Passive Information Collection Pays Off

Recently I began searching for an artist for a new game. After not finding the right style on BoardGameGeek or on this list of artists, I realized that I had an incredible resource within reach: the Wingspan Fan Art Pack. I looked through the 255 cards and found several styles that might fit, and after a sample process, we found our artist.

Afterwards, I realized how grateful I am for passive information collection. Without so many amazing Wingspan fan artists sharing their work with us in a format we could easily peruse, we would have missed out on this particular person.

The experience made me think about other ways passive information collection has paid off when we’ve tried to identify the right person for a project:

• Job application: Last year when we were searching for an ecommerce director, I turned to the results of our open job application. I created this in 2017, so there’s a wealth of people on the results sheet. Our selection, Erica Sanders, started in January and is amazing!
• Reviewer signup: Whenever I have available review copies, I turn to the results of our reviewer signup form, which has hundreds of people on it. This is far more efficient than fielding individual solicitations.
• Game submissions: If you’re a designer who thinks Stonemaier is a good fit for your game, our game submission form is the first step in the pitch process. The results of this form can even go beyond the game you’re pitching, as sometimes we may go looking for a designer for a specific game concept.
• Demographic survey: Our annual demographic survey is largely anonymous, but there is a question at the end about the Stonemaier game you most want to buy (and the option to add your email address and to give us permission to contact you about related sales). If we have a sale on that game in the future, we’ll contact you about it.
• Stonemaier Ambassadors: For those who apply for our ambassador program and are accepted, we reach out to them about a variety of opportunities. Sometimes they’re location-specific, like when we’re looking for people for our Essen Spiel demo team.
• Play-and-win conventions: We send hundreds of games each year to play-and-win sections at conventions whose coordinators added their information to our publicly available Google Sheet.
• Rolling Realms fan designers: We don’t have a passive way of collecting information about fan-designed realms, but Karel Titeca has generously and continuously compiled these homemade realms into a BGG collection. Some of these fan designs have become official realms, and some of the designers have become some of our best playtesters.
• Back-in-stock notifications: Sometimes our webstore products go out of stock, whether it’s a matter of inventory in a specific warehouse or because we need to produce more. Back-in-stock requests help us contact you when a product is available again and they help us know when there’s enough demand for us to reprint a product.
• Game-specific newsletters: Some people just want to follow one specific product or brand, not everything Stonemaier Games does; other people want launch notifications or deeper ongoing information about a game. It’s for those reasons we’ve started offering signups for game-specific newsletters: Wingspan/Wyrmspan, Scythe/Expeditions, Rolling Realms, and Apiary.
• Third-party accessories: There are a variety of creators who make third-party accessories for our games (following these guidelines), and recently I created pinned threads in our game-specific Facebook groups where creators can share their creations. There are several times where I’ve seen such an amazing fan creation that I’ve reached out to them to see if we could make a version of it (with compensation for them). A semi-example of this is the birdfeeder dice tower in Wingspan; I had seen some amazing creations from Tower Rex, so I reached out to them to design the cardboard tower (before we went to print with Wingspan).

I hope this is also helpful to hear for anyone who is looking to get involved in a specific industry. Make yourself known to organizations within that industry via the various ways they passively collect information, as you never know where it may lead.

Where does this fit with the more personal side of building relationships? I very much still believe in the power of personal connections, particularly when they’re made in public spaces so multiple people can benefit from the discussion.

Have you experienced the benefits of passive information collection? Let me know in the comments.

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