if my sources are true) is awesome. My suggestion would be to leverage the fuck out of this… post this portfolio on all recruitment posts along with the aforementioned graphics twitter link. Give people something tangible to see of the league, so they can start to get excited about it. If somebody can see examples of cards, they can start to imagine having their own, and that starts to build buy-in from a very early stage at almost no cost to us.
Action: Work with Head Office on clarifying who controls the league subreddit and attempt to bring it up to date, and look to add content to it.
Intended Result: As a league that recruits heavily from subreddits, having an active and engaging subreddit is an obvious first step to drawing in potential users who might find it through the league’s official account or our individual user’s personal accounts. Currently, the league’s subreddit boasts about the merits of the National Simulation Football League, advertises the leagues playoffs from 5/14 to 5/16… of 2018, notes the league consists of 8 teams (wtf is that Yeti logo infinite?), and if you’re on a desktop it has a banner that I could make graphically…. Which uh, is not good. By updating and modernizing the league’s subreddit, and attempting to explore new ways of using it, we can attempt to garner new users through them finding the subreddit and actually seeing something interesting and alive when they click on the subreddit for the first time. I’ll outline several steps I’d attempt to take to rectify this below.
Action: Assign two team members, or hire two additional members specifically for the purpose of restoring and updating the league subreddit.
Intended Result: This ties into the previous point, but I really do think that the league’s subreddit is currently massively underutilized. I can’t speak for how everyone Reddits, but personally if I see someone post an interesting pre-written adventure for DnD let’s say… the first thing I do is click on their profile to see what else they’ve been posting. At present, if someone were to do that same thing with one of our recruitment posts, they would see absolutely nothing in that person's post history linking them to the league’s subreddit. I’d like to see us build up the league’s subreddit so we have a strong, up to date presence on the platform to help with recruiting efforts across the site.
Action: Work with the Dotts team to see if we can leverage their soon to be trading aspect to boost the league’s subreddit activity.
Intended Result: I’m not sure where in the process Dotts are with getting their trading functionality online, but I think finding that out and seeing if we could use the subreddit rather then a Discord as a potential place for players to announce their cards available for trade, make trades, etc. Might help drive traffic and posts on the subreddit itself. This would require insight from the Dotts team, but I think there’s potential with the idea itself.
Action: Utilize our new video team to create a video, hyping up part of a game, showing draft cards, dotts cards, and overlay it with stock footage of football clips.
Intended Result: I think we’d probably do this on a contract work basis, rather than making it a specific Recruitment team role. That said, having some sort of hype promo piece is a no brainer and should be stickied on our subreddit, discord, and forum. There’s loads of creative people in the league, I seem to remember a hype piece someone did for the Ultimus once upon a time… I’d love to see something like that for the league as a whole. (Edit: Found the video I mentioned… Look at this thing, so damn good!!! We neeeeeed this, watch it for yourself and tell me that doesn’t get you excited about the league. https://youtu.be/dXWFaWTgKEQ?t=551. Also, here’s the SHL’s version of what this video could look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWL_7rjnsmg
Action: Branch out to non-football related subreddits in an attempt to find new places to advertise for the site.
Intended Result: I know this idea isn’t original to me, but while we’re discussing improving our Reddit presence, let’s focus on more than just football. Roleplaying subreddits, hobbyist subreddits, lonely or looking for friends subreddits, anime subreddits, hell anything really even tangentially related to stuff that the league is involved with is worth investigating. I know it can be difficult to get permission to actually advertise on these subreddits, but again, if you are posting from a username that is tied to the league, and has a post history on the league’s subreddit itself, it will be easy for Redditors to find the league without us having to give them a four paragraph explanation of what we are, and if the subreddit is setup to receive them, then we can funnel them into our Rookie Discord and Rookie Mentor team.
Action: Standardize Recruitment team members reddit usernames, with something that aligns them with the league.
