Every few months, I run into another discussion about modernizing the SCA’s communications offices. There is widespread agreement on many of the problems — information about events and activities routinely appears only in one channel or another, with key details of an upcoming championship to be found only on a Facebook group, and a fighter practice being announced only on a closed Discord server, and discussion of a feast menu happening on a mailing list which only a fraction of the populace receives, and court reports being included in a PDF “newsletter” which almost nobody reads.
The fact that these communications channels are siloed into separate offices is frequently identified as a problem — with Chroniclers producing newsletters, Web Ministers maintaining Society-run websites, and Social Media Officers administering Society-organized online discussion channels, perhaps it is no surprise that communications end up fragmented as well… And it’s natural to suspect that if we merged those offices into a single team, that would allow our communications to be more coherent across that entire spectrum.
Previous Efforts to Restructure SCA Communications
These issues were equally apparent a decade ago, when the SCA’s Publications Manager ran a “Communications Survey” in the spring of 2015. That survey revealed widespread dissatisfaction with the Society’s communications, and a sense that the Society’s efforts were not well matched to the needs of the populace — for example, a lot of effort is put into producing newsletters that are supposed to be regarded as the authoritative source for many kinds of information, but which are only read by a small number of people.
A number of proposals were made in wake of that survey, most of which were rejected by the Board — or as the euphemism goes, “returned for further work.”
Some of the details of those proposals are a little dated, as they don’t reflect the centrality of social media in today’s information ecosystem, but the core logic of those proposals remains true today — and the Society has made precious little forward progress on any of those fronts in the intervening nine years.
The Inertia of Bureaucratic Fiefdoms
Although I am not privy to the Board’s reasoning, I suspect that a major challenge is the inertia of bureaucratic fiefdoms — to make any real improvement would require an upheaval in the offices of Chronicler, Web Minister, and Social Media, each of which is resistant to change: No office wants to give up any authority, or take on responsibility for any additional work, or be made subservient to any other office.
For example, the Web Ministry, which was originally a deputy role within the Chronicler’s office, pushed hard two decades ago to get itself established as a separate office. Attempting to make web publishing once again a position under the control of the Chronicler’s office would prompt immediate objections from the web folks — and attempting to make the chroniclers report to the Web Ministry would likewise prompt fierce objections on the other side.
Despite the fact that it’s a nearly-universal understanding that the PDF newsletters are not a timely or convenient way of accessing content, the Chronicler’s office is fully committed to its specific role in producing that one form of media, and refuses to allow the creation of PDF newsletters to be made optional.
And on the other side, with a few exceptions the Web Ministry views itself as fundamentally a technology office, and does not want to take responsibility for gathering or creating content — for example, it’s commonly thought that a branch web minister is only responsible for posting announcements about local events that are sent to them by other officers, but is under no obligation to go out and gather information about upcoming events and independently turn that into new web content.
Similarly, in many local groups, the efforts of the Social Media Officer are limited to moderating conversations among the populace on closed Facebook groups — only a small minority of groups effectively produce content for outwards-facing social media such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or the like, and it is extremely rare that the content shared by participants on social media is repurposed to appear in other channels.
One Possible Route Forward: Web Ministry Could Take The Lead
In recent years, I’ve been trying to encourage the Web Ministry to step up to solve this problem by taking on additional responsibilities and growing into the role of the central communications office — in particular, to accept responsibility for soliciting, collecting, editing, and formatting material such as event announcements, post-event retrospectives, and short- and long-form content that shows off all of the different things our populace is doing.
If this happened, the non-content “publication” responsibilities of the chronicler’s office at every level below the kingdoms could be fulfilled by a web minister pressing a couple of extra buttons each month to export relevant portions of the website into PDF format — and the role of the social media office could be reduced to moderating user discussions rather than also being exclusively responsible for producing content for outbound communications.
This approach seems like a natural fit for the Web Ministry — if your perspective is that the Internet is the dominant authoritative channel for outbound communications from every level of the SCA’s organization to the membership and the public at large, it makes sense to lean into it, and to step up to play the role that is required to make that successful — because the web isn’t actually an effective channel if it doesn’t have content that is useful to all of the different kinds of interested audiences, presented in a form that is engaging and appropriate for the medium.
And once you’re doing that, then the same office is also in a perfect position to push that content into other channels — into a Facebook event, and an Instagram post, and a mailing list message, and a Discord announcement, and a PDF that gets filed by the archivist (which sadly seems to be primary purpose of most newsletters these days).
This does require effort, because each communications channel has different requirements, and there isn’t an off-the-shelf tool that will let you click one button to turn a single event announcement into an entry on the kingdom calendar, and a page on the local group’s website, and a Facebook event associated with the group’s “page” identity, and a series of photos-and-text “poster images” on their Instagram feed, and a Discord announcement , and a mailing list message… but there’s a lot of overlap, and it makes much more sense for those tasks to be done as part of a combined process than haphazardly managed by multiple officers each in a separate silo.
But doing all of that would require a lot of work on the part of the web ministry, and it’s not clear whether there are many people who are eager to sign up to put in that effort.
Given that inertia, and the absence of any alternative proposals, I worry that progress in this area may continue to be slow.