How can we better reach our community organizers

Recently there have been some concerns raised with staying in touch with our community organizers, specifically meetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. organizers:

  • It has been discovered that some meetup organizers are not receiving the meetup newsletter
  • The annual meetup survey has a fairly low open rate
  • Messages from meetup.com get marked as spam in some email clients

It might therefore be useful to look at how to better reach our community organizers, not just with the survey, but the monthly newsletters too!

Some ideas where proposed during recent community team chats:

  • @hlashbrooke considers the best solution to be to get all organiser’s usernames so we can track things properly, but then we can use our own platform for sending emails, which would be way more reliable.
  • @bph suggested using ‘bitly’ links to see how many actually follow links and reduce the information.
  • @andreamiddleton wondered how much pushback would we get if we started syncing meetup organizer emails between meetup.com and MailChimp.
  • @jillbinder pointed out that this is a circular problem: Any of the ways we have to inform organizers of new processes for communication relies on finding ways to communicate with organizers, which is the problem.

After some initial investigation @courtneypk has also found out that if members have chosen not to share their email addresses on meetup.com, they won’t appear in any MailChimp lists we create from there. This should alleviate any privacy concerns, however it might not solve the problem we’re experiencing.

We would really like to find a workable solution to effectively communicate with all our meetup organizers in a non-intrusive manner, so if you have any ideas or suggestions, or comments on the above, please do leave them in the comments below this post.