Starting a Guild: The Basics
A little while ago I asked for some motivation and I got a good response from Ravenandrose who wanted to know:
How about how to expand a guild? My guildie/significant other is leaving the game, leaving me with a guild bank full of mats and nothing to do with them.First, I apologize for the delayed response to your suggestion. With 3.1 coming out things got a little bit busy and I kept finding other things to write about so this kept getting pushed up on my list until today when I said ok, too much, need to write it.
How to properly start a guild, or at least your ideas on it, would be good too.
I know I have written on this subject before but it is still good to revisit it as time goes on.
My first suggestion would be to come up with a plan. What do you want the guild to be? Raiding? Casual? PvP? Starting off with a good plan lets you make some tough decisions up front instead of having to deal with them later once they come up.
Once you come up with a basic goal for the guild then you build upon it. Appoint officers and create policies.
Policies can be done a few ways and can be very detailed or very vague, depending on the group you are working with. You mentioned you had a guild bank full of mats. Your first policy should be how the guild bank is handled. If you don't make the decision then people with access to the guild bank are just going to use it as they see fit and it will never have much of a purpose. Some policies can of course be made by yourself before you start, but sometimes others may be best to make with the help of your officers and/or general members. Not setting policies at all will make your guild just fall into the casual guild that people are in because they have nothing else better to be in. That's not much of a direction, but if that is your choice then there you go but generally those guilds don't end up with many members and don't last very long.
Remember, guilds are volunteer organizations and people are with you for a plethora of reasons. You want to maintain their loyalty or your guild will falter. Also keep in mind that 95% of the people that play the game play it to have fun and being in your guild is part of that fun. Find out what that fun is and try to build your guild off of it. It is of course just as true in-game as out that you can never please everyone all the time, but you can please most of the people most of the time and that is your goal.
Good luck on starting the guild. If you need any other help feel free to e-mail me at Kreeoni (at) gmail (dot) com or get me on twitter.
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