So, you want to run a meetup

James Milner: Yeah. Thanks. I know we're bit short of time, so I'm gonna try and be quick. So this is my talk. So you wanna honor meter, question mark.

I'm actually really glad that I ended up with this name. It's my first time doing this talk. But when I actually sent the CFP to Matt, I think the title was like two sentences long and I don't even think it was grammatically correct. So I'm like really glad that he made me change that back to something normal. So, yeah, obligatory photo of my face in a circle.

My name is James Werner. I'm a developer evangelist at Edu UK. If for whatever reason you wanna contact me, there's my details. So email, Twitter, and Website. SU UK, if you haven't heard of us, we are a GIS software company.

So GIS Geographical Information Systems. Hands up if you know what GIS is or you've come across GIS before. Geographical Information Systems. Yeah. Exactly.

So I'm doing developer relations then. You might have guessed because I forgot to wear a t shirt. So that was not smooth. So, yeah, I run developer of Amazon team in UK. So it's just me.

I'm responsible for, you know, obviously promoting our APIs. It's very similar thing to what majority of people in this room probably do. So first things first, I thought I just want say that I think it's really cool that we could all get together in a room. There's there's a lot of people in this room that I've met over the last year of doing this, and It's just, like, really awesome that we could all come together and kind of be in the same space and share our thoughts. So I wanna kinda keep this quite light.

And if you guys wanna jump in and shout things out, then that's that's I'm more than cool with that. And, yeah, thanks to Matt and Hassan. So, yeah, a bit about developer relations at Esri UK. So the first thing to say about that is that I work for actually a distributor, so I'm not I don't actually work for Esri. So Esri is, like, the parent company in The States, and they're, like, Esri UK, and there's, like, Esri Germany, Esri France.

And it's they're all actually distributors. So that's actually when I think Brandon was saying earlier about burnout. I'm just saying that one of the things is does anyone get annoyed? Like, then they feel like they lose control. They don't have control.

One of the things that I find actually a lot when I'm not burning out is the fact that we don't actually make the product that we sell. So it's like really hard sometimes when you're like, someone like this doesn't work. And I'm like, okay, Cool. But there's nobody in the office who actually works on that API or whatever. So, like, I have to email some guys and say, it's they spend, like, two weeks getting back to me.

So that can sometimes be, you know, a bit a bit of a pain, something you'd like learn to live with. And if you format your documents properly and you send them to the right people, then eventually things change. So there's quite a strong safe side developer relations team. So there's about six or seven people out in The US doing developer relations for Esri. Hands off if you've ever met someone Yeah.

Over here is pretty much just me on my own, I'm really lucky, and I have a really awesome team of people that kind of support me. Back me up, I've got, you know, managers who understand developer relations and they understand the importance. So that's really cool. So, obviously, I'm a developer evangelist, you know, do all the kind of traditional things, go and talk at meet ups and conferences and sponsor hackathons and all this kind of traditional stuff. I guess there's a few things that we probably do a little bit different to most people.

So we run these, like, first party, cheer them meet ups, so they're kind of all about Esri technology. And so Esri is kind of more normally more sits in the kind of enterprise software market. So there's a lot of people who are actually really like, that's what they use. They they are they just use Esri technology. So we run these first party meetups.

And that's kind of a mix of what was going on in The US, and that was, like, they've been running those over there for years. So that's kind of why I'm giving sort of about meetups is because of these geo meetups that we run. We also have an annual conference. We have this big event that happens every year in Westminster. Like, I think this year, we had about 2,000 people, and this is our first year running our own developer floor.

So that was pretty cool. That was quite a nice experience. Nice to get some people come in who didn't talk about Ezreal, which was, like, a massive like, nobody had done that before. They were have, like, external speakers speak about, like, open source and stuff, which was was really cool. And, also, I helped on Geothat Day with Rob Burns.

And, yeah, I'm also heading up the startup program, so I do end up doing a lot of different things. But, yeah, I came to talk about meetups, not about me. So let's talk about meetups in the broadest sense. So there's a lot of different types of Meetups. There's, you know, obviously, there's things that are Meetups are platform terms specific, language specific.

You have, like, interest specific. So for example, in our case, it would be like geo. It's the it's a kind of running theme, but in be something like game development. And then you kind of have, obviously, meetups that revolve around open source technologies and ones that revolve more around proprietary technologies. So the examples I've got there is, like, the d three j s one of meetup as the open source.

Second, then, what's that? Yeah. I love the unity for proprietary technology. And there's things that kind of don't fit into any of those kind of categories like show themselves. So John Vincent, I can tell, thoroughly recommend it.

