 Great, so welcome everybody to this session Today, I'm very happy that I get to speak about something that I'm very passionate about which is Essentially organizing meet-ups organizing events, but ultimately it's more about building communities Very quickly My name is Juan. I was born and raised in Colombia. I am based in the Netherlands I work for a Dutch company called Sivia We do all sorts of consultancy. We're here with colleagues that do everything dev of security Me specifically I work in data But I guess Literally everything that I'm gonna say during these presentations should be relevant regardless of what you do like tech or not and the beautiful thing is that even though I didn't originally thought of this as As something that is similar to open source The truth is quite a lot of the things that you learn from contributing to open source projects are very similar to the things that you learn and you do when you're Contributing and organizing events. Let me tell you a little bit about myself back in 2011 I Became very popular and I I am asked quite a lot of friends Because I was just really good at organizing student parties for me it felt effortless to Throw something up and with very little preparation just get a room full of people that were having a blast And that was kind of the moment when I realized like oh, I have an interesting superpower. I Had no idea was gonna be ever useful outside of university time But it was Back when I graduated For the first couple of years. I was completely broke. I Think back then the coolest life hack that I ever learned was if you go to a meetup You might learn a thing or two maybe land a nice job, but more importantly there is often free food So during these two years of my life, I think I was attending one two three meetups a week That was a little bit of my cycle and I did learn quite a lot Besides the free dinner, of course Back in 2018 something magical happens. I attended this meetup and At the end of the meetup I thought to myself You know, it's like the organizers were not even trying there is so much that you could have done better around this meetup and That's when they hit me that is like well if you're so opinionated about this and why don't you organize your first meetup? And so back in 2018 I started organizing this community called the Amsterdam data visualization meetup and It was amazing Back then I didn't have any support from my company To organize these events. It's not that they were against or anything But it was more a thing that I did in my free time It was just me approaching other professionals. Just Making sure that people were in a room and that was really contagious really Just the fact that with very little work. We're talking roughly 10 minutes of work. Sorry 10 hours of work You can gather some very interesting people in a room you can learn from them and You can just improve the community that you have around your city Now back in 2020 2021. I Also gave it a try. I started a couple of meetups was not my cup of tea But I'm happy to tell you that this year alone. I've organized eight meetups I know work for a company that loves it they actually have a space where we can organize meetups and My boss is super happy that that's my superpower Like I don't write blocks I'm probably the worst programmer in this room But yet somehow I Can provide a lot of value by doing this little activity Let's talk a little bit more specifically the why behind meetups I think there are three very compelling reasons to organize them The first one is marketing Meetups can cost somewhere between zero euros to maximum three thousand and And the amount of relevance that you get from this like there is no marketing effort That delivers you a hundred people that are passionate Experience around the topic and that live close to whatever it is that you're working Like that amount of relevance is insane for something so cheap the second approach is Sorry, the second reason is just leadership It is amazing for the people who decide to organize these things Because you get to practice project management You get to practice networking. You get to practice public speaking For those of you that maybe don't have a leadership role, but that you think that you might want to grow into that direction a Meetup is a very low stakes opportunity to practice all of these skills and not only leadership that also goes to Everything marketing skills building making banners landing pages all sorts of things that maybe you don't get to do in your day-to-day work And the third one is because of the marketing. That's our networking During these meetups one you get to meet peers that you would never normally Like not meeting the wild these are people that fully understand what you do your profession But maybe work for another company So this is kind of like the only place where you can really exchange ideas freely With I like this air of competition Also, if there are some people that you really admire Organizing a meetup is the perfect opportunity to reach out to them. I said, hey, I think you would be an amazing speaker. I Think I met some very interesting people just reaching out to them And if they feel that your intentions are really community driven more than just like getting a few hires here and there people are very open towards volunteering for meetups now One of the meetups that I'm currently organizing is the analytics engineering meetup If you have never heard of this profession, that's completely fine this term started back in 2020 So it's a really really new concept But back then back in the same year. I thought to myself I really want to claim the analytics engineering meetup for myself and It paid off nowadays that are like eight of them, but they always have like analytics engineering meetup London So it was an interesting idea These are numbers of exactly how it all started like Back when I organized the first meetup it took like a couple of months Like I mentioned not more than 10 hours of planning But these were the numbers that we were able to amass This is just a funnel of how many people during the group and ultimately 40 people stayed the whole time So this was enough to really prove to my manager to my colleagues like hey, there is something in here We just spent almost nothing to organize this and we just got the attention of 40 people. That's Sadly enough. That's much much better than they are a Gmail campaign now, let's let's say that I inspired you and You want to go home tonight and organize your first meetup. What are some of the steps that you need? The first one is what I call creating an identity