When I organized a meetup for the first time
We all go to meetups right ? If you haven’t or don’t know what a meetup is, a meetup is simply a local gathering of people who are a part of a community with an aim to contribute for the community, interact with each other, build a strong network and learn together. I have been to many meetups till now but have never wondered that how it feels like to be an organizer.
Many of us go to meetups for swags, some tasty food and also to learn something new. I also usually go to meetups if I feel like the topic is trending nowadays in the industry and I should learn it or at least have an introductory idea what that technology or topic is all about. After attending a number of meetups I got more interested in becoming a core member of the community and contribute as much as I can. I was more involved in Salesforce Community so to help I started SFDCStop - a Blog and a YouTube channel too. As a result, I became a tech speaker, a blogger and a YouTuber but I didn't know how it feels like to be an organizer until I became one.
I consider myself lucky enough that I got selected in Google Udacity Android Scholarship Programme 2018 for the first phase and not even that, I became the channel moderator of Delhi NCR group. But with great power, comes great responsibilities. After one week or so when the moderators were announced, people started asking for local meetups and I felt more responsible that I as a moderator have to take the initiative and make sure that everything goes well.
So, I got suggestions from Udacity team for the meetup and I started by sending out a Google form that consists of 4 - 5 MCQ questions regarding the choices of people like :- what is the preferred place of meetup ? When they wanted the meetup to happen ? How much they have covered in the course ? If they can arrange a place for the meetup or any other suggestions they have ?
Hopefully I got about 15 - 20 responses out of a group that consists of around 220 members. I started feeling like nobody is interested. I wrote a long message stating the total members and responses in my group and encouraged people to come and why they should attend such events. Some people supported me in that message and stated genuine reasons for less response like - students were having exams at that time. I waited for exams to over and posted again and this time, asked our Udacity Student Experience Lead - Akshit to help me in encouraging people too. As a result, I got around 40 registrations. I thought that was enough for the first meetup but this was not the end.
One of the main concern for the meetup is venue. As we were low in budget so arranging a venue was a big challenge. I got suggestions to arrange a meet-up at any park or coffee shop and I fixed the location according to that. But I wanted to give my best to arrange a great venue. I asked everyone I knew in other communities and luckily I was introduced to Investopad and they agreed to give us a space for our meetup. Getting a space was really like a boost to my confidence level. So, our venue was final and I had already posted for people to become speakers in our Meetup and 2–3 people were ready. Everything was perfect now. I communicated with our speakers time to time to make sure that everything goes well. I reviewed the content and gave necessary suggestions that I can give to them and we were ready to rock.
24th March 2018 - The day of meetup came. I was pretty excited and also a little worried thinking about that how many people will actually come. I coordinated on phone and reached the venue exactly on time. I was amazed to see that 6–7 people were already present there before me. So, I just gave an introduction of myself and had a chat with everyone. Then we started our sessions, all the speakers were present and were pretty excited for the event. I used to tell a story after each session and we also had a game called Android Dumb Charades after the sessions as I wanted to have a fun part too in our meetup to make it memorable.
Finally, we ended our meetup and it was a great learning experience and I was really very happy to see everyone’s faces after the event. All the people were super excited and enthusiastic till the end. I was very lucky to have such a great audience.
It was really a memorable event and a great learning experience for me. We together laid the foundation of a new community that day. I hope we’ll have more meetups in future in which more people will be there to join us.
Thanks for reading..!!