Very good meetup. They just let you come talk about projects that you've been working on, the interesting stuff. But I think one of the points that I wanna make here is that it's kind of meet ups. They they actually end up falling into multiple different categories. So it's kind of like this crazy diagram of, like, things intersecting.

It's never really just, like, one type of meal. So motivations for involvement. I didn't wanna put bullet points again, so I put things in like randomly sized, sliced ones and like spread them around. Yeah. But there's loads of different motivations for wanting to get involved in the launch.

And each meetup is gonna have its, you know, different people who are there for different reasons. So, you know, from a vantage perspective, it's obviously one of the major reasons is evangelism. Right? So, you know, spreading awareness to technology, so so on and so forth. You guys know this stuff.

For recruitment, so obviously, a lot of people like, a lot of companies might run meetups to help, you know, like, hire more developers, you know, brand awareness, interest, and, like, general interest. So people obviously come on because they're interested. Right? So they go because they have some level of, you know, involvement of that technology or they use that in their day jobs or their side projects or whatever it might be. So there's lots of different reasons and reasons why people are kind of motivated, and they wanna get involved in these types.

So I kinda like this is the reasons this is some things that I think helped made for a great meetup. So the one thing I've to come realize from organizing this year that meetup with Azure UK is that organization is, like, the number one key thing for making sure that that comes like, that that meetup comes across world. I mean, you I cannot, like, stress enough, like, how many things that I regret from the the first time I run a meetup and just not having been more organized and not actually dedicated more time. Like, I didn't realize how much actual time there was. How much time it takes just to get some people in a room and, like, talk about something is, like, actually surprising amount.

I mean, all those things I've listed there are actually subcategories of organization working. So interesting content, actually finding interesting speakers, people who actually have something to contribute to the conversation, you know, can can provide people with kind of interesting content. Community building, so, like, structuring your meet up in such a way that it encourage people to keep coming back and to keep discussing the technology. Critical mass. So there's kind of there's two power points.

Right? So there's having too few people, which is never that great. You don't wanna have it's not really ideal to have, like, six people in a room talking about, you know, no JS or whatever it might be. But at the same time, it's not really ideal to have 200 people, like, 200 basic people in a room, people leaving halfway through, like, so so on and so forth, people disengaged. So having that that nice balance between the two, I think, is really sort of important.

Timing. So sometimes people run me outside, like, 9PM or, like, 8PM or whatever, Obviously, I think Jesse touched on food and drink, but just making sure that you have you cater for everyone, you know, healthy food. Like, how many people have been to a meetup have just been given a pizza and beer, and it's just important talking about keeping things positive. Like, one thing I keep saying is, like, I know Jessi mentioned, like, well, actually, but also just generally people being unnecessarily sort of, like, you know, like, critical, and, like, that's just kind of sucks. So I'm trying to avoid that.

It's how people organize a Meetup. So I always like, use meetup.com, and that's the one name on everyone's server, but I kind of wanna see that as an open question. Like, is I using anything other than meetup.com or Amiator? Is that Bright? Am I Bright?

Another option. Okay. Cool. So you guys probably know him know all that already. Right?

Like, you guys will not be able to. I wanted to discuss running one. So I've kind like of segmented this into three parts or like three different approaches. So you can either run your meetup or you can run a meetup that is not specifically about your technology but kind of fall into a wider kind of, you know, wider technology spectrum. Spectrum, or you can just go and sponsor somebody else in here.

And each of them have different benefits, pros and cons. So I think I've kind of broken it down. There's probably more than this, I've broken it down to four different things. So it's the amount of interest you're gonna get. So if you run on the just about your technology, there's actually a strong chance that you will actually get less people and you might expose less people to your technology.

Right? There's also the amount of effort. So if you sponsor someone else's event, there's obviously less effort for you because you don't have to organize that. You don't have to, you know, find a venue, like, so on and so forth. You just have to potentially show up and maybe give us some t shirts or pay for some beers or whatever it might be.

The third thing you've got is efficacy. So you actually reached the goals of why you wanted to run that meter. So if you run the meter and you explicitly promoting, like, your technology, then you probably are gonna have more arguably more impacts than if you just, you know, again, just paid for some beers. Right? The last thing is commercial bikes.

So I just wanted to touch on kind of obviously, if you run your own first party, you a lot of this. You don't want it to feel like a marketing exercise. You want it to feel like an engaging community community event. So, yeah, if you don't get that picture, you should go watch mister robot because it is awesome. So, yeah, first of all, the sponsor someone else's meetup approach.

