I’ve just spent the weekend at Wellygeddon, handing out cards and flyers to some of the 22,000 geeks in attendance. This is the fifth year we’ve done this, and after five years I’m wondering whether we can do it better.
There’s an old saying that “Larp is sold by word-of-mouth”. Larping is a social activity, and the best way to get people to try it is if they know someone who already larps. That way they have the reassurance of a friend there, so they’re not faced with the intimidation factor of meeting a whole room full of strangers.
But when we recruit at Armageddon, we’re typically contacting people who don’t know us. They may know what larp is, because they’ve seen that episode of Supernatural or some other media coverage, or they may be larp-adjacent and play tabletop rpgs or do cosplay and find the idea of running around and hitting orcs with a foam sword or pretending to be someone else while looking badass in their costume appealing. But there’s still that intimidation factor. Which is probably why despite handing out flyers and getting names and email addresses on signup sheets, we have a relatively low uptake rate of these people actually showing up for games. I’m looking for suggestions on how to improve that if we can.
(I’m also after stuff about the basic stages of catching people’s attention and getting them interested, but I’ll add that to the thread later).