[group-organizers] Script to announce events

[Francois Dion]

On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 2:01 AM, Éric Araujo <merwok at netwok.org> wrote:
> In this first message, I would like to ask if any of you are using some
> tool to automate sending announcements to various systems.  For our
> monthly meetings, we end up doing these things manually:
> - send bilingual email to our mailing list
> - add markup to that text, remove greetings and publish it to our blog
> as two posts

Éric,

I do something similar up to this point with PYPTUG (
http://www.pyptug.org ). We have a mailing list on google groups and
the website itself is a blog. I was thinking of doing a script email
to blog (you cc the account) initially but I'm thinking of doing the
opposite. Run a script that will check for new content on the blog,
and if so, convert to plain text and email to google group. Another
option is to subscribe your mailing list to your blog through
feedburner, but then it is html emails. I'm still not 100% sure which
way to go.

I also link from my personal blog to the PYPTUG blog for workshops and
monthly meetings.

> - post a short blurb with a link on our LinkedIn group

Don't have, I'm thinking about it, but PYPTUG is not a non profit
company, it is just a user group. I'm not sure how to set that up on
LinkedIn as a stand alone entity. Of course, once setup, if you use
feedburner, use your blog as the source, and it will post on LinkedIn.

> - post a short blurb with a link on our Facebook page

None of our members are interested in Facebook for some reason. If
there was any value to it, then I'd create one and again, use
feedburner.

> - post a shorter blurb and link on our Twitter account

We do that: http://twitter.com/pyptug and it gets posted automatically
from feedburner.

> - update our Google calendar

Still a manual process. I haven't investigated a way to automate this,
it doesn't take that long. I'm not sure it is used by anybody,
however...

And finally, for our PyHack workshops that are held at the local
hackerspace ( http://fablocker.org ), they post it to their meetup
page and their website using the information I post to the mailing
list.

Overall, it is a bit too much manual work.

As for meetup.com as Ned Batchelder mentioned, it seems like the most
popular way of doing this. It is does some promotion for your group.
It is a good way to know how many people are going to show up, but it
is not free.  I was thinking of using eventbrite instead (free), but
overall, people find it a chore to register for every meeting. In a
larger area such as Boston or Montréal, I'm sure it makes more sense.

François

--
www.pyptug.org  -  raspberry-python.blogspot.com