So kind of, I guess, one of benefits of this is de risk. Right? So they're already running that meetup. You already know how many people are gonna sign up. You already know that people are interested.

You just have to potentially provide some money, potentially provide some interesting content. So it's limited effort. You don't have to worry too much. I mean, there's also the effect that it's being run by people who are probably just interested rather than other other kind of like companies trying to market their products. Technography, so you're sponsoring A meetup.

That is not specifically about your technology. So you're, like, nurse or a database provider provider and and you're you're sponsoring sponsoring a a nurse nurse or or a a database database meetup. Meetup. Right? Right?

So you're gonna get a wider audience because you don't it's not just people who are there to be talking about your technology. You're exposing your technology to a wider group. Again, if you're running that first hand and you're running out of anyone else, the amount of effort is gonna be pretty high to actually do that because you have to organize the venue, the speaker, the song and so forth. And if you're doing that also, I think, like, to an extent, your commercial kind of vibes are marginally negated because you don't have to deal with, you know, people aren't disabled. It's it's just all about you.

You're kind of you're playing for the the rest of the community. Right? And then, yeah, run your own events. So I'd say, like, the amount of interest is gonna just be likely to correlate correlate it with the, you know, the number of people who are interested in your technology. So if you're, like, a a really small start up, then it's probably maybe not the best idea to just go and run your own first party meetup about your technology because it's just not gonna be the the traction there to to have enough people to come along.

But the amount and the amount of effort you're gonna put in is gonna be pretty hard. Right? So you're gonna have to do everything. And, yeah, this is kind of the point that you have to manage the the commercial vibes of that. So you have to manage the kind of you know, nobody wants to go to me and people just talk about themselves and their own technology.

So if you can find ways of kind of integrating different talks or different things apart from your own technology into that, that's that's that's quite cool. So I'm just gonna focus on this one because it's the one that I've kind of fallen into and one of the things that our company has been doing for while now. So actually, I think the first thing to ask you is is this a good idea? Because the answer to that question might definitely be no for one of the reasons that, like well, for one of the reasons I just mentioned, which was you might have an attraction to get enough people to be able to to do that. So it's one of the questions I ask about our own unit all the time, but I've kind of been well, I mean, the my management team think that it's a good idea, so I I I trust their judgment, and I keep following through with it.

And so far, I think it is a good idea, but I'm still sometimes worried about it. Because, yeah, my running first buy party meetup is a bold move. You're saying there's enough people who interested in this technology to come along to a pub and take time out of their day to kind of talk about what it is that you do or whatever your company software that your company is providing. Right? So obviously, you're gonna have to start thinking about all sorts of things.

Like, you're gonna have to engage your current community. You're gonna have to find ways to promote meals, which I'll talk about in a minute. Finding finding a venue, finding food, making sure that the food is good quality and that you're catering to everyone's needs, finding people who actually wanna speak. It's gonna be an interesting kind of dilemma because that might be the first thing that you struggle with is that you decided you wanna run this meetup, and then Lily actually wants to come and talk apart from yourselves, which is, you know, that can be a bit boring for ten years. So yeah.

What are your goals for, I mean? So I think one one of the important things to think of is what do you actually wanna get out of it? What are the end results you would like to see from actually running that meter? So some of the things that listed there are, like, community building, technology update, parameters, you know, these kinds of things. But, again, I kinda wanna open up and if any of you are running meet ups or you're sponsoring meet ups or, you know, you're involving meet ups in any way, what are the goals that you want, you know, to achieve by by being involved in those meet ups?

And then how would you measure these things? Again, like the the age old question of how do you measure, like, develop relations. How do you, you know, how do you prove to your managers or their managers how that kind of sponsoring these meetups is worth it? So, I mean, some of the things I measure is things like number of attendees, number of speakers, the number of people who actually actively want to come and speak is is always quite a nice thing to to measure. You know, you can measure things like social media bars.

One thing we do is we do surveys. We send out a survey after the meetup, and then we kind of try and gather back as much feedback as we possibly can from those surveys, whether that be negative, positive, or, you know, indifference. And, of course, you've got, like, text sign ups. So if you've got more API sign ups because of your meetup, well, that's fantastic, but it might not always necessarily equate to that, especially if those people come to your meetups that already signed up to your technology. So how are you promoting that?

Again, I'm kind of leaving this open to discussion, obviously, like, things that we use are meetup.com because it's on Meetup. We also want things like we leverage other other organizations or things that we sponsor. So we sponsor something called the Association for Geographic Information, which is kind of like the de facto body for, like, GIS in The UK, and we get them to, like, post out to their mailing list and put that on their events events page. So there's there's, like, networks that you probably can already tap into that you might not necessarily realize that are kind of there to you. So it's always worth exploring that.

