Guide to Guild Success: Part 2

With this guide, I plan on writing different articles that will explain most of the hardest parts about owning a guild, upkeep, and on top of that: making it succeed. I hope to provide helpful tips and advices that will come in handy for those who are both old and new to the Guild Community. By no means is this the law, but after years of experience I want to share my knowledge about the place that I got attached to the best. Neopets without guilds would pretty much lack the sense of community and even more, sense of family.

Part 2: Guild Activities

In a guild, it is important to have opportunities for the members to be involved, entertained, and interested. One of the primary and most effective ways to do this is to provide activities for the members to complete, often for points. It is important to have a wide variety of activities: games, puzzles, creative exercises, events, and more. The purpose of guild activities is to ensure that all members are happy and have some things to do in their down time.

To start with, let me explain you what all these Guild Activities are. Mainly, Guild Activities are games you will be offering your members to participate in when they join your guild. Whether you offer one, ten or fifty, if guild members don’t take time or feel motivated to participate in them, you will most likely be removing them shortly after.

A lot of people might be wondering, why offer activities at all? Shouldn’t normal guild content be enough to entertain the members with chatting, etc? Well normally, yes this would be true. But, it is important to remain realistic in your expectations for a guild. Is it reasonable to assume that every single member will be there to chat throughout the day? We all have things to do, people to see! So we must keep this in mind, and prepare things that members can do on their own and still feel involved. Members are expected to participate if they can. It is important to have active and participatory members in a guild to uphold the activeness that a guild may once hope to take pride in. Activities can be an equivalent to a regular site feature like the games room, if done correctly; they can be just as fun and encompassing.

People always ask for me, specially when they belong to a guild. While it’s fantastic your guild may stay chat-based, where all members would just stick to chat, do you think that at some point they won’t ask for something else? Rather than waiting for guild members to complain how there is nothing else to do but chatting in the guild, why don’t you take a step forward and already provide them? Members, once they found the guild offers more than just a chatty board, they will feel encouraged to do something else and to provide something to the guild as well. Wouldn’t it be great to see your guild members taking part of what you worked hard on for? People are afraid of doing activities because they think no one will do them. While this still remains in certain guilds, let me tell you that it’s not impossible to make them succeed and earn a special spot within the guild. At some point, members will be just tired to do the same routine every day: Log into their accounts, dailies and chat in the guild board. Your goal to achieve is to make the guild activities something they would see as an habit, rather than as a task.

Activities can also become huge motivators for members to improve not only their accounts, but also to themselves and the overall guild. Members can be motivated to complete activities by receiving points and feel achievement and reward. Each guild is different, however, and not each guild will have points given to members for completing activities. It is up to each guild’s discretion whether or not they will reward members with points or whatever they think would still work as a motivation. But, I speak from experience when I say that most members need an incentive to continuously participate in things like activities, otherwise participation will be minimal or none. It is when a guild provides a reward for member’s hard work and dedication that participation will be high.

We know that it is against the rules to offer Neopoints and/or items as prizes. You can tell that any member who participates will get free paint brushes, because your guild will most certainly be deleted. However, this is not the only way to stimulate members. As you previously saw, I mentioned points. Guild Points are basically a kind of system you can use within your guild. You see, TNT is always making some good plots where you will earn points throughout the steps and missions you complete. At the end of said plot, a prizes shop is opened to public. That’s what you can do in your guild that will not be contradicting or breaking any Neopets Rules. You can simply state in your Guild Activities that members will earn a certain amount of points and then when they finally collected a good number, they are free to redeem them for special guild prizes. Prizes that do not involve Neopoints or Items, that is. You can offer small graphics such as banners, buttons, guild fonts or even lookups they can use to support the guild. In this way, you are not only rewarding members for being dedicated but also you will see how your hard work is finally paying off.

As for the time Guild Activities have to be updated, this can just depend on whether or not you have time to do it. I would recommend to set deadlines, so people will try to work on them as soon as they have enough time. Having activities for about two months is highly recommended, because you will be ensuring people have enough time to do them. Making them weekly or bi-weekly will never work, if you were wondering. Same would happen during school time, just make sure to extend the deadline for those who may not have as much free time as others to participate in them.

Last but not least, within Guild Activities one should also consider throwing Guild Events from time to time. You may be wondering what these events are about, well basically they are special activities you or a member can host for all the guild to take part in.