10 ways to kickstart your meetup group
Posted: May 7th, 2009 | Author: vinnie | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
A friend of mine just started a Meetup.com group and asked me for some tips on attacking members. Here’s 10 ideas I sent him:
- free pizza and free beer (even 2 pizza pies and 2 12 packs is all you need to get a crowd in)
- have it at a location ppl want to goto – either a fun bar/restaurant, or an office that is an interesting host, like a big firm that ppl would want to network with somebody at the firm (a normal office isn’t as exciting
- tell everybody you think would be interested about it, i printed out biz cards for the meetup off the meetup.com website and always handed them out
- invite ppl that you think will attract members, for me that was 4 companies to demo, for you it could be companies, or it could be a high profile individual. they don’t have to speak, but let the group know they will be there
- send a personalized newsletter a few days before the event to remind me and let them know you want a true yes/no
- use craigslist to repost the event in the events section, meetup.com helps with this. I also posted on sites like upcoming.org and eventful
- be super friendly to all new members when you meet them so they keep coming back
- ask your members to rate your meetup (meetup automatically does this, but if you don’t get a lot of ratings, ask again)
- give out something free at the event (even a t-shirt) and mention this before hand
- create a linkedin group around the event so there is a way to leverage the network offline
And if you’re in the London area, be sure to check out my friend’s event – Global Security Challenge: http://www.meetup.com/GSCNetworkingEvent/
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