If you are a fairly active guild with over 40 or 50 active accounts in it, I think it would behoove you greatly to start having monthly guild meetings. If you have a fairly open-door policy during the meeting it will allow your guild members to get a lot of their grievances out into the open and help them feel better about their place in the guild. This is also the best time to tell them about important guild changes such as raiding night rotation, introduce new class leaders, etc.
Here are some tips I suggest for smooth-running guild meetings:
- Have it in-game, in Vent and in an interesting locations. We have a certain floating island in Nagrand that we use each month. When people show up, they can chill by goofing off with emoticons or dueling while the nitty-gritty gets taken care of in Vent. This has also led to at least one comical situation where a PvP-flagged Alliance character happened to come check out our little party. Finally, it is quite heartening to see just how many people have your guild name and wear your tabard.
- Have an agenda lined up. Let the guild members have a system for letting you know what they want to talk about prior to the meeting taking place. This helps keep the meeting running smoothly and quickly. What I do is have members of the guild message me in-game with the subject they would like to bring up. I then keep all of that information in a text file on my desktop that is fast and easy to bring up in the middle of the meeting. In case of a time crunch, the people who email me questions and are added to the agenda get priority over the people who bring stuff up at the meetings.
- Make it respectful. It should be made very clear that the person with the floor isn’t to be interrupted during their initial schpeel. Once they are done open the floor to questions but try very hard to limit off-topic conversation in Vent. Questions should be asked and answered in an intelligent manner; this is not the time for “lawlz boobies” comments.
- Don’t keep people for too long. If people start to get really ansy then don’t be afraid to call the meeting. There is nothing wrong with coming back and visiting more topics in a thread on the guild forums or saving it until next month’s meeting.
That should just about cover the basics. I highly recommend running a meeting or two and seeing how this works out with your guild, I can guarentee you that it will help increase the satisfaction of your guild overall and might help you get people to come forward who otherwise wouldn’t.
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