Meetup group organizer needs promotion tips

May 24, 2009 11:32 PM

What steps can I take to make my meetup group appear legitimate so that membership can continue to grow and improve? This might involve fixing the meetup or building my promotional skills.

I run a meetup in Amarillo, Texas called the Amarillo Stuff Meetup. It's a "new in town" type meetup group that doubles are a general activity group.

Things have been going fairly well. We've grown to over 160 members in the past 5 months. However, only about 20 of those 160 are active.

I think part of the problem is the method by which most people join. I have a Facebook ad that promotes this group and it seems to do well in getting Facebook users to join the group. However, it also seems people who use the internet to socialize also tend to like to stay at home.

I'd like to attract a new demographic and at the same time help give my group some credibility. Namely, I need more women to join the group since the current membership is overwhelmingly male. Having women RSVP to events causes men to RSVP. Not sure why, just does.

Flyers and Craigslist haven't worked too well. People don't seem to trust flyers and Craigslist. I've tried handing business cards, but people then suspect it's a marketing ploy and that doesn't get anywhere or they simply lose the card.

I'd like to get local radio, tv or print media to cover the group. I think it would lend the meetup some credibility, but I have no idea how to pitch the concept of meetup to them and how to talk to radio/tv people.

Perhaps you have some suggestions on what I can do to improve the meetup or just some thoughts in general what motivates people to go to meetups.

posted by abdulf to society & culture (6 comments total)

Honestly, 20 out of 160 members active sounds like you're doing a great job, especially for a group with such a wide focus. I ran a very specialized Meetup group for a while. It had well over 30 members, but only 3 or 4 of them regularly showed up to events. A good number of the people who joined never showed up to a single event, posted on the forums, or communicated in any way whatsoever.

Heck, I'm a member of 2 different Meetup groups right now that I've never been to a single event for. It's so easy to join groups that you get a lot of people who think they might be interested, but never work up quite enough enthusiasm to join in.

If you're trying to attract new people to join your group, though, you might have more success by advertising specific events than the group as a whole. Maybe try to get the event listed in your local paper's calendar section, then pass out cards/flyers to the new people once they get there and see that the group is legit (and are hopefully having a good time).
posted by tomatofruit at 12:30 AM on May 25 [1 favorite has favorites]

If you've got that many people on your list but not showing up, isn't the problem not that you don't have takers, but that your interested parties aren't staying connected with you after the point that they sign up?

My suggestions:

1. Take photos at meetup and load them onto the site. Photos of people having fun, that is! Let people see that this is a real group made up of real people who're finding it worthwhile going along. Let them see the venue too so they can go "Oh yeah, I'd fit in there."

2. Send out group announcements prior to each meet-up. Make each message unique: I was once a member of a group for a while there that sent out the same old message prior to every meetup, and hell if I knew whether the event was actually happening or if it was just some robotic site feature. Write in the messages how many people showed up to the previous month's meetup (mention it by name rather than using the generic "last month", to avert the "Is this a real email written by a real person?" question) and include some anecdote or other that provides an "in"... Mention the ridiculous beard-growing competition that's spontaneously broken out between three clowns, or "We broke our record with 20 members along last time, now let's try and break it next month!" or just *something* that suggests some personality.

3. It can be hard showing up to a group of people you don't know, particularly if it's an established group and you worry about being an outsider. I'm currently in touch with a few newbies I'm coaxing along to a meetup and for that reason I'm being seeeeeriously in touch with them: telling them about the group, how to get to the venue, what to expect, and that we're all dying to get some new members along so we're all going to be very amenable to newbies and will try and make it easy if you're shy, etc etc etc. I'm giving people my mobile number in case they get lost and/or feel uncomfortable approaching a tableful of people they don't know to ask if this is the one they're looking for. Follow up new additions to the group; tell them you'll drop them a line again personally before the next meetup happens just to check in and see if they've got any questions...

Don't know if any of those ideas help at all; that's all I can really think of. Hope so! Good luck!
posted by springbound at 12:44 AM on May 25 [2 favorites has favorites]

Honestly, 20 out of 160 members active sounds like you're doing a great job, especially for a group with such a wide focus. I ran a very specialized Meetup group for a while. It had well over 30 members, but only 3 or 4 of them regularly showed up to events. A good number of the people who joined never showed up to a single event, posted on the forums, or communicated in any way whatsoever.