so First you need to determine a topic You can go for something super broad like Developers meetup or something very specific like Kubernetes security The more specific your topic goes the more likely it is that your community is gonna be smaller But you're gonna attract more advanced and more knowledgeable people Well broader topics than to attract more beginners There is no right and wrong approach. I personally at the moment I am having a meetup that is very beginner friendly and one that is much more advanced and I really like that balance Second thing is you need an identity Like what is the thing about your event and these? This is really all sorts of things from is everybody allowed to be a speaker. Are you gonna pursue diverse speakers? Are you gonna take the extra mile? Are you do you care if people do sell speeches or if a talk feels like a marketing? Thing or are you gonna ban certain technologies? Even I've seen some meetups that make it a thing to organize a pop quiz at the end and that was kind of their gimmick All sorts of things can go into their identity And finally how you're gonna push this now the beauty of things is meetup.com It's an amazing platform. It's quite cheap Think it costs like 70 euros a year and it is surprisingly democratic. So it's not that you can pay Actually, I don't know if that's fully true, but the point is with the 70 euros subscription You get advertised and those people that are in the platform get a really good chance to find out that your event is happening But of course you can set this up in all sorts of ways Once you have it all set up and you have an idea of how your meetup is going to look it's time for you to start organizing the first event Before the meetup, there are three things that you need to arrange The first one is a sponsor quite often the sponsors are in charge of providing the venue And or things like food and drinks In return, they sometimes get to send the speaker. They sometimes get to put a banner. They sometimes You always have to of course be careful some people might have some intentions on In fact, I one time was gonna speak at a meetup and because the sponsor was one of the competitors They decided that I was not fit to be a speaker So I guess you'll know this It's difficult because a lot of people might be willing to sponsor but You also have to be careful not to sell your soul There is the venue quite often the sponsor would provide it But sometimes that might not be the case now For the very first meetups that I organized one time I had to pay it out of my own pocket and in the end For one of the meetups I organized I ended up losing 200 euros which wasn't that terrible, but It's still kind of a challenge to find a venue because even though most companies have offices that are completely empty during the afternoons Sometimes they might not be fine with bringing strangers The average meetup just for your reference is in my experience minimum five people but maximum a hundred hundred twenty and You don't fully have control over how many people are gonna show up So that's what makes a venue a bit difficult Just having some sort of place like a hotel or a conference venue like this Until them. Hey the day before or two days before I would tell you how many people will show up Already like these carts some people so really finding a venue it's tricky I'm lucky my company super happy with me sponsoring this at their venue. So that's amazing and Finally, it is the speakers like the real meat and bones of the whole Events you need to find at least two speakers that are gonna be part of the program in theory Everybody who has something to say that they wish they would have known a month before Counts as a valuable speaker You shouldn't really discard new people whenever they want to speak But at the same time it depends a lot on your audience and Finding very knowledgeable speakers if you have some sort of requirement is tricky To be really honest with you. I think the most difficult part of organizing meetups is always finding speakers Because most people are either on holidays on those moments and personal commitments or The truth is there is also quite a lot of people that feel that they're not interesting enough So this is always something that is interesting Amazing life hack check all their similar meetups in the area if they have presented for those Chances are huge. You're gonna say yes to yours Or contact me happy to present whatever you all are based Now I normally hate adding a lot of text to my slides But since these slides are public I just wanted to show you this is the template that I use whenever I reach out to a speaker You can read it or not, but there's some things that are interesting to contribute is Normally when I reach out to a speaker, this is my templates I make it very clear that I'm not selling them anything. I'm not trying to recruit them Very early on it has to be transparent that It is really an open source thing. I just I think it's super fun when professionals gather and speak nothing to sell you second thing is Any tint of hesitation regardless the event It's a massive Red flag for people. So if you said, yeah, depending on your availability with my plan this we might See if enough people are interested people tend to pick up on that. So My rules at least whenever I organize a meetup is I prefer To be the only speaker and be very strict about my vision Rather than giving impression to people that the meetup might or might not happen But that's just me the next point that is important to handle is marketing Now as I mentioned meetup.com does a lot of it for you. You just create the page and people will find out And that's like amazing already Organically quite a lot of people sign up. I think for the average meeting without too much trying Between 30 to 60 people just come just from it up even before you start advertising the whole thing But then of course that are paid advertisements and things like LinkedIn or Facebook fact LinkedIn is quite interesting because you can literally target Every person that has these job title or that uses these tools or that has this particular software in their profile It kind of goes a little bit against the whole like Community and organic growth and everything but if you really need to reach out to everybody that has an expertise and that's your thing You could do that with paid ads The most important for me is word of mouth Like reaching out to people personally and giving them the impression that they are gonna be missed if they don't join It's much more powerful When you tell a professional like hey, I really admire