Chess Organization Philosophy 3 of 3

What makes a good chess community?
[as blogged originally on playchess.de Feb 23, 2004]

A chess community offers one or more products/services to a market (the accessible pool of chess players), via a formal or informal organization (with a governance). We can divide this topic into two: (a) Product development and marketing (products include services for our discussion); (b) Establishing and sustaining the organization

Before we cover the two main topics, let's convince ourselves of the applicability of this model (product and organization). For large organizations such as US Chess, there is indeed a corporate structure and well defined products. How well they operate is a separate discussion (see rec.games.politics). But what about very small organizations, such as an informal club run by one person? I will argue that this situation is exactly the same. This person made a decision to start a club because they wanted to reach out to the accessible pool of players, and offer one or more of: (a) a club closer to where they live (accessibility); (b) a club that offers better or a different kind of tournaments (product); (c) a club with different leadership (better governance, organization).

The key point is that the person(s) made a conscious decision to create an entity (organization) that has the responsibility to provide a product. They rely on customers to survive, and the dynamics are similar to the commercial marketplace. The product offered is a venue to play in, at an agreed (hopefully repeatable) time/place, and some structure about the format of play (casual, rated), etc.

Product development and marketing

Chess products ultimately revolve around playing the game. There is certainly a niche market for the aesthetics, such as art, and collectable historical artifacts (see www.ebay.com) but for our discussion, we can focus on playing the game. I will claim this includes products such as:
(a) Organizing a casual game of chess
(b) Creating/maintaining a rating/ranking service
(c) Organizing a rated game of chess
(d) Organizing a tournament
(e) Organizing a Championship
(f) Creating playing materials, such as sets, chess engines, databases
(g) Creating instructional media, such as books, CDs, DVDs
(h) Creating and distributing news content, analysis, commentary
(i) Delivering instructional services
(j) Delivering coaching
(k) Creating and delivering meta-information (portals, directories)

Any particular chess community can only create, offer and deliver a small subset of possible chess products. Communities that try to offer too much will fail. A spectacular example of this is www.kasparovchess.com now defunct. It tried to offer 'world class' playing, instruction, news and more, and then couldn't deliver on any of it well. First they lost their customer base, then investor base, and then failed. An excellent example of success is www.chesscafe.com which focuses on commentary from leading chess personalities, with an attached store.

So we see that selecting the right product(s) to offer is an important decision. Two key questions are: (a) what is the need for this product in the marketplace? (b) do we have a management team (organization, individual) with a passion for the product, and the ability to deliver? We will consider the second questions below ('Establishing and sustaining the organization'). For now, let's discuss product need, positioning and marketing in the chess marketplace. The ideas and concepts are adapted from widely used practices in the commercial product world.

Product need - this is hard. It is a simultaneous exercise of considering the existing chess market, who the big incumbents are that are delivering current functionality; contrasted against the functionality you are considering creating, including quality of service. The picture you will create in this exercise is that of a current need, where customers (chess players) are willing to purchase the product. Remember that you generally can't displace an incumbent with an identical product, there has to something different about your product. For example, are you an organizer considering creating a new set of regional tournaments? What need is that filling that isn't already filled? Are you thinking of starting a chess club or an online community? Think very carefully about the specific product(s) you will be offering. Ask yourself why would a chess customer buy my product? Are you the only club in the area or the only club that night? What about the kind of games you will offer? A recipe for disaster is to just say "I'll wing it, and see what happens, I'll build it, and they'll come". It is certainly advantageous to be flexible, but you must be aiming for specific products, just like you aim for specific squares in a game of chess.

Product positioning - this is crucial, and is often ignored. For the product conceived above, who are you selling the product to (what segment of the chess customers), and what makes your product different, and perhaps unique? Product positioning is where you can fine tune the characteristics of your product (including price) to closely match the needs/pain of your paying customers. For example, if you are a club offering tournaments as the product, what is your differentiator? Do you offer fast games, or slow games? Do you have a consistent or variable schedule? Do you allow business travelers to jump in the middle of a tournament? How professional is your level of service? What is your reputation for getting games rated, and paying out prizes? In the crazy world of chess, high integrity and excellent reputation become important differentiators.

Marketing and measuring - crucial, frequently misunderstood and executed badly. Marketing has three aims: (a) promote the organization; (b) promote the product(s). In addition, you need to (c) record and measure the results.