Seconding this - most meetup.com groups have a majority of non-attending members. My primary group has 400+ members and the number we have ever seen would be below 100. The regular attendees would be less than 50. If you have a look at some of your non-attending members, you'll find a lot that belong to 10-20 groups.

Mostly I'd echo the above - personalised messages, welcome people to the group. Link up with other local groups.
posted by outlier at 6:07 AM on May 25

I co-run a Meetup group on Meetup.com -- and we have about 50 members, but only 7 or 8 show up at all our meetings consistently.

It's really easy to join a Meetup group -- it's just a point and click, after all. So lots of people may join a group with good intentions that are then not followed up upon. I've joined a few that I haven't then gone to any of the meetings for. There are any number of reasons for this -- they always seem to schedule things on bad nights for me, or they don't schedule things that I'm interested in. As to why I don't drop out, then, that's a combination of "I'm holding out against the day when they may do something I like" and "laziness".

Having a non-active majority seems like a sort of unavoidable thing -- it's just the nature of how Meetup.com is structured. I think you're doing fine with 20 people showing up.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:16 AM on May 25

Let's say you had a group that was all about, well, pick your hobby type activity. You'd have some fringe people who you saw every now and again, and a core group who were really passionate about whatever it is you were all about.

Now, imagine this only when one of the two decisions is "Stuff" and the other is, "clean the living room", "do laundry" or any number of other things you might have going in life. It's easy to give "stuff" a miss when there's something you have to do. Pretty soon it's a habit. Then the e-mails end up in the kill file. Pretty soon you're 50 and only leave the house to go to work and get groceries. (And you could make something like that progression a pretty amusing recruiting campaign.)

The other point I'll make is that you have a really full calendar which means no one can attend even most of your events. You might be better off to winnow it down to one or two nights a week until you get a sort of critical mass at every event. The other thing I'd suggest is get some of you more active people to take turns championing the various outings. Sort of, "Hey, I want to do THIS! Who want's to come along?" As you get more people, you can afford to put more things on your schedule because you can always count on having critical mass and you'll get more people who want to step up to the plate with an activity.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 9:17 AM on May 25

Your numbers are actually pretty solid for a meetup -- that's about the participation rate you can generally expect. My group has about 5 times as many members and about 5 times as many active members.

From looking at your meetup, I have a couple of thoughts to help get more people to attend:

Your prior events look fairly well-attended, but your future events are pretty sparse in terms of RSVPs. Are you cancelling a lot of events due to lack of RSVPs? Perhaps keep more careful focus on the specific events your members want, rather than scheduling too many things. People don't want to feel like they'll be the only ones to attend something.

There's a bit of flakiness in your event descriptions -- events with no meeting places set, just an injunction to call you on the phone to find you, the Wonderland event, where you only think you know the ticket price, the Young Professionals event that you don't know much about, etc. Any flake-factor in your planning makes it so much easier for your members to decide it's not worth the hassle to figure out what's happening. Firm everything up, and then post your events, rather than posting them firming up.

Plan a 'newbie night' -- some kind of very low-key coffee or drinks type meetup where people who haven't attended any of your events before are specifically invited to attend and meet some of your AOs. It's often difficult for people to take that first step and go out to one meetup, so by planning an event that's specifically meant for them, you can sometimes get a few out the door that wouldn't otherwise have come.


In terms of getting more members in general:

Encourage your members to use the Facebook connect function when they RSVP to events. They may not realize what it does, so explain it to them.

Ask your members to invite a friend to join the group or join them at an event. Of course they can do that now, but if you specifically ask them to do it, they don't have to think of it themselves. You can even plan a low-key, casual event specifically for this.

If you have things like board game meetups and such in public, have cards or a sign out with your URL so that people who see you out having fun with the group can look you up later.

Small local papers often have Community Event listings. If your group has a flagship regular event, like a monthly social night, try listing that in the community events. That'll draw a somewhat older crowd, generally, than you would get from Facebook, though, so depending on what you're looking for, it might not help.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:13 PM on May 25