Intended Result: My username of “eternalstruggleofthe69” while awesome, doesn’t do much for the casual observer in the way of letting them know I am involved with the league. However, if I’m posting on a subreddit regularly as /u/ISFLsyl or some such… then it can at least begin to get people asking what the ISFL is. Even if I’m not actively recruiting with a certain comment, if someone likes what I say and checks me out, because I’m active on the leagues subreddit, they’ll easily see what the ISFL is…. See what I did there?
This also has the added bonus of allowing the Recruitment Head to track the various members activity on their assignments and to better be able to assess the level of work each member has accomplished in a given season (maybe allow for bonus’ to be paid out for additional work done by members.)
Action: Work with the Media team to more fully flesh out allowing users to post NFL specific media.
Intended Result: I imagine by now most everyone has heard my rant on this, but if not… buckle up.
You know that one guy you know that’s like super into fantasy football and all he ever wants to do is talk to you about his team and how good it is, or about that one team he smoked the league with back in 2016; I know that guy, because I am that guy. You know what everyone hates? Listening to that guy talk about his fantasy football team, because nobody actually cares about his team. That would be the equivalent of an NFL fan looking into our league media section and reading a piece about the league, with absolutely zero context.
Now, if that same NFL fan looked in and saw a piece about the best potential name for the Washington Football Team is the Washington Walruses… now they have a point of reference. Now, I love our league media, and I don’t want to take away from all the wonderful pieces that we have now that are specific deep dives into the league itself, but I’d like to suggest we allow each user a once per season paid media piece on the NFL. As we’re getting ready to head into the 2021 season, there’s no better time to start, and the intention would be to take the best of these pieces, regardless of if they are deep dives, analysis, memes, etc. and post them to both our subreddit and crosspost it to all the various football subreddits with one of the league’s accounts. There wouldn’t be a specific league advertisement on the post, just the post itself, so it shouldn’t be breaking any advertisement rules across any of the forums. However, it would go a long way to increasing our Reddit presence, and potentially add a depth to our league that currently does not exist… and let’s be honest, people are going to be talking and looking at this stuff anyways, so let’s leverage it for the benefit of the league and our players bank accounts.
End rant, thanks for sticking to the end of it.
Action: Work with the Casino team to develop a one time “free entry” into a weekly bet or prop for all new users who sign up.
Intended Result: You ever hear those annoying ads for DraftKings where they promise to match new users' bets up to a certain amount or offer them a free spin in an upcoming challenge or bet? They do that stuff because it works… People love free shit, hell, I once let a Kirby Vacuum salesman pitch me for 2 hours for a Capri Sun, we all have our weaknesses. So let’s develop our own version of the Draftkings pitch and put it out there to the world. “Join now, and get 2 free squares in our Ultimus Squares Competition. Payout per square is 2 million per square, but spots are limited to join now and claim yours today!” That’s probably a bit too gimmicky, but you get the idea…. Give people a bunch of reasons to say yes.
Action: Work with the Banking Team and Head Office to develop financial incentives for returning users and affiliate users to join.
Intended Result: A lot of automotive dealerships offer loyalty or conquest rebates to new customers who have bought previously at other dealerships or returning ones. No need for us to recreate the wheel on this one, let’s just apply those principles to the league and again, give people who may have been on the fence of rejoining or coming over for the first time a reason to finally pull the trigger.
“This season post the link of the affiliate post that brought you here to the site and receive an additional $5 million in your bank account! There’s never been a better time to join!” Again, gimmicky, but there’s a reason virtually every business out there offers these sorts of things… It works. We can craft and wordsmith them to suit our needs here for the league, but the premise remains the same.
For players who have left and we’d like to potentially engage, I’d formulate a similar offering and then give it to every GM in the league and ask them to @everyone ping it in their respective locker rooms. Even as a closed locker room, Colorado has a bunch of people I’ve never personally spoken to before, but were in the league at one point… We don’t @everyone too often since Edd left, so maybe a random ping to some of these people might see a few of them return. Offering them an incentive to do so, makes it that much easier.
