Meetup Organiser Newsletter emails

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Recently, in discussions with a few meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. organisers, I’ve discovered that it appears that Meetup Organiser Newsletter emails are not being sent to all persons assigned as meetup organisers.

The first person who was assigned as co-organiser of our Cape Town meetup (besides the WordPress user) does receive the newsletter
Myself and another co-organiser do not, and have never received these emails.
This was brought to light when, in a separate discussion in a WordPress related SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/., another meetup organiser indicated he has also never received the meetup organiser newsletter.

We put quite a bit of effort into the monthly newsletters and if folks are not receiving them, it could pose a problem. For example, if we use the newsletter to highlight discussions around guideline changes (eg the recent logos in slides guidelines, which was discussed in a previous post) and meetup organisers are not receiving these emails, they may feel left out of the decision making process.

I’d like to propose a little investigation into this, perhaps by emailing a selection of recent meetup organisers via our HelpScout instance, and determining how wide spread this problem is. Once we can determine a) if there is a problem and b) where it lies, we can look into resolving it.

I’m happy to move forward on this, if it is something the community agrees we should look into. I’m also open to suggestion as to the best way to achieve this.

Courtney P.K. 10:14 pm on April 22, 2019

I agree that it’s quite concerning that some organizers are not receiving the newsletters (and possibly other message sent via meetup.com)! Your idea for an investigation sounds good. How should we determine the selection of groups/organizers to reach out to?
- Jonathan Bossenger 6:55 am on April 23, 2019
  
  Minor update, I received the Results of the 2018 Annual Survey meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. email, so things are definitely spotty.
  
  If I consider my small subset of initial respondents (which includes myself, @hlashbrooke and @blunnis) it would appear that the newsletter only goes to the first person to be marked as a co-organiser. So my thinking is that we try and reach out to meetup groups that have more than one co organiser.
  
  I’m not sure the best way to do this, so I am open to options, but I have a few ideas.
  
  One way to start would be to look at meetups created in the past 6 months, and reach out to the organisers via the support@wordcamp.org email address.
  
  The other option would just be to randomly select active meetup organisers (perhaps a group of 50) and reach out to them in the same way.
  
  A third option is that I could start by reaching out to meetups I’ve personally run orientations for in the past year (which would be a smaller group) and see if they are receiving the emails. This might be an easier place to start.
  - Courtney P.K. 9:18 pm on April 23, 2019
    
    I think that the first option may not give us a diverse sample of groups — I’ve noticed that sometimes older groups have slightly different features and layouts than others, so I often wonder if age of group affects anything. So I think the second option of reaching out to random selection of active organizers might give us a good sample.
    
    I also like the third option as it’s a bit more of a personal touch and does sound like an easy place to start 🙂
Hugh Lashbrooke 6:58 am on April 23, 2019

Ultimately, it would be great if we could email organisers from our own platform instead of meetup.com. Meetup.com doesn’t give us the email addresses of organisers, but many organisers have now supplied their WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ usernames, which means we can use WordPress.org to send them info. We don’t have those usernames for everyone though – the initial push got many of them, but there are a lot we don’t have unfortunately.
- Jonathan Bossenger 7:02 am on April 23, 2019
  
  Perhaps the best place to start would be to fix that problem? Can we/should we start making it compulsory to require a WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ username to be listed as a co-organiser of a meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area.? I don’t want to create barriers to entry for meetup organisers, but if it means we’re able to send out more valid information and more easily support meetup groups, there may be some validity to it as a requirement.
- Courtney P.K. 9:25 pm on April 23, 2019
  
  I’m glad that the new application process asks for a .org username and email address, so it does make reaching out to organizers easier, but that doesn’t unfortunately capture all the older groups.
  
  Maybe we can try to reach out to all organizers in multiple places (i.e., Make/Community, Meetup.com Message, SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. — just to be sure we cover all bases and increase the chance of every organizer being aware) and do another ask for emails and .org usernames in an attempt fill in more of those blanks?
- Andrea Middleton 8:37 pm on May 2, 2019
  
  I think the “MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. Pro” product does allow us to export & sync organizer contact info to a newsletter service — I think it’s MailChimp? That’s nothing we’ve ever considered, but it’s important enough to me that we be able to directly contact our organizers, that I wonder if it would be worth exploring.

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