I also sometimes post things on Lanyard or there's something called eventhunt. Which is cool. There's obviously mailing lists and Twitter and all the kind of usual suspects. So, yeah, we've been running this year, Meetup now for so I've been in the past year. It was kind of in hiatus before.

So they stopped running it because they didn't have anyone who was, you know, like, doing developer managers, and they just had people who were developers who were occasionally helping organizers, like, probably even predring me to organizers meetups. So I I kind of came along to two, like, major things I did was rebrand to the meetup page to kind of just it looked a bit nineties, so I just went along and grabbed our graphic designer and helped asked him to kind of help us rerun that page. I also set up a Twitter account, kind of sent out on a an initial email to, like, inform people that we've kind of kicked it back into life because obviously a lot of those people are just completely forgotten about us. So, yeah, it's just a nice photo from one of our events. The other thing we did was kind of like use that MeetUp group to promote other things.

So, obviously, I was talking before about our annual conference, so I put that on there and I've got, you know, a bit more attention. And then, obviously, I was running Geovac Day with Rob, and I put that on there. And it's just kind of like another place. You don't the thing is you don't wanna dilute it with, like, non meetup events, but at the same time, like, if there's critical events that you kinda wanna draw attention to, you can actually use that meetup group to bring people together at things that aren't the traditional kind of Meetup space. Picture of Rod.

So yeah. So I guess over the past year, managed to fill up Meetup group from 54 people to 178. I probably average about 20 people at our meetups. So I'd like to see that grow. I'd like to kind of move out of our current space because it's probably about capacity at the moment.

And we run-in London primarily at the moment. Our like, our average dropout rate is about 43%. So I guess that's pretty much average, maybe slightly above average for London. I don't know what kind of dropout rates people are getting for meetups, but, yeah, our experience is about 43%. We say, like, if we're gonna get roughly 50% dropout, so if we get 40 signups, we expect about 20 people to come.

So, yeah, just wanna finish off on my top 10 tips. So the first thing I found really useful is how cheat sheets. So what we have is we just have this word document that just lists everything that I need to take. So every time I'm thinking I need to run this meetup, I literally have a checklist. I'm like, I need to go, I know I need this many adapters.

I know I need, you know, this swag. I know I need to post it on this event page, and so on and so forth. Second thing is I've never scared to haggle, like, we've had a lot. Like, we've changed venues a couple of times and both times I've managed to, like, get the price down just by saying, like, well, you know, we're gonna get this many people along. Can you do us a special deal?

So, like, if people say it's this much, like, don't just take the word for it. Don't be scared to kinda, kinda, like, like, you you know, know, barter bar a a little little bit. Bit. Arrive early, that's, like, something I've learned the hard way. So AV is always a nightmare.

I'm sure you guys know this inside out. Arriving early just helps negate a lot of problems. You can get things set up and make sure that everything's working. The people who are coming on to meetups, ask them if they wanna if they wanna get involved, if they wanna speak because a lot of people actually won't agree to come and speak unless we explicitly ask them to. So especially asking people, I found, is, like, the best way to get people to agree to speak next next time.

Do a write up. So I always do a write up after every event just so I know what went well, what didn't go well. Sure. A lot of you probably do this already for events anyway. Are you being reusing the same venue a lot recently?

And that's just because it saves so much time and effort. So you can you kind of have this formula for and now I have a formula, like, for running this meetup. So I don't have to worry too much about finding a venue, finding out prices, so on and so forth. I just say, yeah, we kind of wanna do the same thing we did last time. Right?

And that literally saves hours. Another thing is kind of linking events together. So we'll promote the meetup at, like, Geovac Day or at our annual conference. We kind of we linked different events together. So one thing I did was get a bunch of, like, business cards printed with the meetup euro and just kind of hand these out at different events.

But, yeah, be aware of scale. So you might outgrow your venue, something to think about every time. Like, next time you go to run an event, just think how many people should we have last time, what's the capacity of that room because we might have outgrown that. This is something I actually figured out the time. Having someone greet in there, like, giving name matches is really nice kind of welcoming.

Having someone there to kind of greet someone as they come in and just because sometimes, like, people come in and they're just kinda like, what's going on? So it's just nice to have someone there. And lastly, it's the feedback survey. So I can't believe it's that already, but, yeah, you shouldn't it's it's it's really useful to have honest feedback. So, yeah, we've been using is it SurveyMonkey?

What's it called? SurveyMonkey? Yeah. Is that right? Yeah.

Cool. And that's all I got.