Action: Work with the Banking Team and Head Office to develop financial incentives for new users to join.
Intended Result: “This season all new users get an additional 3 million dollar sign-on bonus when they accept their DSFL contracts!”
This sort of thing is super easy to implement and gives people an incentive to stick around for 3 weeks from the initial recruitment date to the DSFL draft (a ghastly stretch of time that we really need to address, but I digress.) Tying the bonus to the contract acceptance (this media post is so long nobody will see that I love Big Edd) also ensures that only active members are the ones getting the bonus, and also limits the potential for this sort of thing to be abused (though I doubt that would be an issue.)
Action: Advertise our weekly ISFL Gameday shows, specifically to new users.
Intended Result: This is perhaps a minor point, but I think it is a neat idea. We have this show that some users have taken on, and from everything I’ve heard it’s received excellent feedback from the community at large. Are we recording these anywhere? If not, can we, and catalogue them to give new users something to see and listen to… Maybe advertise the time and where to go to listen, to give those new users something exciting to interact with during that time between joining the league and getting drafted to the ISFL. A small thing I realize, but I like what those guys have been doing, and would like to see us utilize it more.
Action: Work with DSFL HO, DSFL GMs, and the Rookie Mentor team on increasing retention.
Intended Result: Again a broad topic, but I’ll try to narrow the scope of it a bit to give you a firmer idea on what we’re discussing here (and yes I know I mentioned something similar with the Rookie Mentor team already, but it seemed foolish not to include them here.) Just going by rough numbers though I’m sure HO has a much more solid grasp of things, but from recruitment to the ISFL draft we seem to burn off about 30-40% of a given recruitment class. Those numbers are a huge kick in the balls for recruitment who work so hard to get these folks in the door, only to see them vanish after all that hard work.
Now saying that, there’s of course no one thing we can point at and blame for that drop off… Life happens, things change, fake football is strange, Hanks is a maniac… There's a million things that could cause people to leave the league or just lose interest in it, but I feel it’s important that recruitment not just end at the creation of a player. So anything that our team could do to help keep those people logging in and regularly interacting with the teams, rookie chat, etc. is something we should all be working towards. Admittedly, I don’t know entirely what that looks like, but I would want us working with those other groups to be a part of the solution.
Alright, I think I’m gonna call it there for now. There’s a saying in sales, “Underpromise, Overdeliver” and I think I perhaps got it backwards in writing this application. That said, this league has meant a lot to me personally, and I want to see it succeed long term, hopefully even long past whenever I finally decide to hang it up. Recruitment and developing potential paths for new players to join the league is at the very core of that, and I think my skill set would allow us to continue building on the excellent work the Recruitment team has already done all these many seasons, while hopefully expanding its scope and allowing us to diversify our various recruitment opportunities. I’m quite confident in saying that I don’t think there’s any “silver bullet” for increasing our recruitment numbers, and I can’t promise that even if we do all of these various things we’ll see massive results. But I would suggest that by focusing on building a foundation to recruit from as well, while trying to find innovative ways to recruit aside from our standard /r/nfl posts, might lead to us finding a sustainable recruiting strategy that will soften the curve of r/nfl scouting over the coming seasons.
I appreciate your consideration for the position, and am happy to answer any questions or concerns when/if that may become appropriate. Thanks for all you do.
~Syl
Grader Notes:
*Google Docs has this at 3,870 words
*1.5x media bonus please
*If this is Tesla grading this, throw me a few extra bucks, Joe doesn't have to know you like me more.
I'll also add that all ideas below are free for the taking, and I am happy for any league members to take them and run with them should something be of interest to you. Upon learning I did not receive the job, I have since committed myself to a separate endeavor, and therefore lay no claim on anything below... if you see something you like, feel free to steal it and run with it! And so without further ado, here is what my application for the recruitment head position was.
