Maximize the effectiveness of your user groups with these key rules, focusing on venue management, speaker coordination, and effective promotion to ensure a successful event.
At least a month before a user group talk the room for the presentation should be booked.
Make sure that the venue is prepared for the speaker to arrive.
Many of our speakers have hundreds or thousands of followers on social media. To get the best attendance for the user group, the speaker should announce their presentation using as many media channels as possible that they are presenting at the user group.
Each venue is a little different and has different requirements. Don't expect presenters to know how each user group runs, especially if the user group organizers will not be available on the day/night.
A successful event requires attendees to show up, or it won't reach its full potential. You will have to promote your event in a way that makes sense to your topic and approach.
The most cost-effective way is to use a large variety of online services that are available and to talk about the event.
A great way to increase your overall audience, as well as your attendance at each User Group, is to use social media and online forums like MeetUp to advertize your events.
You can use MeetUp, as well as the social media platforms, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to announce all of our upcoming User Groups and keep track of attendance.
Imagine a potential client visiting your YouTube channel, keen to engage with your content but clueless about the next event you're hosting. You skip a valuable chance to connect with your audience if you don't highlight upcoming events on your banner. It's a great way to show off what you're promoting or hosting!
Audience shots are great except when you don’t have a full house. In this case you should move people to be next to each other.
In order to make your next event even better, you need to be able to collect feedback on the day from the people that were there.
After the event it is also critical that you analyse the feedback. Why else would you be gathering it?
- Do you book a venue a month ahead?
- Do you confirm with the venue on the day of the presentation? (or the day before if it’s a morning presentation)
- Speaker - Do you encourage speakers to use their social media to promote user groups?
- Speaker - Do you inform venue specific details to speakers before presentations?
- Promoting - Do you share your events?
- Promotion - Do you promote user groups via social media?
- Channel - Does your home page banner show upcoming events?
- Events - Do you organize the audience when numbers are low?
- Feedback - Do you collect feedback from events?
- Retro - Do you evaluate your event feedback?