[nulagrithom]

If you're "kicking people out of the group" and telling people not to "RSVP" unless they're 100% committed, then I feel like you're more effectively making people disinterested in your group than you are solving your attendance estimation problem.

If your group is so large that you have a waitlist, I'd be willing to bet there's a consistent statistic of RVSP vs Attendance that you could rely on. Maybe check records of your past events and see if there's much fluctuation?

[monksy]

You would be surprised on the amount of people who sign up for a meetup group and never attend a single meetup.

[ghaff]

Not the sort of meetups people are talking about here, but I'm on a bunch of lists and a number of meetup groups where I have never or only rarely attended an event.

[monksy]

I run a social group that has about 3.6k+ people on it. We have about 200-300 active people at any given time. Most of the people who drop out of the group have 0 RSVP Yeses, and 0 RSVP Nos.

We do a lot to get attendance up and to create events that people want to attend.

[aaronchall]

Our group was used to about a 66% showup rate, with a top end of probably about 80%.

Showup rates started declining, probably due to people thinking it didn't matter if they didn't make it, and not canceling their "Yes". We started discussing the problem when we had a 40% showup with a large waitlist.

We considered tracking no-shows for suspension, but before we even started that, I started mentioning the fact that we were thinking about the problem to members, and making statements on meetup pages about us looking at no-shows.

We didn't have to actually change policy, but thanks to some simple communication, we got showup rates back to their average 66%.

As a best practice, we should probably continue to mention it from time to time to ensure we don't get back to those kinds of lows.