Announcing Escade's Event Services Discord
Many of us have wanted to see more activity in our region or group or our roleplay or other NS activity. We may even have tried various ways to boost that activity. The goal of this server is manifold:
1. To help us improve activity through best practices that have been refined over two years of event planning.
2. To connect like-minded people and help build activity across NS.
3. To host events for players, groups or regions!
4. To have more NS-wide events that aren't limited by political factions or other arbitrary things that separate cool people.
Since planning Valentine's Day events on forums when I first started in NS to planning festivals on Discord between major regions and their allies and friends for the past two years - I've learned a lot about hosting and running events. In fact, increasingly I've had a lot of requests from players wanting help running their events, asking me to host for them (for a plethora of reasons), or requesting advice on how to make an event be successful.
My partners and I have created an independent event server which allows you to:
1. Access and make copies of my open source planning documents (which I update and refine with each event)
2. Have a central place to ask event planners questions, pitch ideas, and get suggestions
3. Find people with like-minded interests to plan with
4. Recruit co-hosts\organizers
5. Potentially host events on this centralized server with team support
6. Utilize a job board to make requests for particular skill sets
7. Always know when an Escade party is happening ^.^
What can a well run and well organized event bring?
Events are opportunities to:
- Create activity and fun things for your region to engage in
- Meet and greet with players from another region to build foreign relations
- Celebrate special milestones such as treaties, weddings, or other events worth a party
- Coordinate conferences around topics of interest
- Build awareness about issues
- Develop connections between players and communities
- Recruit members to your region\group
So You Want Some Event Stats?
The Harry Potter and the Festival of Friendship Year One and Year Two had over 153 unique participants on Discord and forums and 77,000 posts!
The Lord of the Rings Festival had over 66 unique participants on Discord and 25180 posts over two weekends!
The Interregional Olympics had over 65 unique participants on Discord and 20,000 posts!
Not to mention the many events that I have hosted have led to treaties with our allies or been a celebration of treaties! Events build connections. While I think of social connections and friendship as more valuable than treaties and such, sometimes those things happen too
What are the struggles people face in creating great events?
- Lack of ideas\follow through
- Not enough active players to actually run things
- Low participation or low quality participation
- Overburdening one or two people who burn out
- People who sign up to do things and disappear
- People that want titles\credit more than doing actual work
- Getting momentum through advertising and building HYPE HYPE HYPE
). The HP Festival which was really born out of a shared love for a fandom and my adoration of XKI members had the highest participation and membership (on Discord and forums) of any such NS event. 