Hello, friends! It's time for the quarterly Emissary update again, and we've got quite a few things to announce.

The Arx Dispatch, Volume I, Issue 2

With the start of a new quarter, it's time for a new edition of our member newsletter, The Arx Dispatch! This issue features an entirely new (and much cooler, and more eye-friendly) design thanks to our wonderful Siv, so please make sure to check it out! Huge thanks to Siv and Nora for the work they put into producing this.

Arx Dispatch Companion Events

Not to be outdone, Windos and I are running a series of short competitions alongside the release of the newsletter. They run until the 14th, and include events like sudoku, Wordle, and word search. If you're looking for a change of pace from the usual puzzle comps, come check it out!

I'll also be running a summer-themed Emissary social RP, like the spring RP I did earlier this year. Details will be on Discord in #rp-lobby when it's set up.

Recruitment and Retention Updates

Our active member count is on an upward trend. In June we reached 273 active members (including Clan and Council members, but not active Rogues), which was our highest number in the past year.

Out of the people who joined in the five quarters (a year and three months) between April 2023 and June 2024, 44% of them were still in a unit by the end of June 2024.

We've also had our first recruitment trophy earner! Congrats to Masahiro Haku/Wulfram Armis for being the first person to earn a level in Together, We Will Rule the Galaxy.

For those of you who like details:

• The number of random joins (i.e. people who weren't recruited by a current DJB member) has been dropping compared to the number of people who were recruited by a current DJB member. More on that later.

• The number of people recruited by a current member has gone up, in terms of both raw numbers and their share of overall new joins. The number of recruiters has also jumped quite a bit in the past six months, which makes me very happy.

• As of the end of June, 44% of members who had joined in the past year were still members of a unit. For random joins, the number was 29%. For recruited members, the number was 58%. This is pretty typical—we've known for years that people with strong ties to existing members are more likely to stick around long-term.

Future Plans

The Emissary Staff's main focus over the next six months is to improve the Brotherhood's discoverability, which is fancy marketing-speak for "making it easier for people to find us". Social media and our public-facing website will be the two biggest parts of that project.

Social Media

In a recruitment context, social media's job is to get people's attention long enough to get them to check out our website. It's the current version of posting recruitment links in public Facebook groups and Star Wars subreddits, but success or failure is determined by the fickle whims of a being even more sinister than the Dark Side: the algorithm.

Seriously though, getting traction on social media is a long process. The most important part is making sure your posts are interesting enough that people will like/upvote them, save/favourite them, share them, and subscribe/follow your account. We're working on the best ways to source that content, including submissions from the #highlights channel on Discord.

Another element of taming the algorithm is regularity in posting, which we've already gotten feedback about and are incorporating into our content schedule.

Website

Social media gets people to the website, but it's the website's job to convince them to join. At several people's suggestion, we're updating the visitor front page to make it more useful as a recruitment tool.

This is going to happen in several stages. As a temporary measure, we've changed the site to show the About page to people who aren't logged in, so they can learn a little about us instead of seeing a bunch of no-context news posts. The next step is turning the front page into a properly recruitment-focused site. We'll share more details about that when the time comes.

Speaking of websites, we're still running a survey about what improvements you'd like to see to the member home page. We're trying to gather feedback from as wide a segment of members as possible, so keep those answers coming! The survey will run until site reset on August 31.

Closing Out

I hope this post has given you some insight on what the Emissary Staff are doing to expand the Brotherhood's numbers and make sure our members have an enjoyable experience. If you have any suggestions, please don't hesitate to contact us on Discord or via one of the links below.

See you all next time!

Links

• Brotherhood Leadership Feedback Form: Click Here
• Emissary Staff Google Group: [Log in to view e-mail addresses]

• Emissary Staff Suggestion Box: Click Here

• Instagram: DJB Official Instagram

• X/Twitter: DJB Official X/Twitter