Bravo Fleet
Bravo Fleet Communications Office
September 2019 Operational Report
Since taking over as the BF Communications Officer in July of 2019, the fleet has aggressively sought to get the word out to the internet that we continue to be one of the world’s largest and oldest Star Trek Simming groups out there. Thanks to the good work of our communications team (which for the moment includes myself and VAdm Browsden), we have successfully launched recruitment campaigns on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and Discord. These campaigns have resulted in renewed interest and I hope more applications across the board for our simms.
Since July, we have run several campaigns aimed at:
- Bringing more people to our website, enticing them to get involved with all that Bravo Fleet has to offer
- Solicit applications for command/GM positions
Here were the ads that we used on Facebook:
In the future, we hope to continue doing more of this, using new creative and new messaging. Here were our results:
Overall for a first time try at this, and with limited funds, I believe we had a positive return.
Advertising on Reddit takes two forms: posting and being an active member of the community, and paid ads that show up on various subreddits. Through our account: /u/bravo_fleet, I have been posting in various Star Trek subreddits just trying to get the word out about us and steer folks to our website. There has been moderate interest, however, I believe that with some help, we can really use Reddit to our advantage.
Here are the results of our ad and some posts we’ve made:
Activity on twitter has been albeit, limited. During the Star Trek Las Vegas convention and the news coming about the new Picard series, I tried my best to keep involved in the conversation by tweeting, retweeting, and even replying to certain tweets with our account. I believe that Twitter can be a good place to get the word out about what we’ve doing, but active recruitment may not be the most fruitful since most folks tend not to spend as much time as we would need to explain just what we do. That being said, I believe we should still stay active on Twitter, especially as ST: Discovery comes back for another season and we get new Trek in the form of Picard.
DISCORD
Recruitment and general PR on Star Trek and Sci-Fi related Discord servers have been lead ably by VADM Browsden. He has identified several discords which he has gone into as an advocate for Bravo Fleet and tried to spread the word, make some posts, and of course, get folks to come check us out. While this takes time and effort, I believe our initial findings have proven that this can be a good way to recruit, especially with a team of folks behind us. This will be especially important as Discord continues to grow as a communications platform.
FINAL THOUGHTS
While I believe we have made great strides in recruitment, we still have a long road ahead of us. And, quite frankly, we need more hands to help do the work. Specifically, I think we need a few folks for the following jobs:
- Facebook Manager
- Twitter Manager
I envision these folks as doing the posting on these two platforms that require curating. Finding things to post should be easy enough. I think we should be showcasing our writing! We have a plethora of actual posts we can post excerpts from, infobase articles that we can share with the world. We just need someone who can take this on as their contribution to the betterment of the fleet. Additionally, I think we need all the Bravo Fleet members who are active on Reddit, to start showing off Bravo Fleet!
If you are interested in one of the jobs above, or you want to lend a hand recruiting on Discord, or you want to provide a comment/constructive criticism – please shoot me an email at comms@bravofleet.com! I’d be happy to hear from you!
