If you're a group, like a club, I get the need to recruit more members; or the club will die. I ran a Civil War reenacting group for near 40 years, and basically everything we did was with an eye to recruiting. We got uncountable "inquiries" from people that didn't really have an honest interest in what we were doing.
What folks seem to be talking about here, at least at the start, isn't getting people into "our club," but interested in the hobby, in general. First off, it's not all one hobby. There's enough sub-sets of model ship building to make your head spin, and if you're entrenched in your particular aspect of it, such as "admiralty style" models, it's most likely you'll be recruiting for your interest. What if that scares off the potential recruit that may have found nirvana building plastic kits, which you had no interest in?
We here are here because we had a real interest in something. I wanted to work on sailing vessels since I was in single digits, and reading, drawing, and modeling were the only access a street kid like me had. When I finally did work on these vessels, I never lost interest in reading, drawing, and modeling them. No one recruited me into a hobby, I went looking for it.
If you go looking for people to recruit, you'll mostly get people who'll can't or won't make anything, they just like looking, and almost all of them won't know what they're looking at. You know them, they're always gushing at AI pictures, stacks of Legos, and anything with pirate flags. They don't know which end of the screw-driver goes in which end of the nail, and are you personally going to baby-sit them for half-a-day until their attention runs out?
There are people out there who have a deep interest and a yearn to learn, but aren't aware of the hobby because the Internet only shows the garbage when you search. If you want those people, the key is visibility. As I said, my Civil War group did everything with an eye to recruiting, but we only wanted people with a real interest in what we did, and we "marketed" ourselves to that end;
We are NOT a "family oriented" organization, we are a 19th century MILITARY oriented organization. If your being a reenactor requires your family and baggage to be dragged along, please scan our links page for one of the many "family oriented" organizations you'll find there.
By making our group visible and accessible, people came to us, and by being up-front with them, we got quality members that made keeping the standards of the unit easy. I'm sure we sent a lot of bodies to groups that were only interested in getting bodies, but a few of those folks came back after experiencing a group that really didn't care.
There's a few forums like Ships of Scale, Model Ship World, and I'm sure some that are "foreign language" sites to me, that offer viewing, participating, learning, comradery, and more; and in my opinion are the best resource for anyone with interests in maritime modeling than any thing else on the Internet. Facebook and YouTube aren't destinations, they are sign-posts to lead interested people here, and eye-candy for those that just want to look.
When I started building
Constellation I built a web-site to document it because I was getting emails from people doing similar projects, or an interest in doing it but felt it cost more than they could manage to try. I parallel much of that site on on forums like this because I want folks that wish they could to see they can, ie "If I can do this, anybody can."
In short, I think making ourselves visible and accessible to those already looking for us will do more to "grow the hobby" than dragging people with only a passing interest into buying an expensive kit that'll never get built and only serve to sour their opinion of it.
