Actionable Ideas How Meetups Can Evolve When Forced Online Only

Posted on Aug 4, 2020

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

Today I recorded some thoughts regarding the challenges meetups are facing as they’ve been forced online and ideas how those challenges can be met.

A quick summery:

Challenge: Group participation is down.
- Idea: Embrace the smaller numbers; do things that you could not do with a larger crowd.
- Idea: Set expectations about required interactions; let people be passive when they want to.
- Idea: Do more, smaller, focused events instead of one big meeting a month.
- Idea: Create spaces for socializing outside events.
- Idea: Help connect people outside your group structure. Make it easy for members to discover each other on social or their personal website.
Challenge: Hard to attract and retain new members.
- Idea: Make sure events are structured to help new people get familiar with the community (introductions, one-on-one help, etc.).
- Idea: Create a chain of events structured around a goal, like a book club or group project.

In some ways, it’s a great time to start a meetup:

No more venue and food costs.
Can promote and bring in people from outside your city.
People are out of work and looking to improve themselves, give them a path to do so.

If you want to chat about your own group, I’d love to hear how things are going. See this post for more detail:

Thanks again, and good luck with your group!