With 575 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. groups on the chapter account (and always growing!) we like to check in every so often to confirm if the groups are active. However, there are some meetup groups in the program that are inactive or dormant, and we need to figure out how we should manage them going forward.

A few weeks ago, I exported a list of current chapter meetup groups to a spreadsheet and sorted them by the date of their last event. A quick guide to this spreadsheet:

• Groups highlighted in Red haven’t had an event in over a year.
• Highlighted in Orange haven’t had an event in 6–12 months.
• Highlighted in Yellow haven’t had an event in the past 3–6 months.
• You’ll notice a column titled “Upcoming Events”, which we’ll need to investigate for each group, as it can mean they have an event listed, but don’t have a location and/or date yet.

In some inactive groups, organizers are still interested, but they are struggling with attendance and/or finding event topics. We should check if this is the case, and if we can help advise/support them in any way.

I propose the following plan:

• Email existing organizers of dormant groups that we have contact info for (according to the Meetup Status doc).
• Also reach out to the organizing team via message on Meetup.com (this will help ensure that the message reaches organizers that we don’t have email addresses for, and/or if their contact information has changed).
• If we don’t hear back from any organizers for a particular group by 5 March 2018, we will then reach out to all the members of the group via Meetup.com message to ask if anyone is interested in organizing.
• If no members of the group volunteer to organize the group by a 12 March 2018, we will remove the group from the chapter account.

Below is the email that I’ve drafted, which is based on an old annual survey email that we sent to dormant groups. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for changes and/or additions.

Hi Team,

I hope all is well with you and your WP community! We like to check in with meetup groups every year to find out how things are going.

It looks like your meetup group hasn’t had an event in a while, and we wanted to make sure there are plans to keep it running. We’d happily have a call with you to discuss ways to plan events. Here are some easy ideas to help boost your events:

• Encouraging members to suggest events will help get some additional variety in the topics and also will allow people to plan events in times or areas that work for them. As an added bonus it also lets newer folks build their leadership skills. Just make sure they get a date and location!
• Show & Tell style events as well as happy hour/social events are types of events that are low maintenance, but still get WordPress enthusiasts together.
• It’d also be good to schedule a few different events with varying dates, times, and locations, so it gives a wider variety of people an opportunity to participate.

If you’d rather enlist our help to find a new organizer for the group, just let us know! If we don’t hear from you by 5 March 2018, we will assume that you’re no longer interested in running the group, and we will then reach out to the members of the group members to check if anyone else is interested in organizing. If no other members expresses interest in organizing the group by 12 March 2018, we will remove this group from the chapter account.

Thank you for your time, and we’re looking forward to hearing from you soon!

–The WordPress Global Community Team
support@wordcamp.org

• Do you have any feedback on the proposed process and/or the content of the email above?
• Are you available to help send out these emails in the next couple of weeks? This would require you to be an existing deputy on the Community Team.
• Any other concerns or questions?

Please comment by 25 February 2018, as it’d be great to start sending out these emails next week. Thanks!

#meetup-com, #meetups-2