Timi Wahalahti 3:17 pm on September 29, 2019

Proposal: Detect dormant Meetup groups and check with them automatically

I know, I know… I’m proposing again something that needs some of that dev time which we don’t have. But hear me out, let’s discuss this for the future and we also might have contributors to make this happen!

Our 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. program is growing fast. We had 575 active meetup groups in February 2018 and the latest number checked seconds ago is 778. Amazing!

Some of those MeetupsMeetup 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. groups might be inactive or dormant for one reason or another. Community Team would like to help organizers and members of those Meetup groups to go forward and have regular meetups again. We have a good set of ways and tools to support them.

Currently, we don’t have tools to detect dormant Meetup groups other than by manual work (last time it was done by @courtneypk on February 2018). Manual process involves exporting the list of meetups, sorting it, manually sending emails to organizers… And doing it for all the 778 groups. That’s deputyProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. time we don’t have available right now or in the future when chapter program grows more.

I’d like to propose a semiautomatic process for this. Leveraging Meetup.com APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways., we can check when each group has had their latest meetup. We are already pulling the information about latest meetup date to our Meetup tracker, so that helps us here.

Run a check when last Meetup has been organized at the same time when pulling the same data to Meetup tracker
- If the last meetup has been over six months ago, start the following process
Send an email to the organizer’s email address in Meetup tracker. CC support@wordcamp.org to open up a ticket in HelpScout
- With HS workflows, tag the ticket dormant-meetup and close it
If the organizer responds
- Remove the tag in HS ticket
- Start a discussion about how the Community Team could help them
If the organizer does not respond in two weeks
- Open the ticket with HS workflows and leave a comment suggesting to send message to organizers via Meetup.com
- Manual step: deputy sends a pre-defined message to all organizers via Meetup.com, adds a new tag dormant-meetup-org-contacted and closes the ticket
If organizers do not still respond in two weeks
- Open the ticket again with HS workflows and leave a comment suggesting to send a message to members of the Meetup group
- Manual step: deputy sends a pre-defined message to all members of the Meetup group via Meetup.com, adds a new tag dormant-meetup-members-contacted and closes the ticket
After two weeks
- Open the ticket once more with HS workflows and leave a comment suggesting to check if there’s any new activity on the Meetup group or if a member has replied or sent a Meetup application
- Manual step: deputy does the checks and if there hasn’t been any new activity, proceeds to remove the group from chapter

This way we can detect dormant Meetup groups efficiently without a need to do a lot of manual work for it once in a while, help local meetups to overcome their possible problems that have led to inactivity and keep our chapter program meetup list up-to-date.

Time for feedback! Please leave your comment by 2019-10-18.

Is this semiautomatic process needed?
Do you have any feedback on the proposed process? How to fine-tune it to be better?
Any questions or concerns?

Sallie Goetsch 5:57 pm on September 29, 2019

This sounds like a great idea, though I don’t have the skills to make it happen. Checking in without automation seems unnecessarily burdensome.
Rocio Valdivia 3:44 pm on September 30, 2019

Thank you Timi for this! 😀

1) Yes, we need a process like this to be more proactive with dormant groups.
2) Yes, I like your process, except that I’d not close the HS tickets, because an open ticket is the only way to keep the attention of the deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook.. We could maybe mark them instead as pending and once every couple of weeks, to go to those Pending ones to follow up.
3) No concerns, but one suggestion: I’d love us to generate an automatted report about the dormant groups every month or anytime.
- Timi Wahalahti 5:55 pm on October 1, 2019
  
  I’d not close the HS tickets, because an open ticket is the only way to keep the attention of the deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook.. We could maybe mark them instead as pending and once every couple of weeks, to go to those Pending ones to follow up.
  
  My idea was to leverage HS workflows for opening up the tickets for follow-up automatically after the X period of time if it does not get a response before that. Working that way, tickets wouldn’t be in the queue if not necessary or neither need to check the pending queue every once in a while.
  - Rocio Valdivia 11:23 am on October 3, 2019
    
    Oh! if we can re-open them after a X period of time, then it would be great! 🙂
    - Courtney P.K. 11:26 pm on October 12, 2019
      
      This was also my concern — if HS is able to re-open tickets after a set period of time, that would be ideal!
Javier Casares 2:33 pm on October 1, 2019

Hi! As some of you know, I have a “hobby” project called wpcalendar.io and I have connected and some other things to all the 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. APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways.. It has a lot of “manual” work to check the data, but if we set some parameters I can do something to list the dormant ones.

