Lessons from 5 years of running a tech meetup

I&#x27;ve been running my local ruby meetup for about 6 years now. It was pretty stressful to begin with, trying to get people to give presentations, or thinking of one myself.<p>Then maybe 4 years ago I had the idea of threatening to shut the meetup down unless we managed to get 11 people to sign up to do a presentation once a year. This basically meant we had an entire year&#x27;s worth of talks sorted by January.<p>We&#x27;ve been doing this every year now for the last 4 years, and it&#x27;s working really well. It&#x27;s not _my_ ruby meetup, it&#x27;s the community meetup, I&#x27;m just helping facilitate it :)

As someone who&#x27;s now been running a data viz meetup for almost 5 years now, I can confirm that this article is full of good advice. It boils down to:<p>1. Consistently put on actually good events!<p>2. Be consistent about marketing the events to make it easy for people to find them!

Been running a tech group in East Lansing for twenty plus years. Also started and helped run the Code Michigan hackathon with the state of Michigan for three years. All this resonates with me, a lot of it I learned the hard way. Surprised no one has written a book.<p>Meeting location is quite important, moved my group around the Lansing area and learned I got way more attendance meeting on the MSU campus, even though relatively few students have ever attended. I&#x27;ve seen other groups fail because they chose a poor location and never moved.

I&#x27;m one of the people helping to run Michigan TypeScript (we meet in person monthly in addition to doing the YouTube channel) and I also ran a React meetup in Detroit in 2016-2018. This article has lots of great stuff in it! I especially liked the parts about knowing your reasons for organizing a meetup.<p>There is one thing that I was expecting the article to cover, though, that it didn&#x27;t: finding speakers. From talking to other organizers around the country, this seems like something that&#x27;s a consistent point of stress. I think with MiTS we&#x27;ve found a good system, since only one month out of last year did we actually have to really &quot;look&quot; for a speaker, which is really great, but also not something that you can always expect to continue.<p>So on that note, if others have ideas to share on this topic, I&#x27;d really love to hear your thoughts.

I&#x27;ve been running my infrastructure meetup for almost 9 years, and it was fun to see so many similarity of lessons, as well as drop off nrs which match my experience exactly.<p>My advice is to keep your meetup at max 40. I&#x27;ve done 20 and 130 and once it goes above 40 it starts to become a chore instead of something fun.<p>My other advice is not to overdo it. Focus on good speakers and the rest will follow. Unlike the guy in the article, I have new sponsors every time and rotate the venue every time to try and diversify the attendees. Over time it seems like a nice, core group will form, which will slowly grow with new people discovering and liking the format and content.

&gt; I’ll also generally mention that there’s a small group heading to a local brewery or restaurant after the meetup if folks want to stick around for that. I do this without knowing at all if there is a small group.<p>This is a classic but a goodie

One more thing: when you share the Wi-Fi password, INCLUDE A QR CODE. It boggles my mind that more people don&#x27;t know about Wi-Fi QR codes. On most phones ~2018 and newer, you just scan them and they instantly connect you to the Wi-Fi network, no typing necessary. My fiancée and I love hosting, and guests love our guest Wi-Fi.

Ran a couple of groups in the Houston area. Houston, while huge, isn&#x27;t much of a tech hub, though there&#x27;s plenty of technology used across all stacks. (though .NET and the like tends to be bigger, as oil&#x2F;gas and health care are some of the largest industries here) Houston is very spread out as well, with pretty terrible traffic. As a result, there aren&#x27;t many consolidated areas to hold tech meetups that appeal to a wide audience, and it can get frustrated setting up meetups to have only 6-8 people show up.

&gt; Without fail, for free events, there’s a predictable dropoff of around 30% of all RSVPs. If I have 50 people RSVP for an event, I’ll assume 30 or 35 will show up.<p>Be careful, though. An event I used to go to that was free decided to charge a donation of I think £5 to a charity because they were connected with the venue and having a fundraiser at the time. Instead of the usual approx 50% attendance, it went up to over 90% and there was a huge shortage of food, shortage of places to sit etc.<p>(It was a 2 day hackathon + conference event, including lunch, dinner, breakfast and lunch again. A comparable paid conference would have cost probably hundreds per attendee - £5 was nothing, but enough for people to see the tickets differently)

Does anyone have advice for affordable meeting space in SF? I&#x27;m leading up the SF chapter of the Solidworks User Group and they give me $300 to spend for each meeting but I&#x27;m having trouble finding places I can afford, even the spaces offered by the city at community centers, etc costore than the allotment.

I had been running an Astronomy society weekly meeting for 3 years, probably the job with the most work on the committee.<p>Being so close to London there were a number of amazing speakers from various universities who were generous with their time. There were some professional speakers.<p>A proportion of the talks were done by members, it was good, it helps to have a passion and an interest in a subject, it also helps that my interests were aligned with the society.<p>However after three years I started to run out of ideas, and got a bit too burnt out, and I&#x27;ve not been back in the past few years.

I like that this guy moves his meetups around. In my area, most of the meetups happen downtown, often around rush hour, making it very difficult for anyone outside of that area to attend.

I am running a meetup for 17 years now and there are some great ideas for me in this article.<p>I once wrote an article lees on the technical side of things and more about the social aspect of building a community: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kaffeeringe.de&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;07&#x2F;wie-man-eine-community-aufbaut&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kaffeeringe.de&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;07&#x2F;wie-man-eine-community-auf...</a>

&gt; Without fail, for free events, there’s a predictable dropoff of around 30% of all RSVPs. If I have 50 people RSVP for an event, I’ll assume 30 or 35 will show up.<p>I&#x27;ve seen a similar pattern with board game groups. At 50+, maybe the community is large enough to be self-sustaining, but for smaller groups, a random dip below average can snowball.<p>Obviously there&#x27;s a broad spectrum of reasons for no-shows but I wonder if there&#x27;s a way to solicit information on causes.

<p><pre><code> &gt; On the topic of venues: you don’t need to rent anywhere. &gt; There are plenty of companies with way too much &gt; space just looking for a way to put them to use and &gt; bring people in. </code></pre> This may be true in Cleveland. The semi-official Bay Area Rust meetup has had two events in the past three years, because it can&#x27;t find venues willing to host events.

Nice read! I organized some tech meetups in the past (2018) and this is good advice. Makes me want to organize them again.

I ran a tech meetup from 2011 to 2018 with cofounder Franco Soldera. Very good points here!

Good read, very encouraging.

Event advice.<p>This is just good overall advice for running any kind of event.<p>Nothing about this is specific to tech.<p>EDIT: why the downvotes?