Talk:Outreach

I kind of want this page to have a section on fallacies and what doesn't work in outreach, since that's such an important topic in quizbowl right now and it might be very helpful to those trying to use the page as a resource. This would include:

• Taking extensive outreach advice from people who have never actually succeeded at the outreach task in question (recruiting people to a team, starting a new team at their school, attracting new teams to tournaments in an area)
• Confusing "making excuses for not attempting or succeeding at outreach" with "outreach"
• Only performing team outreach to schools that meet some standard of eliteness
• Only performing player outreach to people with similar non-quizbowl interests as the person doing outreach
• Only performing player outreach to people with similar levels of interest in quizbowl as the person doing outreach
• Combining the responsibilities for sanctioning misconduct and performing outreach into one process or person, such that an organization's "outreach" consists entirely of restricting people from participating in quizbowl
• People or organizations dedicated to "outreach" engaging in extensive "quizbowl is for nerds," "being too interested in quizbowl is a mental disorder," and other negative-outreach discourses

However, I'm not sure how to edit this material in myself without it being perceived as a personal attack on people I've criticized for the above behaviors in the past. Is there someone else willing to go at this from a fresh angle? Matt Weiner (talk) 20:13, 13 May 2021 (CDT)

Some of this (the first 5 in particular) sounds really good, I'll see if I can add a section at the end about those after I finish up external outreach and work more on internal outreach. I'm not aware of the exact circumstances about the latter two, so I might leave that for others who know more. - Chris C.

I've added sections on both "Best Practices" for outreach and "Common Outreach Mistakes." I think that should cover most of these. I added a sample outreach flyer and will add a successful outreach email (with details removed) as well. There could also be more about the relative importance that quizbowl places on outreach and how that has waxed and waned over time. - Chris C.

Surely we could have a sample flyer that doesn't have the Microsoft Word squiggles? –Alex Damisch (talk) 14:17, 20 May 2021 (CDT)

Improved flyer added. If people want the original copy of it (it also has a back) to modify for their own use, they should feel free to contact me. - Chris C. as of 20:00 PST 5/20.