Professional GameMaster Society - Progress

Wanting to focus on achievable goals, our fledgling Professional GameMaster Society agreed that we should concentrate as a first order of business on the plucking the low lying fruit.  That has been to create a package of materials for Pro-GMs to use in the pursuit of one of our easiest to generate business models, which we're calling "The Glorified Game-Sitting Service". 

In this model the GM sets up shop with a local Community Center, Library, School, or group of parent's to host a game for young people, probably between the ages of 11 and 14.  The fee structure is based, loosely, on a sliding scale depending on the number of participants, with the minimum being 4 (salt to taste) and the maximum being 12 (ditto).  The pay ranges from $12 / hour / Player for 4 to $8 / hour / Player for 12.  Of course the more Players the more money, even with the sliding scale.

For the Package I created a set of documents that can be used by the Society Members by downloading them and replacing the <Item> bracketed items in the document with whatever is appropriate.  For example "Welcome to the <Name> Game Club" where name might get replaced with "Elthos".   The documents include:

1. A Cover Letter intended as an introduction to the Community Center Administrators, or Library Staff, or whomever would be appropriate, and simply introduces the concept and asks if there is interest.
   
2. A Proposal Letter which goes into some more detail and provides additional information, and works towards setting up a program.
   
3. A Game Club Rules document for the Parents which explains the basics that they need to know about the Club, and provides additional information about pricing, location, and the benefits of the Club for their kids.
   
4. A Pricing Calculator Spreadsheet for GMs to use to work out how much they wish to charge.

All of the documents have the Professional GameMaster Society Logo, and include a link to our Website, as well as a link to our individual Google+ Professional Gamemaster Society Profiles.

At this point the documents are pretty much completed, but I'm waiting to hear from our members on any suggestions they may have for changes before finalizing them.  Other than that I may add a poster or two as examples for help with marketing the local games, possibly.  Overall, I'm quite pleased with the results.  I see this service as particularly useful for High School and College age students who wish to earn extra money GameMastering for young people.  While I don't expect this to become a means by which anyone reasonably expect to get rich, it can serve as a nice way to make supplemental income.

That said, the Society has come up with a number of wonderful brainstorming proposals on a variety of methods for achieving our longer term goals (which do include getting rich GameMastering) that I've also documented in our Google Share Folder.  That as well has been coming along nicely and we have some very interesting ideas on the table.  Some members are prototyping various concepts at this point.  I'm pleased to see it.

This has been a very thought provoking and interesting experiment thus far, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it leads in the future.   My next step will be to pick out, with the Society's help and advice, our most promising model and see what I can do with it, while encouraging our other members to do likewise.  Hopefully, if all goes well, we will have further progress and something of interest to the wider community of GameMasters to report.

If you happen to be interested you may request to join the Professional GameMaster Society via the Google+ site.