How I ran my first meet-up

Chris Taylor
Aug 24, 2017 · 7 min read

Back in July, I innocently posted on a mailing list asking if anyone would be interested if I ran a meet-up in Sheffield for designers in government.

The only problem was — I’d never run any kind of event before.

Fortunately, Gov Design Sheffield went (relatively) smoothly — largely down the help and support of friends and colleagues. I was also surprise how fun I found it.

So I thought it might be useful to share what I learned, for anyone else considering running an event.

Finding your audience

I first spoke to a few friends and colleagues to see if an event for government designers who work in and around Sheffield would be something they would find useful. There’s quite a bit of digital government presence in Sheffield and Leeds at the moment and I though it would be useful for those designers to meet up and share the work they are doing. Everyone I spoke to thought it was a good idea.

This gave me the confidence to begin asking more widely on the cross-gov slack and service design mailing list. Around 20 people replied saying they would like to know more, so I posted a Google Form to collect some simple basic information (name, email, gov department, location). I probably should have done this first or even just created an eventbrite page straight away, to save people having to enter their details again.

Read up and don’t be afraid to ask for help

Whilst the replies were trickling in, I asked Kara Kane (who organises the cross-gov community events) for any advice. She helpfully replied with some really useful nuggets of wisdom:

  • Decide on a format — is it during the day or after work? Is it open to the public? Is it going to be just show and tells?
  • The Gov Design London event is setup with 2–3 speakers, its after work at 6pm and its open to the public. They create a meet-up page for each event and publicise on twitter.
  • Crowd-source the agenda via a google doc distributed to the attendees
  • Be clear about what happens next — is there another meet up, what are the outcomes?

Kara told me it was ok to use the Gov Design branding for this as well, which I think helped it get off the ground (Gov Design Sheffield has a nice ring to it).

I also did a bit of googling and found these articles most useful:

Secure a venue and date

After I had enough people registering their interest (20) I began thinking about dates and venues. There isn’t a suitable space at my current workplace. I knew that the Department for Education in Sheffield had previously hosted a user research meet-up so I asked a friend who just started working there to make an enquiry for me. He came back with a couple of free dates and room sizes. I picked a mid-week date, four weeks from then for three hours (1–4pm). Kara had advised to check if there are any other similar events running around the same time and to maybe try and avoid school holiday periods. However I had already had a group of interested people so I decided August was still ok (this was more of trial anyway).

Keep organised

After I sorted a venue and date, I published the details of the event on Eventbrite. It has a facility to allow people to book tickets, hold waiting lists and email your attendees. It also lets you print out registers and use a free app to check-in people on the day.

I created a Trello board to track everything I needed to do — which was invaluable. I used it more as a reminder and a brain dump of everything I thought I should do. If more people help out in future events I’ll probably use this to help coordinate everything.

Speakers and format

I knew that I would be relying on friends and colleagues for the speakers for this first event.

I started emailing and messaging people on slack to see who was interested — and to my surprise everyone agreed. I suggested that they do a talk (on anything they wanted) or a show and tell of around 20 mins (knowing that its a pretty good length to keep peoples attention). I didn’t get involved in curating any of the content or anything — I just trusted that they would share something useful (which they did!).

Once everyone confirmed, I shared a google doc with the speakers where I’d worked out a rough order and added estimated timings. I was planning to compere the event starting with a five minute into. Then I would introduce each speaker and, following their talk, ask the audience if they had any questions. I allowed for five minutes of changeover/overrun and five minutes for questions per talk. We planned for three talks, then a 15 min break and then another three talks which I hoped would be a nice pace.

Check the venue

I spent an hour or so checking out the room once booked and took a few pictures to share with the speakers. We spoke with the buildings reception to find out if there’s anything else they needed to know — they informed us we should include the fire safety procedure and get them a list of the attendees on the day (eventbrite has a feature for printing out attendee registers). We planned to have one person stay in the reception area to bring groups of attendees up in batches on the day.

Keep everyone informed

Every week leading up to the event I kept the speakers up to date with the latest number of people who had signed up and information about the venue. I originally had asked them to bring their own laptops, but I later changed my mind realising that it would be easier to run it all from one laptop.

As I firmed up information about dates and the speakers, I emailed the attendees via eventbrite — I kept this to a maximum of 1 email a week, with my final email being the Friday before the event. This was all pretty easy to do via the Eventbrite interface.

On the day

I spend the morning checking through the slides that the speakers sent to ensure they ran ok on my laptop. I also made PDF backups just in case. To make it easier for me and the speakers, I cleared my desktop completely and just had onefolder called ‘Speaker Slides’ and organised the slides in speaking order.

I got to the venue two hours before it started (only a 10 min walk from my office). The room was supposed to have a ceiling mounted projector but it wasn’t available so we had to use a portable one. This meant we had to spend a bit of time rearranging the room so that the speakers would have enough room to move and the projector wouldn’t block the view of the attendees — I’m so glad I got there early.

As it was approaching the start time, I got a bit anxious that not as many people as I hoped had turned up. In retrospect I should have put down a clear time for people to start arriving and state when the talks would start. I expected a drop off in numbers — around 32 people had signed up and 19 actually showed up. I was initially quite disappointed by this but as the day went on and I chatted with people, I realised they were getting a lot out of it and I felt much better. The last thing I wanted was people to feel this was a waste of time.

One thing that I didn’t manage very well was the timings on the day. The talks in the morning ran a little short, so I panicked and added my backup talk in to fill the time — which made us run over by about five minutes. People came back from the break a little later which compounded things. The talks in the afternoon then overran a little so I had to cut some of the Q&A’s short — in total we finished about 20 minutes later than we should. Next time I will give the speakers an indication of the amount of time left and probably have fewer talks and a shorter running time so that any timing issues won’t get so compounded.

We finished the day with a trip to a pub that was helpfully on the route back to the train station. I spoke with people and got a genuine sense that they had found it really useful, which was great to hear. Made it all worthwhile

What I’m going to do differently next time

I learned loads from this first event.

Next time, I think I will run it in the evening after work. A few of the contractors who came said that they found it difficult to justify coming as it was in work time. I was initially reluctant to run it in the evening as there is no budget whatsoever for this to secure a venue and I assumed no government buildings would be open in the evening. However I have now managed to find somewhere willing to host it after work, so we’ll give this a try.

Because it will be in the evening I plan to make it shorter. I’m going to aim for 3–4 speakers next time and aim for around two hours running time. The 20-minutes per speaker duration seemed to work really well though, so I’ll keep that.

Open source checklist

I’ve made checklist so that I would remember everything I learned for the next event on GitHub https://github.com/ctdesign/meetup-checklist.

I’ll be adding to this as I run more of these kinds of things — feel free to add your own insights as well.

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