Motivating your meetup

[ASayre]

Motivating your meetup.

Question is... how?

I run the SB Meetup. (all opf these numbers include myself and 2 asst. organizers)

There are a total of 71 members.

55 members are in the area.
41 have visited the meetup in the last 3 months.
33 have visited in the last month.
20 in the last 2 weeks.

8 people have attended a recent meetup.

Average turnout at events are usually between 3 and 5.

Number of people in SB who have RSVP'd for the next meetup: 3 people. 1 yes sofar.

Are there any suggestions for motivating the meetup members, and increasing event turnout, and getting the word out?

I've tried scheduling events at different times, weekday nights & weekends (Weekday days are out due to work).

We just can't break the barrier of more than a few people per meetup.

Rallies, which would probably be the most fun and draw the largest turnout, would seem anemic if there were only 3 people. Some people have aversions to handing stuff out or canvassing.


I need help here in Reagan's county. Any ideas?

Andre Sayre

[wgadget]

One thing that seems to work in our meetup is if you go to where it says "members" on the left side of the meetup website page, you'll see all the members in your group, with a little envelope next to their name. A week or so before an event, you can email them a personal invitation to the event...Say something like "Ron Paul needs you, and your grandchildren need you to _____ . " Make sure to put in the time and place so they can get there without any trouble. Just a few meetups can really build momentum.

One drawback is that you can only email 12 messages per day, so you might want to start a little earlier or get someone else to help you with the project.

BTW, you don't mention what kind of events you're planning. A lot of people don't like to just sit at meetings. You probably ought to find a good intersection with lots of sitting traffic at lights. NO RIGHT TURN LANES is crucial. You can't work in a dangerous location with turn lanes. Then when the cars are stopped, show them your sign and offer them your literature. The bigger the crowd, the more interest from the traffic. You will be inspired to do it again and again, especially when cars start honking at you and giving you the thumbs up. Make a big sign that says "Honk if you love LIBERTY." And get lots of Ron Paul signs, too, of course.

[mstrmac1]

Bump

[kutibah]

I think you need to mass email everyone and let them understand how important rallies are. It will slowly snowball. Rallies in my meetup group used to be in the 5-6 range and slowly got bigger. Now we're up to 35 people per meetup! Also, try and post photos from other meetup rallies you find to encourage them and show how fun it is (it really is fun when it gets big). That's all I can think about right now.

[ross11988]

Unfortunately turn out rates for my group are usually only 20%. The rest of the 80% i never get a reply email from. What I did is make videos of some of meetups to inspire and show that you are actually doing stuff on the streets.

[Mark Rushmore]

I was having similar problems at a local Meetup (same numbers almost. 3/50 turnout to real life events). I discovered that a much more effective use of my time was getting people that we met while on sign-waves, who were already interested in Ron Paul, to join us. For our first two sign waves we had 3 people there (all from the Meetup). By the fourth we had 9 people, and only the original 3 were Meetup related (although some of the newcomers ended up signing up).

I used to think a lot of the problem was the Meetup site setup, which is a bit awkward. At first I was afraid to communicate cause I didn't wanna be an asshole spamming the whole list. I thought setting up a quick web forum for local areas would make it easier for people to get involved, but that never took. In the end I've found that the magic is getting the cell phone #. Rather than give people the Meetup link anymore when I meet them while out and about, I'll just exchange numbers. Then call them before the next event and you've got a much greater chance of getting a yes than simply posting/mailing on the Meetup, no idea why but it just seems to go that way. After that, when they've already come out to an event, give them the Meetup link just as a backup way of checking on new events.

A while after this, a second Meetup was set up specifically "for people who want to get involved in real life". I've discovered that this is more useful than it might appear. Having a large but inactive Meetup group may be good for spamming things like the TeaParty - but when you organize things, and everyone sees that only "3 out of 50" people bothered to RSVP or attend - people get disheartened or assume that there isn't much support, etc... By forming a splinter group with the core people who were coming out at least once a week or whatever, you get a super-active group where every event is RSVP'd properly, etc. From my experience, once you have these two groups running in parallel, people who now search on Meetup looking to join will self-select about the appropriate group. The big group with lots of members but little talking gets the people who don't want to engage too personally. And the small group with lots of activity gets the people who are looking to really jump in and be involved.

None of that seems particularly revolutionary, but just offering some thoughts from my experience.

Oh yeah, and of course, pictures are a huge yes.

[ASayre]

One thing that seems to work in our meetup is if you go to where it says "members" on the left side of the meetup website page, you'll see all the members in your group, with a little envelope next to their name. A week or so before an event, you can email them a personal invitation to the event...Say something like "Ron Paul needs you, and your grandchildren need you to _____ . " Make sure to put in the time and place so they can get there without any trouble. Just a few meetups can really build momentum.

One drawback is that you can only email 12 messages per day, so you might want to start a little earlier or get someone else to help you with the project.

BTW, you don't mention what kind of events you're planning. A lot of people don't like to just sit at meetings. You probably ought to find a good intersection with lots of sitting traffic at lights. NO RIGHT TURN LANES is crucial. You can't work in a dangerous location with turn lanes. Then when the cars are stopped, show them your sign and offer them your literature. The bigger the crowd, the more interest from the traffic. You will be inspired to do it again and again, especially when cars start honking at you and giving you the thumbs up. Make a big sign that says "Honk if you love LIBERTY." And get lots of Ron Paul signs, too, of course.

Recently we've been tabling and handing stuff out on State St, and at the local farmers market.

Before that, we were regularly doing sign waving, but, it got too cold to stay on a windy overpass.

Hopefully going to start heading onto canvassing, but then people start to get out of their comfort zones.