My Belegarth Background

Hello!  To help you understand how my experiences can help your realm, let me start with some background information about my fighting history, my realms, and my kingdom.  I started fighting in 1999 when I was in high school.  My friends and I found out about Dagorhir (this was before the split) when we made friends with Carl, who had fought some growing up in Ohio.  We did some backyard fighting for a while before I began to become interested in organizing a larger realm.  By the time I graduated high school, Nan Belegorn was a large and growing young realm.  Sadly, after graduation I had to move away for college at Iowa State University, and left Nan Belegorn in the capable hands of Bhakdar (still Alcon at that time).

I got right to work starting another realm in Ames, and with the help of some friends who had also come to ISU from Cedar Falls, we got regular practices going pretty quickly.  We recruited a lot of amazing talent right from the start and that first year Tir Asleen took six people to Oktoberfest, plus Bhakdar from Nan Belegorn.  Fighting in Iowa had taken root.

Fast-forward thirteen years, and I’m still in Ames and still helping run Tir Asleen.  I have gone through periods of intense involvement in the management of Tir Asleen and I’ve gone through periods where others have taken most of the weight for me.  Through all that time I’ve learned quite a bit about what works for us and what doesn’t work for us, and I hope that others in similar situations can learn from our experience.

To make that experience as useful as possible, it’s important that you know a little bit about the community where Tir Asleen is located.  Ames, Iowa is a mid-sized town of 60,000 people (including students) that is dominated by Iowa State University, which had an enrollment of about 30,000 in 2014.  Iowa State University’s award-winning campus was designed as a pedestrian campus, with limited accessibility by car.  Students walk or ride the bus where they want to go, and there are many large, beautiful green spaces sprinkled throughout campus.  In short, it is the perfect setting to fight and recruit new members.

Over the last two years, we have done that in spades.  Tir Asleen has had two years of bumper crops of new fighters in a row, with fall practices ranging from 30-80 people, and averaging around 40-50.  In 2013 and 2014 we took more than 40 people on the five hour drive for Oktoberfest, including 10-15 brand new fighters both years.  In 2014 Nan Belegorn, following many of the same principles we do, had similar success, going from a defunct non-practicing realm to having around 40 fighters at Oktoberfest in about eighteen months.

So with that brief summary of where we came from and where we are now in mind, I will lay out the theory behind our recruiting success as well as the nuts-and-bolts actions that we took to translate that theory into membership over the next several segments.  The theory we developed may not be directly applicable for every realm, but I am convinced that every realm can benefit from a thoughtfully crafted recruitment campaign designed for their unique situation.