your work. I'm organizing these events and I'm very curious about your feedback And when you reach out to your colleagues, I hate I think these picker is interesting because you seem to work in something similar Whenever you build that bridge and reach to people personally the chances of them coming up is much higher. I Think we have all been guilty of ignoring those invites that Oh, they invited 2,000 people so they're not gonna notice if I'm not there Yeah reaching out personally Seven days before the meetup is where the most action takes as I mentioned my other rule is I Really tried my best to keep meetups under 10 hours of work Just because you could organize a conference like this But then it stops being fun and it becomes like a full-time job Well, if you have a team of two or three people and you keep them to 10 hours of work That's very feasible for everybody both But it gets a bit more intense seven days before first. That's when you have to start doing the most marketing because the most people sign up to your event the same week and The people that sign up in The last moments are the ones that are the most likely to attend So it sounds weird, but you really want to prioritize people that sign up one hour before the event starts Over the person that sign up like a month or three weeks in advance It's a matter of fact. I also only make the events available two weeks before Just for decent purpose Also, it's very important to confirm to the speakers tell them. Hey The event is going on. This is the address. We expect you here if you need to work or have a call before you can do here food is there and You should bring some people Now if you have three speakers and you tell those speakers to bring two people That's already a massive quite a bit of people in there So if every speaker would bring two or three colleagues You don't have to worry too much about turn up And finally one thing that most people don't do but it's very important is send some sort of confirmation to the attendants Reach out to them on Slack on meetup on LinkedIn maybe even personally I Generally make one message on meetup.com saying hey, this is the event is gonna happen here Just telling all of the little details. We're gonna be the speakers and very importantly asking them If you cannot make it, please We draw your RSVP that helps us make a much better estimate Because yeah, you know for these things. I really don't like the meetups that charge you money Not even like symbolic one or two euros. I'd really like it if it's free and fully democratic But when things are free people might sign up and not show up Just little nuts like please help us be more clear if you're coming or not makes a massive difference On the day itself you have some tasks first one is welcome the guests or Be the ceremony master really Introduce the speakers make sure that Everybody gets a little introduction Reach out to the speakers ask them all sorts of things like how do I pronounce your last name? Last week I had a speaker from Finland and I'm like, how do I pronounce your last name? I don't want to mess it up on stage So just those little things are important. I Also think it is very nice when you're doing this with colleagues because then you can assign roles what I tell my colleagues is If you want to help with meetups, even if it's just one hour of your time or less Fine with that. I don't expect them to be fully involved Because there are quite a bit of roles that they can take during the day The first one is of course the host Which is probably like the most intensive in terms of public speaking and I Know quite some people don't like to volunteer for that The second one is tech support which the gentleman at the back know how important it is just having somebody to handle the slides and the Presentations and assays the speakers the microphones their recordings and so on but I also really like the figure of the body as In getting a colleague and tell them if you see somebody Being shy you're in a corner alone or checking their phone Try to talk to them If the event happens at your company and you work there, it's much easier for you to like reach out to new people than vice versa so having somebody there to create an atmosphere for everybody is a Really like a great thing that doesn't happen too often and then finally there are the drinks Whenever you do drinks you need to work a little bit of catering Maybe the sponsor the venue already provides that service In the past they have been sometimes where I have to like bring the crates of beer myself and Just stand behind and give it to people and assist them a little bit So if you have some people dedicated to Ordering the pizza giving it to people and so on Putting it nicely that that works quite well the tip that I also give is Don't go cheap on drinks because The most value that comes out of meet-ups Is in the drinks afterwards? Sure, the talks are really nice for people that want to learn but the conversations that happen after That's where recruitment happens. That's where like friendships happen where Even you find new clients you find everything To me that's really the core where the most interesting things are happening So I really want to prioritize that Now I maybe should have mentioned this because I noticed some people taking notes But if you're interested in this topic, I actually created a good book Page you can scan it you can go there. It has all of the notes With all of my knowledge and organizing meet-ups Essentially when I created this page, it was just for people that might want to create one All of the steps that I mentioned and even more are pretty well detailed in there So feel free to check out these links send it to anybody. It is completely free completely anything and Michael Yeah, my call to action for all of you is one consider meet-ups They're amazing for a lot of reasons as I just told you really underrated tool for companies to Check out the link Maybe there are a couple of things here and there that you or one of your colleagues might appreciate and tree if you're organizing a Meetup or an event. Let me know always happy to speak about meet-ups or something else Thank you. I guess we can open up for questions People And if they attend to the to the meet-up Then afterwards we return back the money So only those that register but don't come back don't attend the meet-up and then we've moved for from a 3540 percent of people showing up Tomorrow less 95 percent of people So no, I wanted to share that. No, that's an interesting strategy maybe my remarks there is It's tricky because what that would mean is that now