 Thank you. Wow, what an honour. What an honour it is to be a New Zealander who lives in Australia speaking at a word camp in Europe. What an honour it is that so many of you want to hear about WordPress Meetups and how to grow your Meetup. Like Taco said, I'm a web developer. I work primarily at the moment for XWP as a team lead. I help advise word camps and Meetups in Australia and New Zealand, and I don't organise them that I do organise on my own. I have an amazing team behind me. There are two universal and often unconscious questions people ask themselves when they're deciding on whether to join a community. The first question is, are they like me? And when someone is looking at a Meetup page or a website about a Meetup group, the choice to attend that event will be influenced by whether what they see about your group seems as though it will fit them, seems as though you are offering something that is like them. The second question is, will they like me? And how they're received when they come to your group and how they're integrated into that community will totally influence their choices to return again. So we'll start with having a brief look at how we can better answer those two questions and attract and keep awesome Meetup members. I'm guessing that for the biggest majority of us as Meetup organisers are doing our organisation through Meetup.com. So the first opportunity that we have to answer some of those questions is our Meetup page. Of course, the principles apply if you're organising your Meetup through Facebook, your own website or some other platform. But for generally, the first port of call somebody will have when they're looking you up is your About page. Your About page is the first opportunity to introduce your purpose or goal. And this is where you put your mission statement and where you should be very clear about what you're about. Maybe it isn't enough just to say we're a group about WordPress. There's not much in that to really sell it to someone. If, however, you say, we're WordPress users who teach and learn from each other, who enjoy sharing knowledge and who are passionate about encouraging others into WordPress and open source, we're introducing both the mission to advance WordPress, but we're also introducing the kinds of people that they're going to meet when they come to your event. This is our About page. It gives kind of broad strokes about the group. It gives people the opportunity to look a bit further if they wish. We've made maximum use of the custom pages available on Meetup.com. This is the index of all of the pages that we have available so that people can get as much information as possible before they actually come. Like Tarko said, we run three Meetups a month. We have a user Meetup, which focuses less on code and more on the use and application of WordPress. We have a developer Meetup where people get under the hood and we have a small local Meetup that we adopted that needed some admin support. In our Meetup pages, we outline the details about each of those groups. We have our code of contact so people know what's expected of them. If you follow the link that's up on the slide, you can actually download copies of all of those templates. Actually, I'm just assuming at this point that WordPress has published my blog post. I haven't had a chance to check, but it was scheduled to publish when I started speaking. If it's not there, it will be at the end of this. The second area that you have available to make great impressions on people and to help answer that question, are they like me? Are your member profiles? On Meetup, you have the opportunity to ask people questions about themselves. While we often, as organisers, use those questions to resource what we do in the Meetup, it's also a great opportunity to give other people who are looking in on our group some information about the people they're likely to meet. These are not a requirement, obviously, because we try and keep things as open as possible. When we see that most people do fill that in, and this is, of course, my profile, and these are the questions that we ask. What would you like to learn about WordPress? And how are you currently using WordPress? And we often find that the answers to that definitely informs us as providers of content, but it also gives people who are looking in an opportunity to see if some of the issues that they may be having might be answered if they came along to our group. The other thing to have is a photo gallery that shows people about what your Meetup looks like. Obviously, as we go through the presentation, you'll see that I've used a lot of international Meetups groups with their permission to showcase photos of the various groups that are doing Meetups. What was interesting about that is what I noticed is that we all tend to just shoot off camera photos, and some of them are great, but one of the things that I'm taking away from this for me is to get our team to actually bring along one of the good cameras one day and actually suit some kind of good promo photos just for the top little photo gallery on Meetup, just to give people a really clear idea. And of course, here's a photo of our Meetup. This is the user Meetup, which has a tendency to be the bigger group. Finally, the welcome email is a really great way of introducing your group to new members when they have taken the plunge of actually joining your Meetup group, but they haven't yet been along to an event. It's actually an excellent opportunity to introduce yourselves perhaps a little bit more personally. And I have to thank our team member Amelia, who used some of her great content marketing knowledge to write the content for our pages. This is a picture of our welcome email, and you can see the kind of headings that are in there. How do the Meetups work? What's the format look like? How do I get involved? And what can I do next? And again, that's part of that download file that's available on my website. So once we've given people enough information to help answer that question, are they like me? Our next challenge is how to answer that second social need. Will they like me? When was the last time you went somewhere for the first time? I'm pretty confident that for a lot of us, that will actually be this weekend. We come along, we're into this huge environment, there's a whole lot of unknowns, particularly for those who've never been to a word camp before. As a Meetup organizer, I think it's really, really important to stay in touch with that feeling. It makes us much better at identifying awkward and uncomfortable newcomers and introducing ourselves to them and making them feel included and welcome is really, really important in terms of actually connecting them and making them more likely to come back and to, you know, in the long term become involved and an integral part of your Meetup group. I think that on the night of the event, we actually need at least one social butterfly who's keeping an eye out for those kinds of people. And if you're one of those people for whom this is really uncomfortable, it may be that you need to identify somebody in your team who's less uncomfortable with the idea of putting themselves out there and introducing them. And