5 Ways To Make Your Meetup Community Better
I’ve been thinking a lot about the meetup community in Portland. Like pretty much everything in Portland, it’s changing and growing super fast. A year ago the meetups were mostly advanced user groups. The attendees were professional developers with a lot of domain experience. These users were interested in power features of the community tool, and required little context from speakers to have a positive learning experience.
Today the same meetups are dominated by people completely new to the area, with little or no context about the group’s interests. Tons of people are surging into the tech community. Many of them are just getting to know their computers for the first time, let alone advanced JavaScript frameworks.
The influx of new developers has transformed these professional communities into networking hubs for novice programmers and those switching careers.
For groups that are conscious of this change, it is overwhelmingly positive.
It’s hard to keep a meetup going when it’s always the same ten people. You can quickly end up recycling ideas, struggling for attendance, and fizzling out. New users bring fresh perspective and excitement! That translates into group momentum, growth, and enrichment. It’s also rewarding to see new people folded into your community, who start out lost in January and give a really neat presentation in June!
If you organize or participate in a meetup already, or if you’re interested in starting one this year, here are five ways to bridge the experience gap among attendees, and forge more meaningful communities.
1. Be Explicit About Who’s Invited
If newcomers aren’t sure who’s invited they’re less likely to come. That’s bad for the health of your group. To avoid this, both your meetup homepage description and the description for each individual event should specifically state who can attend. A good example might be:
“People of any skill level in this technology, or development generally, are very welcome. We love meeting new people and are willing to point you in the right direction.”
Another example involves groups that specifically target a certain kind of person. ChickTech Portland is an example of an awesome, beginner-friendly group. However, the nature of the group makes it seem as if only women and girls are invited to their functions. I honestly don’t know if this is true, I’ve written their group more than once to clarify, because I don’t want to invade what might specifically be intended as a female dominated space. If anyone is invited, it would help to explicitly say so. For example:
“we do not exclude anyone based on their gender, anyone wanting to participate in our community is welcome.”
If not, they should explicitly say that instead:
“this is a group specifically for women and girls. In order to make a safe and comfortable space for those so often excluded, we ask that other people come only if directly invited.”
2. If You Offer Food, Make Sure It’s For Everyone
I’m generally impressed at the quality of food offered at Portland’s meetups. There’s usually something for people who don’t eat animal products, and people with dangerous food allergies. While it is nice for organizers to consider these needs, the truth is that all of your food should be edible to everyone.
The question is not “how do we avoid excluding people?” Rather, the question is “how do we include as many people as possible?”
Imagine being a kid at a birthday party who can’t eat any of the cake. It’s nice to make them their own special dessert so that at least they get something. But they’ll probably still feel left out when everyone else has a “normal” cake — the real cake. When you’re an adult that feeling doesn’t go away. If we want to be inviting and friendly, we must keep this in mind. It’s nice to make sure people with dietary restrictions have something to eat. It’s friendlier and more inclusive to make all or most of the food something everyone can eat.
3. Post Prerequisites
Something that our team at Treehouse does really well is telegraph the dependencies for every course. When we make our assumptions known and give students a sense of what they can expect, we set them up to have a positive experience. Having a standard list of skills or tools that people should be comfortable with to get the most out of your meetups serves the same function. It gives those who aren’t ready yet something to work towards, and a better sense of what to expect. They’ll likely have a better time, have simpler questions, and be more likely to return and contribute in the future.
The tech community in general has a hard time remembering what it was like to use their terminal for the first time, or how mysterious GitHub once seemed.
4. Host Regular Intro Nights
Advanced user groups might also try to bridge the gap with specific “get up and running” events. These nights are advertised to people with little or no experience who might want to come check it out and get personal help from advanced users.
Step One evenings are super healthy for any community. Offering easy-access with welcoming entry points will guard your group against assumptions. Misjudging the needs and wants of your community is one of the easiest pitfalls in organizing a meetup. Having intro nights helps to occasionally reset those assumptions and keep attendees in the proper balance.
These efforts can have a negative effect though. There is a growing sense of stratification — the “beginner” groups, or beginner events, where beginners are welcome, as opposed to the real events, where beginners will…not be turned away. Just remember that, as with food offerings, the goal is to make as many people feel welcome as possible. Intro nights should serve as a good jumping on point, but they should not feel like token gestures. Bill them as catch-up days or something of value to existing attendees. That way fewer people will feel like they have to wait for a starter event to try out your group.
5. Mark Willing Attendees as Liaisons
Perhaps the best thing you can do to be welcoming to newcomers is mark specific people as group liaisons. Liaisons should wear special shirts, badges, or name tags that explicitly invite people to come chat with them and make introductions. Meeting new people can be scary, and it helps to have an anchor in the crowd when you’re first coming in. This is especially true for attendees that might feel under qualified or phony for being less experienced. Tech communities are finally acknowledging how common imposter syndrome is, and we can do a lot to mitigate this early on.
Liaisons should be willing, not begrudging. They should be happy to spend time talking with newcomers, but more importantly they should try to integrate newcomers by making the right introductions and setting them off on the right foot. If you use meetup.com to advertise your group, it’s a good idea to have liaisons marked in their profiles, perhaps with some conversation starters that lower the barrier to entry for anyone shy.
A little effort goes a long way toward accommodating new developers in our communities. Not only is it a nice thing to do, it ensures the future health of our communities. If we really care about keeping Portland a good place for developers, then honestly it’s the only way.
I’m a JavaScript developer in Portland, and currently write course material at Treehouse. Feel free to reach out for recommendations about Portland meetups — I frequent many. You can find me on Twitter @ joseph_fraley, or on LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/joefraley