Application for the position of Recruitment Head
By Sylphreni
With my recent departure from GMing in the league, it has come to my attention that the position for Recruitment Head is soon to become available, and this document is my application to pursue the role within the league. I personally view recruitment as the lifeblood of the league, and while we’ve had some very bad luck on that front in recent times (thanks Capitol asshats), I’m confident that we can take action now to better establish us long term as a league with a hopefully sustainable source of varied recruiting means.
While it’s true I do not have any experience with the existing Recruitment Team, I have plenty of real life experience in that area stemming from a past career in sales, finance, and advertising. I have worked in a management capacity in real life for roughly the past five years, and have been successful in those roles. I hope to bring that success to the Recruitment Team, while also embracing the foundation the team has already in place. I know it is typical when the United States has a president take office that they have a platform for their first 100 days in office, and what they hope to accomplish. It is my intent to cover what my goals would be to accomplish over the course of my first 100 days in the position, and give some insight into how I will seek to achieve those goals. This of course will not be a comprehensive list, as I hope to work within some of the existing frameworks of the department, as well as hear what ideas they might have to improve our current recruitment processes.
I can almost guarantee that while reading this, you’ll see some ideas you may really like, and some you'll absolutely hate. That’s fine, this is meant primarily to be a framework by which we could outline the role I’m applying for, as with everything all of the suggestions below are just that… suggestions. That said, I do hope they outline the level of thought and overall care I’ve given to the position of Recruitment Head, and help give some insight into what my aspirations for the position and for the league at large might be. So, without further ado….
Proposed Actions for First 100 Days in Office
Action: Conduct individual interviews with each existing member of the Recruitment Team.
Intended Result: Gain an in-depth understanding of each member's strengths and weaknesses, as well as their current workload and expectations within the department. Find out from them what they feel is working within the current constructs of the department, and what things need to be changed, updated, or discarded.
Action: Update or create job roles for each member of the Recruitment Team and analyze potential hiring needs.
Intended Result: Clear expectations and communication are key to any well run operation. Work with the members of the team to play to their existing strengths and develop or clarify their roles within the team so they have a better understanding of what’s expected of them. Makes it easier to rate their performance in the position for the Head while also streamlining and making the entire department more efficient.
Action: Dedicate one user specifically for the purpose of maintaining our existing relationship with r/nfl and overseeing our regular recruitment with them.
Intended Result: While this partnership is largely the reason most active users are in the league at current, we have seen diminishing returns on it over the past several recruitments from them. My focus with this relationship would be to maintain it, but to attempt to flatten our recruiting curve across the board, rather than holding out hope for a large class once every 3 seasons. I'd look to make improvements to the recruitment post itself, but I’ll address them later here.
Action: Work with the PT team to have one of the PT’s posted for the season be the following: Written Option: “What has the ISFL been/meant for/to you?” Graphics Option: “Create a one page advertisement for the ISFL that you might see in a newspaper, including whatever you feel might interest or draw in a potential new user.”
Intended Result: The wording can be cleaned up with these, but the idea being we use the written responses to develop a testimonials page that we can use when posting various recruitment posts. Likewise, we can work with the PT team to determine the best graphics submissions to determine what information we might need or want on an ISFL advertisement to also be used on recruiting posts. Once we’ve narrowed down what that might be, look to contract out the creation of such a document from either some of the better submitters, or a known graphics artist in the community.
Action: Work with the Graphics team to develop an ISFL graphics Twitter, and hire somebody for the position.
Intended Result: One of the best resources and assets the league has is all of the fantastic graphics work that our various users create for the league, and yet most of it is never seen by the majority of the league. Such a Twitter account would not only display these graphics on the site's homepage with the existing Twitter widget, but would also give us an account where we could promote the league’s graphics artists across our recruitment posts. I’d also explore linking this account to the league’s subreddit to see if we could post new graphics submissions to the subreddit as individual posts for people to see and follow.
Action: Work with the Rookie Mentor team to seek ways to better improve new user retainment between recruitment efforts and the DSFL draft.
