It occurred to me last night, as I was talking to a room full of my fellow Meetup.com event organisers, that the strength of our events is based around the community we had each developed. All of us organise an event on a particular topic we enjoy. In my case this is blogging, but the room was packed full of people organising events on everything from Spanish speaking, to philosophy and creativity. It made for quite a diverse set of people and some interesting conversations.
The event last night was organised solely for Meetup organisers; an opportunity for any Meetup organiser to get together and share some ideas about how to organise better events. In fact this is something Bernie and I have been doing since last year, with monthly events on topics such as venue selection and how to promote your Meetups. We have a few more events up our sleeve too to help our community of Meetup organisers.
Now I’ve used one word there a few times: community. And that’s key to what we are trying to achieve with the Meetup Organisers Group: a community of event organisers who can share something to help each other.
For example, I’m sure everyone here knows how frustrating it is to put on an event only to find you can’t get enough people to register. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a community of fellow Meetup organisers to whom you can turn for advice?
What about the challenge of finding a good venue. I certainly have been in a spot with trying to find a venue which isn’t going to charge me a minimum bar spend of several hundred quid in Central London. Thankfully I was able to turn to my friend Navin (a fellow Meetup organiser) who pointed me in the direction of a venue that has worked for me many times now.
Hopefully you will all agree community is a good thing. If that’s the case, will you help and become part of our Meetup Organisers Group community?
Really this isn’t a massive undertaking. We are not asking for you to pay a monthly fee, or give us your email databases, or even to promote the event to your group. What we are asking for is participation. Simply your time and expertise.
How does that work?
Well, to start with, why not join us at our monthly events. They are held at the Talk Talk Customer Experience Centre – where you were for the party, but in a meeting room on the first floor. Each event features a guest speaker who can help us all to be more successful with our events. Bernie has already lined up someone to talk about using video to build our communities and another speaker to cover the social / online tools you can use to build your event communities – things like facebook and twitter.
We are going to follow that up with a professional event organiser, someone whose job it is to sell event tickets. I’m sure we could all learn a thing or two from these experts.
Secondly, why not produce a blog post. Share something you have learned or experienced and see what you get back. You could write about anything Meetup related, but let me give you some suggestions:
- The tactics you use to promote your event
- How you have attracted sponsors
- Which guest speakers have added to your events
- How you organised a trip around a famous attraction
- The challenges you faced in organising a dinner
- What happened when a venue let you down
- How you have made use of the message boards on Meetup.com
- How you feel about the new Meetup.com website…
Anyway in which you can share your experiences to add value to other members of the community is helpful. It really is simple to get started blogging. You can either add your content directly to the blog (just email me and I’ll set you up with a user account) or send your copy into Bernie or myself and we’ll add it for you.
Community really is a great thing. But it requires your participation rather than simply being a spectator. I was really disappointed at the Meetup organisers party to see people handing out flyers promoting their Meetup. It really was not the time or the place to be trying to get “bums on seats”, after all the only common interest we all had was Meetup.
What was great however were the talks from Lloyd Davis about the Tuttle Club and the hugely entertaining Guru John Poppolini. I’ll post up some video clips on this blog shortly for you all to enjoy.
I thought Lloyd touched on some interesting points about community, for example how he knew who the right people he wanted to attend were simply because they just kept turning up. Simple thinking, but effective. I will certainly be going to a Tuttle soon – although to be fair I have been saying that for almost three years since I first uttered the words, what the hell is Tuttle?
We’re going to try to and continue building a community in London for Meetup organisers. But it will only work with your participation. Please get involved sooner rather than later, it will be a shame if this fizzles out because a group of people, who are generally motivated, simply didn’t make the effort.
