Our first meetup and what I learned
Last Wednesday we had a terrific turnout for our first Meetup. I was especially pleased that so many people attended given our budget of zero to tell everyone. Just goes to show that a little time on Twitter, Facebook, and the phone goes a long way. Having a pretty nice tool like meetup.com was a great deal of help. I found meetup.com about a week ago, set up a Meetup, told people, and (thank God) people showed up. Here are the lessons I learned and what I will do better next time:
1. Create a schedule of events.
A schedule doesn’t have to be complicated or strict. A lot of people asked, “Are you going to talk?” My feeling was, “Well, I’m talking to you right now!” I wasn’t looking at things from the right perspective. In the future, our schedule will look something like this:
Event: Dwolla Meetup Group
Time: 5:30-7:30 pm
Location: Upper level of Raccoon Brewing, 200 10th St, Des Moines
5:45 – Brief Intro (Cover what we are trying to accomplish and what we’d love help with)
6:30 – Short talk about Dwolla and a high-level overview for people who would like to learn about it. Reinforce the feedback forms and where people can see some of the “new stuff” we have been working on.
These two things would have made a tremendous difference in what people took home from the first meeting. One of the big things I was hoping to get out of the night was brutal, face-to-face feedback about what people would like to see change. Other than geeking out with Mike Templeton over a UI update for a few minutes, there wasn’t much feedback. I got too consumed with making sure everyone got their t-shirt.
2. Make it clear what you’d like to achieve while you’re there.
This is where the brief introduction would have been really handy. We also didn’t designate anyone to hand out the t-shirts, outline what information we were hoping to gather, or drive the message home. People got what we were doing and were incredibly supportive, but I should have been clearer.
3. If you’re running the meeting, don’t expect to leave at the exact time it is scheduled to end. Also, pick the date wisely.
I was there early, and I was there well over an hour after the meeting was to be over. That’s not really a bad thing. As long as people were willing to listen to me, I was going to stay.
When I picked the date, I went with a date that was easy for us. We bumped it right up against the start of another social media networking event that I really wanted to visit. Had I picked the date (or set the time) more wisely, I wouldn’t have missed the other event, and people would have been less rushed to leave.
4. Make sure you have name tags.
It’s amazing what a visual cue like a name tag can do to assist your recall abilities when you’re accustomed to using Twitter all the time. Spend the whopping $3.49 for a 100 pack and bring them! If you’re in Des Moines, we suggest Koch Brothers, who also accept Dwolla!
5. Bring a camera and appoint a person to use it.
We had two cameras and who knows how many smartphones in the room along with a horde of tech-savvy people. It’s our own fault that we don’t have a ton of great pictures from the evening. So, designate someone to take pictures! You’ll get more from the evening, and the next day people will love taking a look at who they missed meeting and who they can follow up with.
Here are a few things I think we did right:
- Giving t-shirts rather than free alcohol or food. I think that people (especially those who are already users) got a kick out of getting a t-shirt.
- Picking a neutral location. People were free to come, leave, and talk without feeling like it was an office setting.
- Using Meetup.com. This tool is just amazing for this.
- Doing it. While the event was small, and maybe more impromptu than most, I feel it was extremely good for our project.
- Learning from it, and planning to do it again. We’ll have to get together with 87central to come up with a t-shirt design for the next gathering. I was thinking something like “I Dwolla in Des Moines.”
Please feel free to let us know what you liked and didn’t like about the Meetup so we can ensure the next one is even better.