Hi folks. You may have noticed in our recent team announcement on Facebook that I’ve joined the Underworld LARP team in an online capacity. I’m the developer who did the website redesign late last year. I’ll be getting more involved in managing online content and social media for Underworld LARP going forward. Check out my bio for a bit of background on my skillset, but basically, I really like the thought of LARP as a small business, especially from a technology standpoint, and I’m super excited to be contributing here.
I have experience in tech, entrepreneurship and education. I used to teach at a school to help people become tech entrepreneurs. I’ve learned a lot in my time through my various roles and I love the fact that I can help share some of this info with people in the LARP community.
Author’s note: The information and opinions provided in this article are in no way meant to convey the belief every LARP should be run one way, that every LARP should be profitable, or that every LARP can or should evolve into the same thing. Rather, the intent with this article is to help LARP runners consider additional means of achieving goals they may have in how they run their LARP. It’s an almost certainty that none of these suggestions would apply to all LARPS, nor should they.
Treat your LARP like a small business
I love LARP and I love the passion I see every day in the LARP community.
One of the first things we look for when someone applies to start an Underworld LARP Chapter is a high level of passion and creativity. We know that these attributes in LARP owners are critical to providing the best experience to their players. Providing the best possible creative experience will help draw in new players and retain existing ones. It’s vitally important to a LARP.
There aren’t many small businesses that offer an experience similar to a LARP. It’s critical to your success as a LARP owner to understand the creative process in order to perfect that experience, and it’s equally critical to remember that there are other small business strategies you can adopt that will help your business as a whole.
This post represents the first in a series of posts about this subject. Today we’ll be giving an overview of some of the things that LARP owners should be aware of in order to maximize their business development. In the future you can expect that we’ll go into further detail on these, and other, subjects. When we help you start a LARP we want to make sure you have the best chance of success.
Be as online as possible
Many LARPs are pretty good with online communities. LARPers represent one of the most engaged customer demographics imaginable, and LARP owners realize that they need to provide a way to keep their players engaged between events. Forums were the standard way of achieving this previously. More modern approaches to achieving this can be found via Facebook groups, and there’s a lot of possibilities by running a chat service like a Discord server.
Where a lot of LARPs fall short is in their marketing technology and business practices. Remember: you’re not just marketing to LARPers, you’re trying to engage and acquire new customers. LARP is non-traditional and the player-base often consists of people with countless different interests and from various walks of life.
When marketing to a demographic that varied it’s important to have as many standard marketing means available as possible. Have a website, even if it’s a simple one-pager from a service like Wix or SquareSpace. Don’t use these in lieu of a Facebook page or Facebook group, but to bolster that existing footprint and try and catch people who may be looking for more traditional marketing.
Market Yourself like a Small Business
LARPs are pretty good at using social media, but often miss executing on one of the most important reasons to be on social media: growth. If your goal is to get bigger and get more players you need to be going out of your echo chamber in order to recruit. A lot of LARPs are good at doing this in places like conventions or community events, but don’t discount your reach online.
The best thing about marketing online is that countless people do it and there’s a pile of documentation online on how to start and get better at it. Googling something like “Best resources online to learn marketing” will get you a pile of results. I recommend Neil Patel as a resource who understands online marketing methodologies. Here he’s written a blog post about resources to help you be better at marketing online. It’s so meta.
Don’t ever forget online advertising. It’s possible to get real specific from a regional and interest standpoint. You can definitely pay a little bit of money to Facebook and have a high probability of reaching LARPers in your area. If you spend $20 advertising to 50,000 people, and one person signs up, that person will definitely pay more than $20 in LARP fees in their future as a LARPer.
Talk to the Press
Your local newspaper wants to do a story on you. LARP is super interesting. That doesn’t mean everyone will be interested and you’ll do massive recruiting, but because so many different types of people could be LARPers you want to make sure to get your message out wherever you can.
Newspapers need to put out content every day. Local entertainment, local small businesses, local creative arts, these are all subjects of interest to a newspaper. Take advantage of that resource. By doing their job they’ll help you out.
I’ll be covering some tips & tricks on how to speak to the media in a future post.
Get Small Business Training
There are all sorts of resources available regionally to help people manage and run small businesses. If you make money you’re a small business. By running it you’re an entrepreneur. Want to make more money? There are strategies to achieve that goal.
Train Your People
LARPs are often powered by volunteers. It’s hard to have enough money to pay everyone, but it’s definitely possible to invest into them in order to make your product better and help them feel appreciated. If you view the people who help execute your vision for your game as writers, actors and other creatives, you can quickly see that there are also methods for them to get better at those roles.
Connect some of your people to the local writing or theatre scenes. Help them meet peers that will allow them to grow creatively. If they’re passionate enough about being involved in LARP to volunteer, they’re passionate enough to want to self improve at it.
If you’ve got some extra money at the start of a season, maybe consider hiring a local theatre person to teach an acting workshop to them. It would be good team building, it would help them be better in their roles, and even when they’re done volunteering and go back to being a player they’ll be a higher quality player.
Train Yourself
Whatever you do as part of your role, whether it’s finances, plot, administration, logistics, writing or acting, there are ways for you improve those skills. You can. People do it all the time. You’re probably expected to do it for your day job.
It only makes sense that you’d do it for your small business.
In Conclusion: we’re a small business too!
This applies to us at Underworld LARP. We’ve been working hard to grow this for years as evidenced by our multiple appearances on Dragon’s Den and all the other changes we’ve made. We’ve entered a new phase of this journey.
We’ll be putting out more content like this in the future. We want to help our Underworld LARP Chapter Owners grow their small businesses and we want to see the community as a whole grow bigger. Stay tuned in future weeks as we elaborate further on all of these above subjects, and more! We’re also excited to be opening up our website to content like this from other sources.
We’re a business too and we’re going to keep trying to get better and better.