What can Ruby Central provide to organizers?

[Ally Vogel]

Hello everyone!

Ally here! I am reaching out to all the Meetup organizers in this group to see exactly what are the needs and help that organizers need from us and Sponsors to make your events flourish and succeed. 

Initially, we thought the that setting up a Meetup.com Pro account network was the way to go, but the more and more struggles we have with the support team there, the challenges of managing the account already, and even just the recent feedback I have heard from others on its lack of popularity, costs to run a group, and its general functionality is not maybe what organizers need at this current moment. I have heard a lot of great things about Luma as well - basically doing what Meetup.com does, but on a nicer platform and it's also free (unless you want to pay for the upgrade).

So my question for all of you is what is it that you all would like to see from us and sponsors to help you on? 

[David Doolin]

Hi Ally,

Off the top of my head...

The biggest challenge I've faced as an organizer is finding venues.

Since quite often an engineer in the meetup steps up to coordinate

with their company, probably anything which helps the overall community

grow might help increase the pool of venues.

Thanks for reaching out!

Dave Doolin

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primus inter parse

[Jim Remsik]

I will say that Luma has been great and that I don't have much residual goodwill with Meetup. There are legacy groups out there including Mad-Railers (Madison, WI) that largely act as a rolodex for old members of the community.

I've recently worked with Diesha from Ruby Central to see about RC acting as a Fiscal Sponsor. I think this is the biggest win I've seen for a larger event. We basically could cut our rental cost in half because Ruby Central rents on our behalf and provides us with a Non-profit discount. The work to determine who gets sponsorship and when is ongoing.

Communication is the biggest blocker I can see. Identifying who has an interest in getting in front of audiences in terms of speakers, sponsors, and community partners versus people who are invested in building and maintaining their communities. How can we align opportunity with interest?

Jim

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[Tekin Süleyman]

Hi Ally,

I’m one of the organisers of the North West Ruby User Group  (NWRUG) in Manchester, UK. We started monthly in-person meet-ups again last year and it has been a bit of a struggle.

Finding a suitable venue took a while, and we recently lost a venue due to lay-offs at our host company, but we’ve since found a new host in a local recruitment firm.

Our two main issues are: finding willing speakers and getting attendees.

On the speaker front, that’s always been an issue for us, as we’re drawing from a smaller pool of local Ruby developers than most. Post-Covid this has only got worse. But we’ve found ways to work around the lack of speakers by instead either watching pre-recorded conference talks or running workshops/interactive coding sessions when a speakers aren’t available, the later proving popular but requiring more work and facilitation on behalf of us organisers. This at least means we can meet monthly, regardless of whether we’ve got an actual speaker or not.

Getting attendees has definitely been the major issue for us post-Covid. A big contributing factor is that there are now way fewer people that actually work in the city centre day-to-day. Previously we would have had a significant portion of attendees coming to the meetup straight from the office, whereas now pretty much all our attendees are travelling into the city in the evening specifically for the meetup. On an average meetup we’re getting half a dozen, whereas pre-Covid it was at least double that, often many more.

Regarding meetup.com, we were using it pretty actively up until they started charging for free events. It was far from perfect, but the one advantage it does have is reach: our meetup was getting seen by far more people than without it, and we were regularly getting attendees showing up having found us on meetup.com. I don’t think this reach factor should be underestimated. We would very gladly use meetup.com again if didn’t cost quite so much for this reason alone.

Lu.ma looks nice, but it really can't compete on the reach factor, beside the fact it appears to only be available in limited locations currently.

One idea we’ve had recently to encourage more to make the journey in to Manchester for the meetup is to organise a co-working session during the day to entice people away from their home office, but we’ve yet to explore how this would work in practice. Would we try and subsidise or seek sponsorship for the desks for attendees? Or see if we can find a co-working space willing to discount desks somehow? We have a feeling this has legs, but also that it would require cash money to make it work, which we don’t have a great deal of...

Tekin

https://tekin.co.uk