this is where having a team involved in organizing your Meetup becomes really, really important. So I think it's important that we all kind of have a dedicated welcome wagon type person involved, which is probably easier to do and I guess when you've got a smaller group, but it may just be you. One of the ways that we have to help facilitate that welcome and to bring people together is to provide food and drink for a social time before we get into the Meetup program itself. At our Melbourne main Meetups, we start the evening with half an hour of social catch-up. We have pizza, we have drinks. It creates a great opportunity for people to get to know each other in a relaxed context. And we also, of course, as a lot of groups do, head to the pub after the event for more social time. And interestingly, the social time, more than the presentations, have proven to be a really valuable space for people to forge some great friendships and collaboration opportunities. If we as organizers can create the environment and atmosphere that fosters that feeling in our members, our Meetups will grow. So if it's pizza or drinks or just coffee and cake, there's a huge benefit in providing this kind of social space. And the question often comes up, how are we going to pay for that? Well, you could ask members to donate, but we also can talk to sponsors and we'll talk more about that in the detail a little bit later. So when you've been running a Meetup for a while and we have a group of people who make others welcome and encouraging participation on all levels and you're trying to keep the momentum going, what are some of the keys to making that happen? Well, for me, the first is have a team because you can't do this on your own. Or you can, but it's difficult to sustain. It's difficult to stay inspired when you're doing this on your own. And of course, this is a photo. You can see those circles around there, our Melbourne organizing team. We're incredibly lucky to have an amazing, huge pool of people to draw from who are hugely enthusiastic about WordPress and committed to building amazing things with it. I'd also like to make a note here that if when you've been going for a while and you've got a committed core organizing group, it's actually really easy to get into a groove and to forget that there might be other people who need to be included. So hold on lightly to your responsibilities and always be on the lookout for enthusiastic people who might just need some gentle encouragement to come on board. So how do you identify potential team members? Team players are always around. They help without asking. They may be the first to arrive in the last to leave. They participate and they may be keen to organize their own meetups around their particular area of interest in WordPress. Great team members may not always be the loudest, most obvious person there, but could also be the quiet achievers who are loyal and regular attendees, obviously getting a lot out of the meetup and could be quietly encouraged to take a more organizing role. They may not put their hand up. They may need you to approach them and they may actually be really excited when you ask them. So keep your eye on the group and encourage people to be involved and we've had a bit of a change of makeup in our group of late. And as it happens we had a couple of people who'd volunteered and so we invited them along to organize this meeting and they got really excited about getting involved and so it's really exciting for me to see other people starting to come along. Quite apart from the fact that takes some of the load off us but it's also really cool to see other people starting to step into areas that really excite them. At a practical level managing our meetup happens with a few really useful tools. We have a Melbourne organizers Slack channel on the WP Australia Slack account and a lot of our planning and conversation happens in there. It's where we keep everybody in the loop. It's where we drop in items for the news for that night and you know how we organize everything really. We also use Trello to manage our tasks, to take notes of inspiration. We have all of our whole year basically planned out with ideas of what we're going to do month by month. We use WordPress for our website of course and that's just where we drop things like our we often video our events where all the slides are in an easy consolidated place. We use Twitter for marketing and I'm kind of wondering and happy to chat to anybody about that afterwards who's using something else because I don't feel it's as popular now and it feels like it's being less effective. I'm a little afraid we might end up having to do Snapchat or something and I don't even know how to start with that so we'll see where we go with that. We also use Hangouts. We have online meetings from time to time when we can't all be in the same place and actually there's a group within our Meetup who have a monthly business Hangout and so there'll be 10 or 15 people they get together to talk about their WordPress business so that's been an invaluable tool and it's awesome that it's free. So from the earliest days of our Meetups our venues have been provided under sponsorship agreements. Initially these were co-working spaces who provided their space free of charge in exchange for us saying nice things about them in social media. As a business for them change we found ourselves ending up having to pay for that same venue and having to find sponsors who would cover that cost and recently after even that got too expensive we've had to go looking for new venues and new sponsorship arrangements and it's been a challenge. We've looked at a bunch of options. We looked at university campuses. We looked at bars and pubs. We looked at community centres. They all have their different challenges. Universities often need to have a contact and they often you know they can be a challenge to use outside of office hours. Bars and pubs have a minimum spend so it ends up being costly or ends up costing our users. Community centres could have been great. There's some great venues but they're always in out-of-the-way places and they may not ever be a feature of the local area where you live. They're certainly around where we are but it just didn't work and we found did finally find a fabulous local library but it was really difficult to get to. So finally when we hadn't found anywhere so we had to cancel a meet-up one month or all three meet-ups for the month and sent out an email to the gang and said hey guys really sorry we can't meet up this month we're really really struggling to find a venue and we kicked ourselves that we hadn't actually asked the group first because somebody came back to us and said hey check this out and now we have a fantastic new central Melbourne city venue really close to public transport and it's back to one of those co-working spaces that totally gives us their space for free and they are amazing so we really should have asked the group first. So the sponsorship arrangements may differ either in-kind sponsorship like venue provision or monetary sponsorship for payment of meet-up fees or pizza the sponsorship relationship can be a little bit tricky to navigate so here are