looking for feedback on guild annoucements

[wesden]

Hello,
As you may know, I was working on guild projects with the team for roughly the first half of the year. The team's focus was then shifted to forums and that's why you haven't seen me as active as I'd like to be in this guild. But its still important to me smile

I know guild announcements (mass PM) was a highly requested feature that the Gaia team worked very hard on making a reality. We even had it be a gold sink for the guild funds, as guilds were commenting on limited use of guild gold. We had many guild users saying they were "boycotting" guilds until guild announcements were released. Our hope was the feature would really be a boost to guild traffic and activity.

Well, the feature launched in mid-September and I haven't seen much uptake in overall guild activity. I've received a total of 3 guild announcements total for the 10 or so guilds I'm in, and wanted to get your thoughts on if its working, what could be improved, why its not being used, etc.

Do you have other ideas on how you think we can boost guild participation/activity?

thanks for your time smile  

[Shanna66]

i love the announcments, i havent sent any out yet but im in plenty of guilds that do use them and they are very useful.


and maybe more advertising around the site about guilds would help. making contets only goes so far. maybe show the top 10guilds on the homepage of the site or something. right now it seems to me that most of the advertising on the site is for the cash shop and zomg  

[mamarita]

As you may know, I have sent several from here, as have other crew. It's a great way to get people in the loop and to get the guild more active. I have used this for a couple of my guilds. It really is working well, and the cost isn't that great.  

[Colinflower]

Guilds need an entire re-vamp from the interface all round to the core features. I believe many people are just tired of guilds like myself. I use to love them a lot.  

[Pilotslover]

I agree with what Colin on this.

I think that the guilds were neglected for long that they simply stopped being everyone's top concern on Gaia.

Once the guilds are fully updated I'm sure you'll see usage swell.  

[Tantooden]

I've tried the announcement and I shall say that have been really helpful about ideas for them I will have to think it carefully.  

[XenjinHattori]

I agree with the above, already stated. Guild announcements are good, yes, but I think guilds need other updates in addition to those, to increase activity. I'm in 10 or so guilds; I've only had guild announcements from three, and six in total. I'm sure you've heard this, but there are probably three main reasons for a guild to make an announcement:

1) Please show up to this guild.
2) CONTEST!
3) Here's what's going on in the guild/recruiting.

I don't know. I'm quite out of the loop. Oh, and hey, people.  

[mamarita]

What I would like to do is have the last time everyone on the guild was logged onto GAIA. I would make it easier to send out a mass announcement letting people know that we are cutting them from the ranks if they don't come to the guild every so often. Also, people that haven't logged onto GAIA for well over 6 months should be cut.

We need the mass announcement system for that as well as the other reasons already stated. And we have gotten more members here and new members because of the system in place.

Please don't take that away from us!  

[wesden]

mamarita

Please don't take that away from us!

we aren't taking it away - I just wanted to find out more about guilds usage wrt/this feature.
smile  

[shall she sail seas]

I like the guild announcements although I personally haven't used them myself. It's cool to see them coming from the other guilds I belong to, though.

One suggestion: create a log page for all the announcements. Sometimes, computers do stupid things that require us to refresh, close the browser and reopen it, etc. Once the announcement is lost, it seems that it's completely lost. Is this true? If there's an announcement log for people to come back to, it might make things easier for some.  

[wesden]

NomNomNominal

I like the guild announcements although I personally haven't used them myself. It's cool to see them coming from the other guilds I belong to, though.

One suggestion: create a log page for all the announcements. Sometimes, computers do stupid things that require us to refresh, close the browser and reopen it, etc. Once the announcement is lost, it seems that it's completely lost. Is this true? If there's an announcement log for people to come back to, it might make things easier for some.

You can always refer back to past announcements by clicking the "View Guild Announcements" button on the bottom of your guild home page smile  

[Sterekorgtfo]

i luv mass pm  

[Amensu Saje]

Well wesden, I'm the current Captain of a support guild, and I'm trying to get some of my members to be more active inside the guild. Well I've found it very inconvenient when I'm trying to contact the inactive members of the guild, and I've got to send them individual PMs. I really feel that it could greatly increase use of guilds, if we could have a feature within the guild moderator panel, so that the Captain can choose which members get the announcement. And if they want all of the members to receive it, then there will be a button which can be checked that says "All". This way it knows to send it to every member. And other than that, you can go through a list and check the members you'd like to send the announcement to.

This way members that are active, aren't getting pointless announcements from the guild. But the ones that do need the announcement will receive it. I feel that every guild could be more active if a feature such as this would be created.

I know it would create a much easier way to contact the necessary members of the guild. I believe that the Captains within guilds would very much appreciate something like this.

 

[wesden]

Amensu Saje

Well wesden, I'm the current Captain of a support guild, and I'm trying to get some of my members to be more active inside the guild. Well I've found it very inconvenient when I'm trying to contact the inactive members of the guild, and I've got to send them individual PMs. I really feel that it could greatly increase use of guilds, if we could have a feature within the guild moderator panel, so that the Captain can choose which members get the announcement. And if they want all of the members to receive it, then there will be a button which can be checked that says "All". This way it knows to send it to every member. And other than that, you can go through a list and check the members you'd like to send the announcement to.

This way members that are active, aren't getting pointless announcements from the guild. But the ones that do need the announcement will receive it. I feel that every guild could be more active if a feature such as this would be created.

I know it would create a much easier way to contact the necessary members of the guild. I believe that the Captains within guilds would very much appreciate something like this.

One of the reasons we created the guild announcements was to bring back inactive users. Sure, the main point is to communicate with active users, but its a great retention tool, too.

Being able to select which members to send was never really on the radar, as it was meant as a guild announcement. That's not to say that one day it won't be, but the teams have moved off guilds for the time being. And as I mentioned earlier, guild usage is not as strong as we through/hoped it would be after the improvements we made so its hard to get resources back on the guilds project at the current time. Keep an eye out in the future...I hope to get back to guilds and make some improvements with the team smile  

[Shanna66]

maybe a way to send out a mass pm to guild staff only