Intended Result: Knowing Schwarz, I know she already has ideas for this and so I’d seek to work with her to implement some of the things both she and her team think would improve our overall recruitment and retainment rates. If we’re going to put all this effort into attracting new members, we damn well need to keep them. Initial ideas might include: Updated video tutorials for new users, a late recruitment “second push” prior to the DSFL draft, “catch-up TPE'' opportunities for late creates, etc.
Action: Work with the Dotts team to develop a portfolio of their best work.
Intended Result: Dotts is one of the coolest new additions to the league over the past year, and for a new user the idea that you can potentially collect your own card (and soon trade them if my sources are true) is awesome. My suggestion would be to leverage the fuck out of this… post this portfolio on all recruitment posts along with the aforementioned graphics twitter link. Give people something tangible to see of the league, so they can start to get excited about it. If somebody can see examples of cards, they can start to imagine having their own, and that starts to build buy-in from a very early stage at almost no cost to us.
Action: Work with Head Office on clarifying who controls the league subreddit and attempt to bring it up to date, and look to add content to it.
Intended Result: As a league that recruits heavily from subreddits, having an active and engaging subreddit is an obvious first step to drawing in potential users who might find it through the league’s official account or our individual user’s personal accounts. Currently, the league’s subreddit boasts about the merits of the National Simulation Football League, advertises the leagues playoffs from 5/14 to 5/16… of 2018, notes the league consists of 8 teams (wtf is that Yeti logo infinite?), and if you’re on a desktop it has a banner that I could make graphically…. Which uh, is not good. By updating and modernizing the league’s subreddit, and attempting to explore new ways of using it, we can attempt to garner new users through them finding the subreddit and actually seeing something interesting and alive when they click on the subreddit for the first time. I’ll outline several steps I’d attempt to take to rectify this below.
Action: Assign two team members, or hire two additional members specifically for the purpose of restoring and updating the league subreddit.
Intended Result: This ties into the previous point, but I really do think that the league’s subreddit is currently massively underutilized. I can’t speak for how everyone Reddits, but personally if I see someone post an interesting pre-written adventure for DnD let’s say… the first thing I do is click on their profile to see what else they’ve been posting. At present, if someone were to do that same thing with one of our recruitment posts, they would see absolutely nothing in that person's post history linking them to the league’s subreddit. I’d like to see us build up the league’s subreddit so we have a strong, up to date presence on the platform to help with recruiting efforts across the site.
Action: Work with the Dotts team to see if we can leverage their soon to be trading aspect to boost the league’s subreddit activity.
Intended Result: I’m not sure where in the process Dotts are with getting their trading functionality online, but I think finding that out and seeing if we could use the subreddit rather then a Discord as a potential place for players to announce their cards available for trade, make trades, etc. Might help drive traffic and posts on the subreddit itself. This would require insight from the Dotts team, but I think there’s potential with the idea itself.
Action: Utilize our new video team to create a video, hyping up part of a game, showing draft cards, dotts cards, and overlay it with stock footage of football clips.
Intended Result: I think we’d probably do this on a contract work basis, rather than making it a specific Recruitment team role. That said, having some sort of hype promo piece is a no brainer and should be stickied on our subreddit, discord, and forum. There’s loads of creative people in the league, I seem to remember a hype piece someone did for the Ultimus once upon a time… I’d love to see something like that for the league as a whole. (Edit: Found the video I mentioned… Look at this thing, so damn good!!! We neeeeeed this, watch it for yourself and tell me that doesn’t get you excited about the league. https://youtu.be/dXWFaWTgKEQ?t=551. Also, here’s the SHL’s version of what this video could look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWL_7rjnsmg
Action: Branch out to non-football related subreddits in an attempt to find new places to advertise for the site.
Intended Result: I know this idea isn’t original to me, but while we’re discussing improving our Reddit presence, let’s focus on more than just football. Roleplaying subreddits, hobbyist subreddits, lonely or looking for friends subreddits, anime subreddits, hell anything really even tangentially related to stuff that the league is involved with is worth investigating. I know it can be difficult to get permission to actually advertise on these subreddits, but again, if you are posting from a username that is tied to the league, and has a post history on the league’s subreddit itself, it will be easy for Redditors to find the league without us having to give them a four paragraph explanation of what we are, and if the subreddit is setup to receive them, then we can funnel them into our Rookie Discord and Rookie Mentor team.