some tips for finding good fit sponsorships that have a mutual benefit that's fair rather than more in favour of one party than the other. It's actually we found this may not always be true but we've actually found that it's better to ask or approach sponsors directly. Sponsors will often come to you but in often cases we've observed that a lot of those that have come towards us haven't really known us and haven't really been able to feel I guess feel like that really good fit. So we always do you know I'm fairly careful about checking about what the expectations are on us and making sure that the sponsors that we're talking to really really understand WordPress and open source and the expectations that we have on them. So an approaching sponsors approach sponsors of someone with whom you have something in common who had a natural connection with your audience. Have a strong professional sounding sponsorship email request or sales document outlining what your group is about outlining the open source and the WordPress ethos and why you'd be a strong fit for working with them. And if you look like it you take it seriously sponsors will take you seriously. If a sponsor decides to come on board respect their branding in your website and your comms about them that's really important. And keep in touch with your sponsor send them pictures of you meet up show them where their money is going and what it's actually doing how it's building and growing the community don't just see them as a cash dispenser build a relationship with them and as that relationship develops and continues your mutual benefit to each other grows with the group. And again if you're interested in the template for that email that we use it's in that download. If I may offer two words of caution about sponsorship the first is don't let sponsorship change the nature of your group. So if the thing that the sponsor wants from you makes you feel less like an open source and WordPress meet up then you might need to rethink that relationship. Number two sponsorship is not about making a profit for your group. It's not about storing up resources it's not about providing high-end fancy spaces or food it's simply about having your needs met. So try and keep your needs modest so that your sponsorship needs aren't extortionate. Okay as with any regularly occurring event once we've got all of that momentum going it's really easy to find what works and stick with it. To get into such a groove that your meet up becomes predictable. So it's important for everyone both organized and attendees to keep your meet up fresh. And there are a couple of ways to do that. If your meet up thrives with a presentation or format and you don't want to move away too much from presentations target speakers who you want to hear from even if they're from outside of WordPress. You don't always have to have a WordPress meet up that has somebody from WordPress. We've got some great connections in the word in the Joomla and the Drupal communities where we are and we've had them come along and speak. We've had combined events with all of them that actually helps to build open source as a whole and make some great new connections with other people which I'm really really proud of. Set specific topic related events. Specifically ask people to speak to those topics. Have a lightning talk event to allow for shorter formats to give people an opportunity to talk for the first time. If people aren't confident to speak run workshops on creating presentations and presenting successfully to give people the chance to practice in a safe environment. And encourage diversity in the speakers you have. Honestly in a lot of cases minority representatives may not actively volunteer but may respond really well if you actually ask them. So offer people opportunities ask people directly build up relationships get people inspired and confident and it will help sort of get away from that meet up where you have the same person getting up every week and doing a different or every month about doing another presentation. One of the meetups for our user group last month was a clinic question and answer session where people could bring their own issues and find a more advanced user to help them out. This is a great opportunity for people to get help. But also for for people who helped to feel a bit more confident in their ability to offer assistance in a safe environment. And we found that everybody learned something from this opportunity. We encourage developers from the developer meetup to come along and help the users. And it's a great way of kind of building bridges within those two fairly distinct and separate groups workshops. They differ from clinics and that they offer teaching on a specific subject and are particularly great for groups where there's lots of new users who want to get to groups with WordPress. And there's some great information over on make.wordpress.org and the way of curriculum for doing WordPress training if you're struggling to set that up yourself. We've also run workshop for developers who want to learn how to contribute to core in terms of setting up their development environment and learning how to actually create patches and manage SVN which has been really, really valuable. And we did one of those prior to our last contributor day. Meetup doesn't have to happen in a co-working space or an office. Some of the most entertaining fun events have been at pubs or cafes over a glass of wine. It may just be that the dominant conversation of WordPress and that's still helping build community. This is the WP bosses some of our Aussie guys. They get together once a week and co-work together. They're all freelancers, they're all solo operators and there's about eight of them actually. We can only see three of them there but that's their thing. That's how they started to build their community is actually for them to have a tribe of people who are WordPress users. In Melbourne we had a similar event that we called Pants on Friday. We all left our home offices and we put on our pants and went and did co-working. So it's always really, really nice to get out of the office and we'd do that once a fortnight or so just to hang out. And funnily enough we got amazing amounts of work done. It was just really nice to do it with someone instead of on our own. This is a contributor day. This is Melbourne's first contributor day last year. We've got the front table there where all the code heads are coding and the back table where the girls are doing the documentation. I'm not quite sure why there's there is definitely at least one girl on the developer table which is fantastic. Everyone can do something and a few hours on a weekend afternoon at this case a local library is a low key easy to organise the way to give back. You can run specialist meet-ups. There are about as many different kinds of meet-ups that you can see as there are people using WordPress. And then there's group weekends. This is Beachpress and this is pretty much my favourite event where we go to the beach but we do it in winter so we don't actually have to leave the house. So really the only limit somewhat any of us can offer our imagination and the will to make it happen. That's it.