The first step in promoting anything is to know your audience, and have a channel to reach them. Perhaps through a mailing list of a national chess organization, you can use a piece of. Maybe it is a newspaper advertisement. Maybe it is circulating a flyer at popular tournaments. This must be the same audience that you were assuming when you made important product decisions above. Once you can reach your audience, then you will advertise to them. Usually you will want to promote both your organization, as well as your product(s) in the same advertisement. The tricky thing is that people tend to get the two confused easily. The advantage of keeping these distinct is that you can abandon or change a product, and still keep the organization and its brand.

When you promote your organization, you are really selling your target audience on the fact that they can trust you (the organization) to create a certain range of products that they will like (even though the products can change over time). For example, in the US, if you see an advertisement for a CCA tournament, you immediately know if this is something you want without looking at the details, because CCA has a strong brand and relatively well defined pool of customers, as well as a streamlined product set.

When you promote a product, you are selling a particular thing, to fill a particular need to a particular customer set, for a particular price. For example CCA has the Foxwoods Open. This replaced the New York Open a few years ago. The CCA brand allowed a product to be replaced with little disruption, because people already had a trust level and an expectation level already set. Then it is simply a matter of judging product accessibility, time, price, etc. for the individual chess customer.

Even if your organization only 'does one thing', it is still useful to keep the two aspects separate. When you promote the organization, you are promoting a trust level to your customer base. When you promote a product, you are driving sales. You can abandon a product, but it is fatal to abandon the organization.

Finally, you will want to measure your activities, so you can tell how effective your marketing is. At a minimum, you want to record contact info from sales that actually happened. It is usually easier to maintain and grow an existing customer base, than always having to start over. Promotions directly to existing customers are generally very effective.

Establishing and sustaining the organization

Chess communities are commonly wholly or substantially dependent on volunteers (or low wage 'I do it for love' people) for their success. The scourge of chess communities (especially clubs) is burnout due to the person who created the community being overloaded, and/or the volunteers failing. The trick to sustaining the organization is to recruit, build and retain a sufficient pool of volunteers. The key is balancing volunteer value, workload, and commitment.

The person(s) who created the chess community will undoubtedly be the most committed. People, who are just given small tasks to make the operation work, will have a low level of commitment, because the volunteer value to them is low. They will most likely think "I'll do this just because I want to play chess here". These people will be the most likely to be intermittent, or quit altogether.

On the other hand, creating high volunteer value is an approach that lets a volunteer own a piece of the organization. Give the volunteer responsibility to drive that part of the organization, and let them shape it. Put their mark on it, own it. Do not micro-manage them. Then their commitment is high, turnover is lower. This in turn makes recruiting easier, because now you are deliberately looking for people that want to take over, not just do little tasks here or there. They naturally want to make things happen. You just have to let go, which for some is not easy, and can be a fatal flaw.

By recruiting and retaining people that want their big piece of the pie, the creator of the organization can now focus on maintaining a neutral structure for the volunteers to operate. This can be a charter, by-laws, Board of Directors, etc. This is structure that the active volunteer will naturally not be too interested in, but usually will be happy to operate in, mainly because it constrains everyone the same, and in a transparent manner..

Once you have a structure and a volunteer pool that wants their big slice of the pie, you need to keep recruiting. The reason is growth. If you have created a community and organization with a brand that people trust, and products that people buy, then you will be in growth mode. You will need to keep recruiting volunteers. Start looking for volunteers with management skills. Look at the structure of the IECC (http://www.iecc-chess.org/) for a good example of an organization that has grown because they put a good structure in place, and let people own pieces of it. [NOTE: Even though IECC offers a 'free' product, I still consider it a 'sale' if a player decides to commit 3 months to playing an email chess game with IECC. Nothing is 'free']

The last topic is vague, but nevertheless important. It is attitude. Attitude comes from the top, so start when the organization is small. A sustainable attitude is one where everyone can feel powerful, and they are constrained only by neutral structure like policies and procedures and not by arbitrary personalities. Everyone feels powerful, and everyone is in growth mode, so no one feels threatened. If someone wants to make a positive impact, then they can. Once a core group of people are in place, it is easy to recruit more of the same. Communities with positive energy tend to attract more of the same.

Future topics for the entire chess market

There are many topics that I could 'blog' on in the future including:

1. Federations of chess communities
2. Promoting chess
3. Promoting chess players
4. Developing best practices and chess standards

I'd like to get some feedback to help me decide where to go with this.