Action: Standardize Recruitment team members reddit usernames, with something that aligns them with the league.
Intended Result: My username of “eternalstruggleofthe69” while awesome, doesn’t do much for the casual observer in the way of letting them know I am involved with the league. However, if I’m posting on a subreddit regularly as /u/ISFLsyl or some such… then it can at least begin to get people asking what the ISFL is. Even if I’m not actively recruiting with a certain comment, if someone likes what I say and checks me out, because I’m active on the leagues subreddit, they’ll easily see what the ISFL is…. See what I did there?
This also has the added bonus of allowing the Recruitment Head to track the various members activity on their assignments and to better be able to assess the level of work each member has accomplished in a given season (maybe allow for bonus’ to be paid out for additional work done by members.)
Action: Work with the Media team to more fully flesh out allowing users to post NFL specific media.
Intended Result: I imagine by now most everyone has heard my rant on this, but if not… buckle up.
You know that one guy you know that’s like super into fantasy football and all he ever wants to do is talk to you about his team and how good it is, or about that one team he smoked the league with back in 2016; I know that guy, because I am that guy. You know what everyone hates? Listening to that guy talk about his fantasy football team, because nobody actually cares about his team. That would be the equivalent of an NFL fan looking into our league media section and reading a piece about the league, with absolutely zero context.
Now, if that same NFL fan looked in and saw a piece about the best potential name for the Washington Football Team is the Washington Walruses… now they have a point of reference. Now, I love our league media, and I don’t want to take away from all the wonderful pieces that we have now that are specific deep dives into the league itself, but I’d like to suggest we allow each user a once per season paid media piece on the NFL. As we’re getting ready to head into the 2021 season, there’s no better time to start, and the intention would be to take the best of these pieces, regardless of if they are deep dives, analysis, memes, etc. and post them to both our subreddit and crosspost it to all the various football subreddits with one of the league’s accounts. There wouldn’t be a specific league advertisement on the post, just the post itself, so it shouldn’t be breaking any advertisement rules across any of the forums. However, it would go a long way to increasing our Reddit presence, and potentially add a depth to our league that currently does not exist… and let’s be honest, people are going to be talking and looking at this stuff anyways, so let’s leverage it for the benefit of the league and our players bank accounts.
End rant, thanks for sticking to the end of it.
Action: Work with the Casino team to develop a one time “free entry” into a weekly bet or prop for all new users who sign up.
Intended Result: You ever hear those annoying ads for DraftKings where they promise to match new users' bets up to a certain amount or offer them a free spin in an upcoming challenge or bet? They do that stuff because it works… People love free shit, hell, I once let a Kirby Vacuum salesman pitch me for 2 hours for a Capri Sun, we all have our weaknesses. So let’s develop our own version of the Draftkings pitch and put it out there to the world. “Join now, and get 2 free squares in our Ultimus Squares Competition. Payout per square is 2 million per square, but spots are limited to join now and claim yours today!” That’s probably a bit too gimmicky, but you get the idea…. Give people a bunch of reasons to say yes.
Action: Work with the Banking Team and Head Office to develop financial incentives for returning users and affiliate users to join.
Intended Result: A lot of automotive dealerships offer loyalty or conquest rebates to new customers who have bought previously at other dealerships or returning ones. No need for us to recreate the wheel on this one, let’s just apply those principles to the league and again, give people who may have been on the fence of rejoining or coming over for the first time a reason to finally pull the trigger.
“This season post the link of the affiliate post that brought you here to the site and receive an additional $5 million in your bank account! There’s never been a better time to join!” Again, gimmicky, but there’s a reason virtually every business out there offers these sorts of things… It works. We can craft and wordsmith them to suit our needs here for the league, but the premise remains the same.
