GROW your Chess.com Club Part 1: Things to know
Prelude
This is a topic that is seemingly easy to approach but is difficult to explain. In simple terms, just "grind" but there's always more to the case. This is Part 1 of a series of blogs describing how to GROW your Chess.com club. In this blog, I will be explaining how to boost your club, such as Member Gains, Vote Chess, Daily Chess Matches, Live Arenas, Club Partnership, Internal Organization, and so much more. As a player who has had incredible club luck and success, I oversaw The Great and Extraordinary Chess Club grow from 600 members to 1300 members and The United Chess Nations member count of 4000-11000+ with top 10 in vote chess, I'm ready to spill the beans and help you achieve what you dream to achieve. So, let us start with the basics.
Chapter 1:The Beginning Phase
(Please keep in mind that everyone has their own way of doing things. I'm trying to simplify things I learned from my experience into something relatively easy to follow, kind of like one of those premovable chess opening). Anything, large or small starts with a beginning. And this part serves as the foundation of your club. Starting off from 1-100 members is one of the longest journeys. To make this shorter having partner clubs can help you achieve this first major milestone. I recommend partnering with a larger club such as UCN (The United Chess Nations), Chess Champ, Chess.com vs. ChessKid, etc. Partnering is when two clubs agree advertise the other club and participate together in events such as Vote Chess which benefits both clubs. These big clubs (I call all clubs over 1500+ members big clubs) can really help stimulate the growth of a young club. At the start, I wouldn't focus on any real club event. This is because the number of people in a club speaks for itself. The more people you have the more likely someone will join without an invitation. Now this is where lots of people go wrong. They promise admin roles in their club for newcomers. Now this is a bad move in my opinion. The reason being that you want a more or less dedicated staff team that isn't too large. I’ll explain why in Chapter 4, but for now, trust me—regardless of your club’s size or age, organization is key. Once you hit 100+ members, this is where you want to specialize in something. If it's Vote Chess, then do Vote Chess. The point is that you want to make the statistics of your club look good. The aim is to get on a leaderboard one day and if your club is on some kind of leaderboard, it's more likely people are going to join without invitation. However, you still need to keep inviting members like your life depends on it, because maybe it does. Use your daily 30 invitations wisely, "target" active players, not titled or those socially popular people who don't want business in some club that has under 1000 members. For now, these people don't really need to contribute anything although you need to start building your staff team. Another big mistake I see is people offering big roles in their club to titled players. This is a problem. Most titled players are on chess.com for two reasons. Play chess, advertise for students, or both. Having a GM in your club might look nice, but in reality they barely will do anything to stimulate the growth of your club. Focus on active players who aren't "famous" yet but have a true heart of helping the club improve. And remember these are the important steps of the beginning phase, there might be more but no matter what, always remember that this is the most important stage and you'll need to work 10x harder to achieve your goals. Now, there is no direct way but a really helpful tip is inviting lower rated players. This is because most higher rated players are on chess.com to improve not talk to people while lower rated players don’t care as much about spending time on non-improvement activities. Struggling up to that 1,000 members is something most clubs don't even achieve but with late nights, a determined mindset that you have when you tilt 10 blitz games at 1:00 a.m., and the feeling of seeing success in something you created can power you through to that 1,000 player mark.
Chapter 2: Having your specialty
Any big or "good" club has something special about it. UCN has diamond arenas/tournaments where member is involved as a prize, Chess.com vs. ChessKid has lots of forum games such as Hurt and Heal, and I'm sure other clubs have their own thing that I haven't quite discovered. This gives you a sort of bargaining tool when it comes to getting club partnerships with bigger clubs or when you go to the point where some of the social powerhouses such as @Scemer, @Jared (retired though😔), etc, are willing to join or offer you advice. Now be sure to have some kind of slogan or catchphrase, start including more rules, and start the sweet achievements/accomplishments list (although you need to update it frequently if needed)! Being unique isn't a bad thing, it can be good if you utilize the good aspects of it. Find a proper balance between having social activities between players, and chess because this site is for chess and people don't just log onto chess.com to talk to their friends, or do they?
