Why I quite meetup after organising £1m Event Successfully

Are you using meetup app for managing your community and events?

But as your workload increase, you realise that it’s causing you more pain than actually solving a problem. Well, that is what exactly happened to one of my professional connection whom I interviewed for this article.

And today I am going to share some key points which made my interview guest to move away from meetup.

source: meetup

On 22nd of June 2022 I had an opportunity to interview one of the FAANG executive: Jane Rochelle (name changed)— Head of Marketing Platform at FAANG.

I started asking questions around what different platforms do you use and what kind of events you manage at your organisation. How do you plan your events? And What tools do you use to do that?

Answer: We are in charge of organising the grand opening event of a new office.

1. I had a budget of £1m for this event.
2. I had the capacity to coordinate with someone in our London office.
3. We had local vendors supporting us for all our logistical needs.

The first step I took is reached out to a facilities team on site to assist with this, We begin planning and to assess if I will have to use outside vendors.

Second, we had a huge budget. Therefore, I knew I’ll have ample budget for food, drinks and decor and entertainment.

Third, because the objective of the event is to welcome new customers, employees and ecosystem partners to the office. I would ensure that I am inclusive of all user (with different requirements and needs) in my planning.

And finally, I collected an experience feedback survey from the New York City event and incorporate it into my planning.

This is where my planning finished, and then we started bringing things together.

I published the event on meetup and sent out the link.

Problem 1#

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Some people who were flying from abroad responded back to me that this link is not visible to them.

We work in highly advance offices all around the world. We have basic internet connection of 110 GB speed.

I asked a few users that do you have any ad brokers or some kind of filtering in place on your machine, and they responded with a no.

So I had to replicate the event on Eventbrite and then send that link out again. With clear instructions in my email to use only one link so that there is no duplication.

Problem 2#

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

Now I had two different places to manage my guest list. Which is OK, but the next problem arose is when I tried to export my guest list from meetup.

The web portal started throwing exception errors.

Obviously, when something like this happens, the first thing you do is to reach out to the support.

And trust me, it took more than 7 days to get a response back from them.

But ultimately this got resolved, and my users started seeing the link. Obviously during this time period some people moved on to the second Eventbrite link, which caused more duplication.

But the good part of it is I asked for email ID to make sure when I have my attendee list. I can easily remove any duplication.

Problem 3#

Photo by Michal Matlon on Unsplash

I somehow manage to get the attendance spreadsheet merged. And you can imagine, if you are catering for more than 5k people, how difficult it is to keep your data clean.

Another issue was because we were recording important dietary information for our attendees. It got difficult to merge it between the two datasets.

Because some people opted for Vegan on meetup and then Vegetarian on Eventbrite.

So I had to ask my team members to help me and contact each of these users and confirm their dietary needs.

Problem 4#

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

All this was somehow manageable, but this last bit was the trigger for me to say goodbye to meetup.

When our event started. We had people coming in from the entrance. Where we had multiple executives checking in attendees.

But some attendees were coming from different cities. So they stayed in the hotels till the evening and then when they arrived at the venue.

They forgot to bring their ID’s. Which is fine because we got them verified by looking at their corporate email id.

But suddenly after the first two hours we realised that some people actually faked their entries into the event.

I recognised them because one of them was my common friend. So I took him in the side and asked him how did you get into this event. You do not work for our organisation?

He replied, it was really easy. I just got the link of this event from a source (obviously he didn’t mention the name) and then filled in fake details in it. So I got into your attendee list.

And then I just got in.

This pissed me off. And after successful completion of this event. I reached out to meetup support again. And asked them how did my event URL got public because I choose it to be private.

The executive informed me that there are various platforms who pull our data via our API’s, and it might have gone out from that route. But before accepting this, he consistently blamed my colleagues 😡

This is when I decided not to use meetup again ever for any of my corporate events.

What factors make a successful event?

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

In my opinion, the key factors which impact the performance of any event are:

1. Event Planning
2. Event Execution
3. Event Team

Now let’s decouple these factors one by one.

Event Planning:

We all know when it comes to plan an event, it is very difficult. One has to keep in mind several criteria’s like:

1. Who is the target audience
2. What is the objective of the event
3. What is the budget
4. Where the event is going to happen etc.

Based on this information, the event host decides how he/she is going to plan the event.

Sometimes it gets a bit easier if you have some experience in managing events. Or if you have successfully managed a similar event before.

But most of the time things just does not turn as they were planned. And that's where you will need a plan B or a contingency.

Event Execution

Once you have your event plan in place. That's where the real execution starts.

You have to be very careful how each dot connects with the other.

Most of the time, your event is dependent upon resources you pull in from the external environment.

For example:

1. Your caterer is someone you will be working the first time. You might have not even tasted the food they prepare before.
2. Your event decoration was done by either the venue management or you need to hire someone to do the job.
3. If you are catering for kids then you might need a lot of entertainment and that will certainly need someone who has the expertise.

Remember, you cannot do everything by yourself. So you have to delegate tasks to others.

Event Team

One of the key factors of your event success is your team.

As you can see above, you have to delegate tasks to your team members. And if your team members are not responsible, then it gets messy.

You do not want that.

You want a team who is capable of doing the work and proactively try to solve problems quickly.

Because when it comes to an event. There will be issues.

What makes an event successful, and how do you measure the success?

Photo by Evangeline Shaw on Unsplash

1. Event Attendance
2. Post Event Social Media Activity
3. Speaker Engagement (if applicable)
4. Number of Returning Attendees

Is the key to success of event?

After more than a decade experience of managing communities and hosting 100’s of events. I would say the key to host a successful event is:

1. Managing the whole operation smoothly
2. Making sure your attendees are always up-to-date, and you set their expectations crystal clear

If you do these two things properly, all of your events will be successful.

I would recommend arouund to manage your event operations.

source arouund

They are currently running a lifetime deal offer which you can avail by just securing this deal for only $99.

That means you will never have to pay to manage your community ever once you avail this offer.

Let me know your experience with meet up!