| I cofounded a meetup a little over a year ago and so far we've seen a lot of success. When we started it we actually made a list of things similar to this article that we wanted to avoid. Here are a couple of ours: 1. We only allow 3 sponsors a year at a predefined cost. This covers our cost with a little buffer for unexpected expenses. 2. We promote our sponsors on our slides, website and a mention in each meetup. They also get one 5 minute promo during their sponsorship period. We also WILL NOT give them our email list. 3. We have it consistently on the same day of the month, time of day and location to avoid people wondering where we're going to be. 4. We have multiple backup presentations ready in case our speaker doesn't show. We NEVER cancel a meetup. 5. We always provide food and drinks and have designated people to handle it. 6. We solicit ideas for topics constantly and schedule them a couple of months in advance. We do not allow sales presentations and we vet all of our speakers beforehand. 7. We recently started a short lightning talk at the very begninning (5 minutes or less) to encourage members to break out of their shell and present a useful tip. 8. We offer 2 full day training events during the year. We generally do this during the work week as we found local companies are more than happy to give the devs the time off for free training. All of the content is created by devs for devs in order to make it as practical as possible. These are a few things that we do. The biggest thing to remember is running a good meetup is not a couple of hours a month job. It's a big commitment. |