How Do You Recruit For Your Club?

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How Do You Recruit For Your Club?

Post by username_crisis_averted »

I wanted to make a thread similar to Briana Magin's How Do You Run Your Club? post. I actually have no idea how uniform club recruiting is, especially in college, so I thought it could be cool to see many different colleges' recruiting strategies side-by-side.

So just tell me how your club recruits.
-when and how often do you recruit?
-what are your recruiting events like?
-how much of your club ends up joining because of those events?
-how have your recruiting events changed over time?
-and really anything else you think would be relevant to this discussion

I'll start by outlining how the quizbowl club at the University of Washington currently recruits and how we've recruited in the past. We usually recruit at the beginning of the year and at no other times, but that can change depending on how much we want new members.

Our first recruiting event was a post on Reddit over COVID. This was our most successful recruiting event to date, attracting about half of the new recruits who stuck around (~10 people). We also used some direct recruitment methods— I browsed the past couple years of articles about our local state format (Knowledge Bowl) and tried to contact the people mentioned via email. These methods did work, but they were definitely more trouble than they were worth. We also tried similar recruiting methods later in the year, but this also ended up being less successful.

Our subsequent recruiting events were hosted at an event called Dawg Daze. Dawg Daze is an annual multi-day event at UW for incoming first-years (distinct from tabling at the student activity fair) that gives student clubs a chance to put on a presentation for potential recruits. You can get more of a vibe for Dawg Daze here. We advertised our event as "A New Kind of Trivia", laying out some basic facts in the event brochure.

Both events started with a presentation that briefly explains how quizbowl works. You can find the presentation here. We also set up a sign-up form and a Protobowl lobby that people could hang out in before the start of the event.

After the presentation, we read some handpicked tossups for the crowd. My criteria for selecting these questions are enumerated in my earlier forum post Some Thoughts On Gradualism. We made an effort to prevent super experienced quizbowl people from participating, and we will probably take that even more seriously in the future.

In 2021, every Dawg Daze event was slammed because they were open to sophomores who were first-years during COVID as well. This meant we ended up getting 100+ people, and so we had to turn lots of people away at the door. That year we had two events: one that used a pop culture packet and one that used an academic packet. The academic packet has been lost to time, but the pop culture one can be found here.

In 2022, we decided that splitting into two different events didn't actually make a ton of sense, so we ran just one event that year. The turnout that year was also more modest, drawing maybe 50-60 people. You can find the packet we used in 2022 here. In this one, we kept track of buzzpoints for the participants. I have anonymized the player data for this version, but you can still see when people were buzzing in. I hope this demonstrates that even newbies can be pretty darn good at quizbowl!

In general, we found that maybe 20% of our club joins as a result of our Dawg Daze events. We are hoping that this number will be higher in future years, as we expect higher early retention.

So how does your club recruit? Please share in the replies!
Kevin Kodama
University of Washington '23
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