Things to consider when organising a WordPress Meetup

Some time ago we organised a WordPress Meetup, which was a very nice experience. We would love to see other people also organising meetups and similar events, so we thought we would share some of the lessons we learned. We will start with what you need to do a couple of months before the event, up to what needs to be done on the day itself. The preparation we recommend is for an event for maybe 50-200 people.

If you are more than three months away from your planned date, it is time to find out where the event will be held. Are there good transport links in the city the event is in? Perfect. The next step is to find a good venue.

The venue is good if it is located fairly centrally in your town, and there are good transport links to and from. Keep in mind that many of us will come from far away by car / train, and then it is good if it is easy to find. If there are overnight accommodation options, this is super good. It is also important that there are good technical facilities on site.

What technical facilities are needed then? It all depends on the level of ambition, but here are some ideas:

Projector screen for presentations
Projector screen for rolling sponsor logos
Projector screen for scrolling twitter visualisation
Film camera computer to broadcast on e.g. Bambuser
Mosquito / microphone for speaker and moderator
Loudspeaker system
Amplifier system that fixes to get sound from both mosquitoes / microphone out to speakers and to the Bambuser broadcast
Wifi connection (aka interwebs)

At this point, it might also be a good idea to see if you can get hold of any speakers who might be interested in talking. If they have a lot of respect in the community and can be a good incentive for others to come, this is great – but it is not a requirement. Also, try to find a day that is good when there are not too many other events.

3 months in advance

This far in advance you need courage and a vision to create something good. Because it will be good – we have a fantastic community with great people in it. Together we create a great atmosphere. What you need at this stage could be summarised as follows:

Speakers (1-3)
A logo
Booking solution
Payment solution
Book the venue
Newsletters, if any
Landing page
Partners / volunteers
Promote the event

Speakers are the most important thing here. If you have a room available and some sessions booked that might be interesting, everything else will work out. Now begins the next step in getting the event up and running: Book the event and get the information out.

Speakers

Have you found 1-3 people who can hold a session? Great! Then the rest is just about logistics.

Logo

A good logo is always good to frame an event.

We have decided to donate the logo Marcus Pettersson made for us at our meetup to the community(CC BY-SA 3.0). Please link to us and to Marcus, and then use the logo however you like!

Booking and payment solution

This is a community event and should be seen as an investment in your knowledge in particular.
Having pre-payment for your event is important, especially considering that your event can cost a lot of money. There are not many people you can hire a venue from and then cancel the event at short notice without having to pay in full. Therefore, once you’ve organised your event, there’s only one option: execute. It is important that you have a budget to work from so that you can pay for your venue in advance, and then the money can come into your account afterwards / at short notice before the event. And don’t forget not to expect to make a profit. It is a community event and should be seen as an investment in your knowledge.

Dealing with all bookings & payments manually will be a lot of work. Feel free to use some form of online booking, but make sure it supports the use of VAT! We used Eventbrite ourselves, which meant that we had an extensive job afterwards writing manual receipts. They may change something in the future, but at the moment we would not recommend that service.

Something to bear in mind is that you want to encourage people to book as early as possible. Therefore, you may want to have a couple of different pricing options for tickets. An early registration for more or less cost price, and then one a couple of weeks before the event, and finally a ticket type that counts as a late registration and is sold in the last week before the event. We added a hundred bucks between each step, but here you do what you want.

Book the venue

Take the step and book the venue! It’s necessary to get a date nailed down and to really realise your vision. Once the venue is booked, there’s no turning back – just full speed ahead.

Landing page

Set up a landing page at as simple an address as possible, and start filling it with information. The following information can be useful to have:

Introductory text about what you want and who you are targeting the event to
Link to booking solution

Possibility to pay online
Possibility to register special diets
Possibility to enter company name
Possibility to enter name surname

Opt-in to any newsletters
Possible hashtag for the event
Information about the session holders & their sessions

Picture of the session holders

Price & Address

Map (e.g. Google Maps)

Times for the day
Offer for sponsors (Preferably one small and one big)
Information for session organisers

Technology in the venue

Information for volunteers
Pictures of the venue

Promote the event

If you book them, they will come
– The spirit of Jim Morrison

If you’ve made it this far, you have a really good foundation for holding a great meetup. But, it’s not time to lie down on the sofa just yet. Now is the time to make sure that visitors, sponsors and session organisers come to your event. Talk to people in all popular Swedish WordPress forums, ping people on Twitter. Send out a mailing to your friends, clients & suppliers. Do you have media contacts? Get in touch with them and see if they want to write something! Also try to find some volunteers for your event.

Some good places to publicise your event are:

http://wpsv.se/
WordPress development on Facebook
#wpse on Twitter

When it comes to sponsors, it pays to make some calls. There are plenty of companies that would love to be seen in connection with an event like this. Sponsors often make the difference between making a loss and making a profit!

2 weeks in advance

Now it’s getting close to your event! By now, you’ve probably sorted out most of the details of the meetup. Now it’s time to start thinking about the day of the meetup and what to do then. Make sure to hold a preparatory meeting where you go through everything that is needed for the day, and who does what. We recommend that you have a few people to take care of the following things during the day:

Coordinator (1 person, all day)
Moderator (1 person, all day)
Timekeeper (1 person, front row of benches, all day)
Entrance staff (1-2 people, about 2 hours)
Cameraman for live broadcast (1 person, all day)

Keep in mind that coordinator and moderator can be one and the same role, but it can be difficult to run around and fix everything between heaven and earth and at the same time be present enough to give intelligent feedback on what the session organiser just said. As you can see, you need at least 4 people to successfully run an event like this, but more people are recommended, especially if you have to set everything up the same day and not the day before.

The day before

Now it’s close! If possible, you would like to set up all the technology & test it on this day. If this is not possible, it will be a very labour intensive morning on the day of the meetup.

Notes & information

It is very good to have notes of different kinds for the meetup. Here is a suggestion for information that should be available in some form:

Sign to put on the outside
Directional signs (If necessary)
SSID Password to the WIFI connection
Today’s holding times & planning
Time stickers for timekeepers (Colour coded time intervals the timekeeper holds up for the speaker)

Name badges

There will always be mingling before and after an event like this. Keep in mind that name tags are great to have to see where people are coming from. You can either use plastic pockets with printed notes, but stickers also work (and are a good option for a low-budget event – we paid £20 inc VAT for 100)

Twitter feed

#wpmeetup is trending and we are so damn trendy!
– @nikkelin

Something that is really fun is to be able to visualise the twitter feed around the event. When we held our event, we were already trending before we had started the event. Really fun. Don’t forget to switch off the screensaver! When we held our event, we used a computer with Ubuntu Gnome3. It went well, until we discovered that Gnome3 did not support turning off the screensaver at that time. It could be uninstalled, but in the absence of a screensaver, the computer was still locked. So Use any device without a screensaver. Here are some tips on visualisations you could use:

Some of these we recommend some creative use of developer tools to remove nags & other information you may not want to show.

Sponsor visualisation

Sponsors like to be seen. Feel free to make a small slideshow that goes somewhere where their logos roll along with information about, for example, speakers, the day’s highlights, etc.

Meetup day

Now we are here! If you’ve followed all the above steps, you’re well prepared. Prepare for an awesome event!