you're allocating people to like checking Who's coming and making sure that you have a list? So like that creates a little bit of overhead if it's worth it. It's worth it what I also do is One I completely overestimate the number like if I have a venue for a hundred people. I invite a hundred fifty and that evens out but it's It's also important to To always remember that Like people have busy lives. It's also hard for me. Sometimes you organize something and the turnoff is a bit disappointing But you also have to know that okay, people have a lot of priorities and rather being sour that people don't show up consistently It's about being grateful about the few people that show up and made it up. So Attendance is always a tricky topic But yeah, that's a that's an interesting system of getting the money back I don't know if I would do it for my meet-ups, but if I have time I would write it down there Maybe put you on that one and also is a measure that if one or two weeks before the meet-up We only have ten people registered then we can cancel the meet-up. Yeah If not, yeah, you don't you don't know yeah fair enough Yes Thank you for the talk my question is how long before the meet-up do you send out the first invitations? To the participants or to the speakers to the speakers and to the participants in general so Speakers I am constantly looking for them like it's 24 7 I meet somebody in a company I'm a consultant so whenever I go to a new assignment and like hey, you could be an amazing speaker so You really try to create this pipeline of people I Think for speakers, maybe two months in advance quite often is a good estimate Just because I'm quite a lot of speakers in my experience would say immediately no if you give them less than a month I don't know But when it comes to attendees when exactly you invite them My golden rule is never more than three weeks in advance Between two and three weeks really because if you start the event like two months before a lot of people will sign up on the first Weeks and the likelihood of those people showing up is almost zero But you also don't want to give it way too little time for people not to plan so two or three weeks This is also the Netherlands. I I understand people in the Netherlands like to plan their weeks further ahead, but Depending on where you're based that might be a bit different Thank you. Yeah, I have actually been running a Linux users group for almost 30 years now and I like a lot of the features that meetup.com has I am still Not real pleased with the way that they decided to start monetizing back a very long time ago And I've largely been boycotting them ever since I don't really begrudge them making money. It's just they started charging organizers and you know And it was a and it was a large sum of money for me at the time So I was I was a bit offended anyway, I have been Trying to use a An open-source tool called it's a it's it get together dot community it does leave a bit to be desired and I Would love to see them build a bit more of a community around it But I was curious if anyone here had any other Alternatives that they tried that they like To to be really honest and if somebody has something let me know afterwards, but my experience is Most of the alternatives are rather dying than growing if we had this talk like ten years ago We could have said like oh Facebook events is a great tool and so on but Now it feels like people are engaging much much less on social media. I Still see that some people still go to meet up like for example When I first came here to will bow. I'm like hey, let's see if that are interesting meetups And a lot of people have a habit of doing that So to me the beauty is that even though it costs and everything it does bring some people that come to the platform All of their alternatives so far I haven't been super happy, but I've tried it. I Always try them first with like personal parties and things like that see if my guests like them But so far I haven't been too happy Yes This is about the one strategy also do make people appear. What do you think about the co-hosting? Or a co-organizing with someone else like a colleague or someone you can trust you see Well in my experience of also organizing parties and things like this. So if you're an alone organizer Do you just gonna reach? I don't know maybe 20 people that say say hey, please come to this. I'm organizing this Well as a Talking of the appreciation they will go but if you do that for with three or four organizers that they have the same word Yeah, that 20 might become like 50 or 60 and I'm speaking about big numbers, but Do you see any disadvantage or do you see something like it? Why wouldn't you do that? Yes, okay, so we it's a it's an interesting trade-off. I've organized meet-ups just by myself and we groups of I Think the biggest group was nine people And what I noticed is the smaller the group the faster the decision-making is Maybe the quality of the end result is not that amazing But to me it's very important that meet-ups don't overtake your job and don't become a burden. So Nowadays I try to organize them with three people Just because it's quite feasible to split and like you do four hours. I do four hours and so on and if somebody's a bit busy You take over But the more people you introduce in the event one You suddenly shift into becoming a project manager and making sure like do you reach out to the speakers whose responsibility was that You sometimes start having a Kanban board for your meet-ups and and Then when you have very large groups like it has happened to me when I organize proper conferences It becomes very hard to have some discussions I've seen somebody it's really pro something and the other person is sent in You spent a lot of time like mediating these these stocks So it is really the trade-off between quality and overhead that you want to have I'd really like three or less And it gets much easier after you have done it sometimes like I wouldn't be afraid of organizing on my own But I guess for the first time she's nice To have a small group Are there any questions online? Somebody watching online. I don't know good if that was it once again. Very happy to have you here Very curious about your stories. Why exactly you carry out meet-ups. I understand now some of you already organized them So happy to chat feel free to check the resource that I share on screen All of my contact information is in there in case you want to reach out Have a chat once again invite me as a speaker But with that said, thank you very much for attending and I wish you an amazing few last days in Bilbao