5 tips on organizing a successful Tech Meetup
Hi guys, I want to share my tips with you. It is one of my responsibilities to organize and facilitate our Meetups. When it comes to organizing a successful Meetup, you are likely to come across some difficulties. As an organizer I feel satisfied when everyone is happy. A packed room is nice, but if the speaker and subject is not interesting for the audience, it will be a bummer.
Tip #1 Create a Meetup group
Do you have an account at Meetup.com? If not, create one immediately. I make use of Meetup, because you can create a community around your brand, and you can easily publish a Meetup. Currently, with Blue Harvest, we have a Meetup group consisting of more than 630 members. If a member is interested in technology subjects, they can join the group and they will receive notifications and updates when we organize a new Meetup.
Tip #2 Preparation is key
Make a concrete schedule for the team and yourself. A rule that I always make use of is to plan everything 6 weeks beforehand. You will need this 6-week plan to arrange the location, speaker, and of course the full program. This is important in order to promote the event. When it comes to the catering, this can be decided later on. However, if you are going to facilitate free food, you can put this in the invitation, because free food always attracts people ;).
Tip #3 Interesting topic and speaker
This is the most important part of a Meetup. Why? If the topic is not attractive or if the speaker doesn’t spark on stage, a meetup can turn out to be a total failure. How can you prevent a failure? I noticed that if the topic is really technical, it is usually more appreciated during Tech Meetups. Think about live coding, a demo or a topic with a challenging presentation. Visitors are not coming for a Meetup with a general topic. They don’t want to listen to a topic which they can google about, because they want to learn something new. Besides that, a Meetup will often be organized during the evening hours, so people rush after their work to join the Meetup, and they could be a bit tired. Therefore, an inspirational topic and speaker is crucial.
Tip #4 Make use of your community and social media
When you publish your Meetup on Meetup.com, your Meetup will be automatically promoted on your page. Your followers will receive newsletters and notifications on their phone if there is a new Blue Harvest Meetup planned. However, that is not enough concerning the promotion because you want to create a lot of buzz around your meetup. I like to promote it on social media, because that is a good way to attract new visitors. Moreover, it is important to invite people personally, for instance your network, or the network of your team. A flyer to hand out to clients or posters to put up is useful as well.
Be creative and think out of the box. For instance, create a nice campaign to have more buzz around your Meetup. An idea is to do a giveaway. E.g. If you leave your business card at the meetup, we can give free tickets of a Tech event away. In addition, you way you will also get the contact information of your visitors.
Tip #5 Check every detail and be creative on the spot
Make sure to be on time on the day of the Meetup, because you’ll need to check if everything is working. Are the chairs and tables in the right place? Does the technical stuff work, such as the beamer and microphone? Sometimes a small problem can pop up during a Meetup. Such as: the beer tap doesn’t work, or technical stuff is not working. Be creative and improvise. For instance, if the screen is not working, ask the speaker to do a Q&A session, and in the mean time you can fix the technical issue.
I hope you like my tips and that this article is useful for organizing a Meetup. What often goes wrong at Meetups, is that it is not well planned. A good strategy is of importance to attract people to your Meetup. If the Meetup is the right tool to execute your strategy; then I have only one tip: go4it!