Chapter 3: Chess related club activities
I assume that when you start to use the steps of this chapter, you have around 1000 members, some staff like 5+ people and some Daily and Vote Chess matches played so your team has a good sense of it if they're new. This is where neatness kicks in. Nobody wants to join a club that has a background that looks like a child urinated on a canvas or a something that looks like a chaotic crayon explosion, or worse 😅 (idk maybe some people like that) but what I want to say is make it neat. Simple can strike as neat. For example, CVC has their owner @Caleb341 name on their logo. In my opinion this isn't the best as the less words the better. I'm not going to talk too much about design but stick with the simple stuff! Since I criticized CVC aka Chess.com vs. ChessKid, I'll say something that I like about it which is that their team has put together a very nice background in their club. See for yourself here in this link, see how their background has this nice light green to dark green fade? It's simple yet looks relaxing, calm, and cool! Ok now let's get into the juicy part of this whole blog. CLUB EVENTS🥳!!! First of all, let me just say that winning lots of these events not only makes your club look good to outsiders, but also for your inner team and shapes up your team. Vote Chess and Daily Chess matches aren't that hard to win. As the UCN Vote Chess Leader, I recommend 24 hour/ 1 day vote chess games. This is kind of a cheat to speed up vote chess growth. It's a perfect amount of time for your team to discuss, but not too late to win on time as well. As long as the heavy lifting is being done, by yourself, or your team the results really show over time. I'm not too sure about daily matches but I do give myself a rule which is to accept ALL club match challenges. Because once again, nothing beats the grind. And be sure to start including these ranks in your accomplishment lists. Now I'm going to discuss a problem that I want to be solved which is that no matter how much a club claims to be partnered or with another club/clubs there are no real Multi Club Swiss or Arenas which in my opinion can highly help grow (inflate kinda) members of all participating clubs. Okay, I sometimes see one of these arenas being thrown around but there's not that much communication between clubs. You just send an invitation and hope the other club/clubs accept. So my plan is to (*pov an ad or sponsorship is coming) create a sort of alliance, where there are weekly Multi Club Arenas (kinda like Lichess Bundesligas). Now that's just a hope/dream I have to one day unite more clubs on chess.com than ever before (this doesn't really concern you but I just needed somewhere to put this in). But being intertwined (I shouldn't say intertwined), but being close or connected with other clubs does help stimulate your own club growth.
Chapter 4: Common Mistakes
Now it's not fair or accurate for me to judge some of these moves as "mistakes" but it's more of a misconception that people have. So let me organize these for you to better understand them.
1. Providing admin ranks to early newcomers. This seems like a good way to get members to join but it's not a smart idea, first of all, you should not trust some people unless they've really proved to be loyal or a good influence to your club. A good way to tell what's the real deal is by offering step by step promotion. Let them work up your trust because say if they are a Super Admin and want to ruin your club, they can literally kick everyone from that club and setting those members back is a big pain.
2. Offering admin ranks to titled players/higher rated players. As I mentioned earlier, this is wrong because most of these players will want to engage in chess improvement related topics, not some community that functions more like social media.
3. Be annoying. This one's pretty self explanatory, if you constantly spam club invitations in a club or make every conversation an advertisement, nobody's going to want to join your club.
4. Make it formal. This is a topic that everyone can improve on. No matter if it's me having a conversation with the owner of Chess Champ (@HenryUrbanek) our conversations always include slang, contractions, etc. This is fine if you know the person, but say if you want a partner club with some really big club, and you don't know the owner, This is where you have to pull out your vocabulary and communication skills to secure that sweet deal. Also keep your club internally formal. If someone was about to join your club and saw that half of your forums are people spamming "Ronaldo or Messi?" it starts them off with a bad impression of your club.
5. Be extra forgiving and be more calm. This is also an obvious one, do not kick someone from your club if they are arguing with you (that's abuse of power technically). Try to make your community safe and please don't be that one crashout person. You want to be seen as that "cool" person, maybe not popular. This helps you secure more deals like partnerships, because others don't want to associate themselves with something bad.
Chapter 5: Set a SMART Goal
A smart goal is something that is Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. You've most likely heard this before but it helps track your progress, make you feel good and encourage when you meet those requirements, and one day, you'll look back and see how far you've come. And the best part? You can set a SMART goal for anything, maybe you want to achieve top 10 in vote chess, 5,000 members, it doesn't matter what it is, it makes a long journey more manageable.
Coda
These tips and strategies might not be exactly essential—maybe you're just reading for fun—but in case you are interested, is most of what I know about improving your club that isn't "It's simple, just grind." However, this is only Part 1 on this topic. I've covered most of what I know here but in the upcoming blogs I'll include more fun activities, charts (oh god please no), about the author stuff (in case you're interested), a less detailed but more direct steps (if you want it), a possible FAQ, and so much more! Well signing off for now!
Best of Luck
Demonic Archangel