For players who have left and we’d like to potentially engage, I’d formulate a similar offering and then give it to every GM in the league and ask them to @everyone ping it in their respective locker rooms. Even as a closed locker room, Colorado has a bunch of people I’ve never personally spoken to before, but were in the league at one point… We don’t @everyone too often since Edd left, so maybe a random ping to some of these people might see a few of them return. Offering them an incentive to do so, makes it that much easier.
Action: Work with the Banking Team and Head Office to develop financial incentives for new users to join.
Intended Result: “This season all new users get an additional 3 million dollar sign-on bonus when they accept their DSFL contracts!”
This sort of thing is super easy to implement and gives people an incentive to stick around for 3 weeks from the initial recruitment date to the DSFL draft (a ghastly stretch of time that we really need to address, but I digress.) Tying the bonus to the contract acceptance (this media post is so long nobody will see that I love Big Edd) also ensures that only active members are the ones getting the bonus, and also limits the potential for this sort of thing to be abused (though I doubt that would be an issue.)
Action: Advertise our weekly ISFL Gameday shows, specifically to new users.
Intended Result: This is perhaps a minor point, but I think it is a neat idea. We have this show that some users have taken on, and from everything I’ve heard it’s received excellent feedback from the community at large. Are we recording these anywhere? If not, can we, and catalogue them to give new users something to see and listen to… Maybe advertise the time and where to go to listen, to give those new users something exciting to interact with during that time between joining the league and getting drafted to the ISFL. A small thing I realize, but I like what those guys have been doing, and would like to see us utilize it more.
Action: Work with DSFL HO, DSFL GMs, and the Rookie Mentor team on increasing retention.
Intended Result: Again a broad topic, but I’ll try to narrow the scope of it a bit to give you a firmer idea on what we’re discussing here (and yes I know I mentioned something similar with the Rookie Mentor team already, but it seemed foolish not to include them here.) Just going by rough numbers though I’m sure HO has a much more solid grasp of things, but from recruitment to the ISFL draft we seem to burn off about 30-40% of a given recruitment class. Those numbers are a huge kick in the balls for recruitment who work so hard to get these folks in the door, only to see them vanish after all that hard work.
Now saying that, there’s of course no one thing we can point at and blame for that drop off… Life happens, things change, fake football is strange, Hanks is a maniac… There's a million things that could cause people to leave the league or just lose interest in it, but I feel it’s important that recruitment not just end at the creation of a player. So anything that our team could do to help keep those people logging in and regularly interacting with the teams, rookie chat, etc. is something we should all be working towards. Admittedly, I don’t know entirely what that looks like, but I would want us working with those other groups to be a part of the solution.
Alright, I think I’m gonna call it there for now. There’s a saying in sales, “Underpromise, Overdeliver” and I think I perhaps got it backwards in writing this application. That said, this league has meant a lot to me personally, and I want to see it succeed long term, hopefully even long past whenever I finally decide to hang it up. Recruitment and developing potential paths for new players to join the league is at the very core of that, and I think my skill set would allow us to continue building on the excellent work the Recruitment team has already done all these many seasons, while hopefully expanding its scope and allowing us to diversify our various recruitment opportunities. I’m quite confident in saying that I don’t think there’s any “silver bullet” for increasing our recruitment numbers, and I can’t promise that even if we do all of these various things we’ll see massive results. But I would suggest that by focusing on building a foundation to recruit from as well, while trying to find innovative ways to recruit aside from our standard /r/nfl posts, might lead to us finding a sustainable recruiting strategy that will soften the curve of r/nfl scouting over the coming seasons.
I appreciate your consideration for the position, and am happy to answer any questions or concerns when/if that may become appropriate. Thanks for all you do.
~Syl
Grader Notes:
*Google Docs has this at 3,870 words
*1.5x media bonus please
*If this is Tesla grading this, throw me a few extra bucks, Joe doesn't have to know you like me more.