Give Your Members Something to Do

In April I went to a workshop led by the coauthors of The Decision to Join, a book that came out of a monumental study conducted by ASAE. I sat stunned throughout the day as one by one my assumptions about member recruitment and retention were systematically dispelled.

One thing that surprised me was how much less important direct mail and other forms of advertising are for recruitment compared to word of mouth. Direct marketing has certainly been my focus, and I suspect that is a very common way of thinking. After all, direct marketing is more tangible than word of mouth, and association staff, who are generally responsible for marketing initiatives, have more direct control over those kinds of efforts. Word of mouth is up to members, right?

Members certainly are the ones doing the word-of-mouth promotion, but staff can play a role that fits with their function as staff. The Decision to Join study shows that the more deeply members are involved in the association, the more likely they are to become promoters. Staff and members both can work to get new members on the path to deep involvement. To get members deeply involved, staff and members provide small, ad hoc tasks to start them off with. Involvement on a small scale will encourage involvement on a larger scale.

So finding ad hoc tasks for new members becomes a critical recruitment tool, more so than direct forms of advertising. That means associations must wrestle with several questions: What ad hoc tasks can we provide? How do we connect new members with those tasks? How do we track these efforts? These are questions I plan to discuss in later posts.

Three Kinds of Prim Limits in Second Life

One of the things I wish I had known up front when I started building in Second Life was certain limits related to prims, Second Life’s basic building blocks. There are three kinds of limits I have found so far that have affected my building projects.

The first is the number of prims. If you own land, space is not your primary limitation. After all, even if you own the smallest parcel, you can build thousands of meters high. However, you are only allowed so many prims in your space at one time, regardless of the amount of space they occupy.

If you own an entire island, you probably won’t have to worry too much about your prim limit. But if you’re like me, you can’t afford a parcel that big. You can own the smallest parcel, 512 sq. m., and pay no land use fees. All you have to do is buy the land, which isn’t a great expense, and have a premium account, which costs $9.95 per month, or less if you pay in bigger chunks. But with a 512 sq. m. parcel, you have only 117 prims to work with. (Linking prims does not reduce the number.) There are several sizes in between, each with a different prim limit.

If you’ve got specific plans, you need to keep this limit in mind. It’s amazing how quickly you can run out of prims, especially because of the other kinds of limits.

The next limit is size. Each prim is limited to 10 m. in each dimension. Let’s say you want to build a little house. Even a simple shape like a floor or wall may take multiple prims. If you want a house larger than 10 m. x 10 m. x 10 m., that’s extra prims just for the floor, ceiling, and/or walls. So even simple objects can take multiple prims, if they are big enough.

The third limit is shape. Naturally, the basic building blocks are simple: blocks, spheres, cylinders, etc. Fortunately, a lot of tools are available to manipulate the shapes. But even so, some objects may require more prims than you originally planned for. The chair pictured below is ten prims, not counting the pose ball.

I’m not saying all this to be down on Second Life. This little enterprise is utterly incredible. But you do have to watch your limits. Here are some thoughts on dealing with those limits:

Adjust your design. Maybe you need to rethink what you want to create. Is there a simpler design that is not exactly what you originally planned but will serve the same purpose?

Alternate. Maybe you can’t have everything you want all at one time, but you can have one thing for awhile and then put up something different. (I’ve heard there’s a way to cheat the system and have objects rez in cycles, but I’ve also heard it can affect performance.)

Be efficient. With the many building options, you can get more out of the object by cutting the profile, etc. And don’t forget that you can sink objects into the terrain or other objects. Maybe you want a simple bookshelf with two sides and a top. You can use three blocks to make the two sides and the top. But if you make one hollow block, you will have the same thing plus one side. Then you just sink the fourth side into the floor. There’s a great article in the building section of the Second Life Knowledge Base on this topic.

Use textures. Transparency is your friend. You can create the illusion of complex shapes by having a transparent prim with a texture that has the shape you want. Many plants are created using plant images as textures on transparent blocks.

Use outside software. The Second Life Web site has a good review of different 3D drawing programs you can use to create sculpted prims, which are a special kind of prim not limited to the basic shapes you create using the Second Life client. This requires a lot of learning, but there are a couple of huge advantages. The first is that with sculpted prims, you can create the same objects with fewer prims. The second is that objects can look much better.

There are also megaprims, but that’s a whole different discussion.