Hey all, 

Just looking around various Ministry staff areas early in the term, I'm noticing we could use some fresh faces in the staffs of almost all of our Ministries (FA may be the exception to this, likely because "Ambassador" sounds super impressive for new players). In general, there are going to be two ways to increase our staff numbers and engagement levels: recruiting and retention. Retention is a broader thing about creating a good environment inside your Ministry and maintaining communication and involvement with staff.

Recruiting is something we can tackle more directly, and is something we need to tackle before we attempt efforts on the retention front. (After all, attempting new retention programs is rather pointless if we don't have new members to retain.) As a result, I wanted to start a thread to (a) discuss ideas for executive staff recruiting and (b) divide and conquer to execute on those ideas. Since these are Cabinet-wide promotional ideas, I'm happy to take point on doing some of the labor to execute them.

I have a few, likely of varying levels of effectiveness and for different target audiences, ideas for how to promote activity in our Ministries/executive staffs. Anyone else is welcome to add more ideas or give critiques on how to make mine more effective and/or prioritizing them based on possible return on investment.

Region-wide Staff Promotion TGs
The most basic idea is to do region-wide staff promotion TGs, weekly or bi-weekly efforts to get the word out about one of our Ministries (or OWL) and working in it. To spice things up, I think we should do individualized TGs for each Ministry (rather than one for all of them) and include information not only about what the Ministry does and how to get involved but also testimonials about what makes working in that Ministry particularly satisfying/engaging, so as to really sell the experience.

In a more technologically sophisticated version of the idea, we could attempt to target specific nations via API/script tools with TGs based on taking certain on-site actions for promotional materials related to specific Ministries. Nations that leave the WA could be contacted about SPSF ("Want to help regional security without your main nation needing to obey those pesky WA laws"), nations that post Dispatches could be contacted about MoM (since those nations are more likely to enjoy content production), nations that are doing things with trading cards could be contacted about MoE's cards team, nations that post a lot on the RMB might be interested in MoC, etc. This is likely a long-term technically extravagant project that may be infeasible, but is sort of my ideal dream world of on-site promotion.

Discord Pings
Similarly (and likely with similar content), we can do @Citizens or @Legislator pings on Discord to promote specific Ministries and their staff from time to time.

Forum Announcements
The most underutilized means of promotion we have right now is the forum. We have whole swaths of Legislators who are active on the forum but not on Discord and (except for SPSF and to some extent OWL) there is no reason they shouldn't be able to be involved in working for Ministries. (Nothing about writing for TSJ, for example, requires Discord.) Could we utilize our "Announcements" forum or the "Executive Offices" areas to get promotional material about different Ministries out there, and potentially in front of different audiences? And is there any way to move some of our Discord operations to private forum sub-boards (somewhat like MoFA's "News from Abroad" thread) so we can actually take advantage of potential involvement from forum-only users?

Promotional Voice Chats
Some Ministries could hold promotional Voice Chats via Discord for their Ministry. Have the Minister and a few of their senior staffers sit in VC, maybe host a game of some sort, talk a little about the Ministry itself, and hope people listen in and want to be part of the team.

Promotion via the Helper/Buddy Program
Tisha's campaign focused on establishing a helper/buddy program to provide one-on-one outreach to new South Pacificans and get them involved. Part of this outreach could include explicit conversations about their interests and trying to match them to different Ministries for recruitment/further involvement.

Alrighty, there's some thoughts! Open to others' input.