Meet your Member's Expectations

The guild I lead is officially a medium RP guild, but that doesn't really do it justice. We do just about everything. People come for the RP, which some people describe as heavy, but we have lots of enthusiastic members who are interested in all the content the game has to offer. So we've got a raid group as well.

I know that lots of guilds have enough trouble with just keeping a guild devoted to raiding together, so some people might wonder how we do Raiding, RP and all the more casual content in between. The secret is that we're an RP guild first and foremost. If something happened to the raid then our reason for being would not go away. If something happened to the RP, then we might go away... in fact we probably would... which would be quite sad... but anyway!
In order to keep a guild together it has to preform how the members expect it to. For us it would be to maintain a certain level of RP activeness. Now there's always going to be people who decide to move on, and that's inevitable. Back before we had a raid group, some members left to explore that content. But it was only a few members. We maintained a certain level of RP activity and the guild has remained.

Frequently the reason that raid guilds break up is that the member's expectations of the raid is not being met. There are many different reasons that can lead to this, but all of it comes down to one point. If the members aren't satisfied then they'll start thinking about leaving, and eventually will if nothing changes.

The peice of knowledge to take out of it all is that the top priority of the successful guild master is to satisfy the guild member's expectations if it is at all possible. And if it's not possible then that needs to be explained to the guild members.

In other words, when you're running a guild, the guild member is the customer. The customer is not always right.... but the better you treat them and meet their expectations, the better your business or guild will perform.