Also, the Meetup API has a lot of bugs (reported, but they said that do not have support for it) but, as I sid, I think I can do something.
- Joan Artes 2:34 pm on October 1, 2019
  
  That’d be awesome 🙂
- Rocio Valdivia 11:23 am on October 3, 2019
  
  Thanks @javiercasares! Let’s talk about it in person during WC Sevilla this weekend 🙂
- imath 9:02 pm on October 3, 2019
  
  Great work about wpcalendar.io 💪 And thanks a lot for volunteering about identifying the potential dormant meetupsMeetup 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. 😍
- Cami Kaos 10:40 pm on October 3, 2019
  
  This is so exciting to hear!
- Javier Casares 9:18 am on October 4, 2019
  
  I checked, and there are 167 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. dormant (more than 6 month without activity). The Meetup APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. has a query to check the “inactive” Meetup, within N (180) days.
  
  Also, there is the information about the Member ID in the organization, but the contact mail or any contact information is not available, so I suppose is needed to access the Meetup panel and send a message to organization or so. There is one possibility via the API to get the email from organizarers, so we could try that (I cannot access because my Pro API is not for WordPress 😉 but we can try with a good one).
  
  This afternoon I will talk to Rocío and see about it.
  - Courtney P.K. 11:27 pm on October 12, 2019
    
    Looking forward to hearing more about this! Thank you for your work on it 🙂
Andrea Middleton 5:02 pm on October 1, 2019

Is this semiautomatic process needed?

Yes, I think it is needed. We have lots of dormant groups that cost the program money without adding value to the organization.

Do you have any feedback on the proposed process? How to fine-tune it to be better?

The progression here makes sense to me, though it does have more manual steps than I’d like. That said, automated emails are icky, so a combination of “Saved Reply” + the personal touch could be just what we need.

What I remember from when we did a round of engagement emails for dormant groups last time, is that it prompted a lot more mentorship work and a lot more meetings. That’s not a bad thing, but I wonder if it would be extra-efficient to include in those outreach emails some ideas/advice on how to organize low-effort events, find venues, or recruit speakers.

Even more efficient/effective might be to have some regularly scheduled “reignite your 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. group” Zoom or 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/. meetings that we could invite organizers of dormant groups to join in on — that could provide a compelling “call to action” toward training that would scale better than individual email chains.

Any questions or concerns?

I guess I’m a little worried about clutter in the queue, but like most things, that inconvenience is worth it if we can activate more organizers.
- Timi Wahalahti 6:07 pm on October 1, 2019
  
  though it does have more manual steps than I’d like.
  
  I agree with you, there are more manual steps than optimal. But on the other hand, I’d like to have the flow used previously: contact the main organizer, contact all organizers, contact members and only after that remove the group from the chapter. Because of meetup.com does not have an APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. for sending messages (or at least I’m not aware of it), we can’t really automate contacting all organizers and members.
  
  What I remember from when we did a round of engagement emails for dormant groups last time, is that it prompted a lot more mentorship work and a lot more meetings.
  
  Makes sense. Thought previously checks for dormant groups have been made manually once-in-a-while going through all groups. My hope is that checking the activity regularly balances the work after few first rounds.
  
  I wonder if it would be extra-efficient to include in those outreach emails some ideas/advice on how to organize low-effort events, find venues, or recruit speakers.
  
  +1
  
  Even more efficient/effective might be to have some regularly scheduled “reignite your 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. group” Zoom or 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/. meetings that we could invite organizers of dormant groups to join in on
  
  Good idea! Maybe not always, because the idea is to check activity almost on a daily basis with automation. Definitely, something that would be a wise thing to do when we are sending the few first batches – on those we are probably getting many groups that are inactive.

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Proposal: Detect dormant Meetup groups and check with them automatically

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