[PSF-Community] Looking for alternatives to meetup.com

[Douglas Napoleone]

On the 'kids these days' part, my Son's after school robotics program (he
is 11) uses snapchat (set up by the kids) for social communication, Slack
for team communication/collaboration, Facebook for communicating with
parents, and ole meetup.com for managing the team meetups, regional events,
and competitions. The regionals are managed via robotevents.com (not under
club control.)

There has been repeated discussion on getting rid of at least one of these,
and meetup.com in particular as that one has real cost behind it, has
overlap with robotevents.com, and is the biggest pain to administrate. Even
for a semi-private group, this proved to be difficult. Two years ago they
removed the group, and signup dropped to almost nothing (12 new signups on
avg per year down to 3 for that year). For a middle school club. Google is
plugged into meetup.com much better than it is for facebook, and not at all
for slack, and the school websites are garbage. Most parents and kids were
finding out about the program through google, which was finding out about
it from meetup.com.

I have signed on to help out with some of the tech stuff to automate
things. Going to 5 different interfaces (slack, school website, facebook,
meetup.com, mailchimp) just to update a schedule is madness.

I really wish there was better competition int his market.

    -Doug



On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 8:33 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at python.org> wrote:

> Thank you for all your feedback. I've collected the results so far
> below:
>
>  * Meetup has great discovery story, it brings in more people
>    to the meetings and supports growth better than other
>    services - this is perceived as the main benefit of
>    meetup over other services.
>
>    Some groups only use meetup for announcements and other
>    services for the organization itself.
>
>    While Meetup does have a big following in at least US,
>    UK, Canada, Belgium, it's not that popular in other countries.
>    Examples: Czech Republic, Germany (though it's getting
>    stronger). This is probably also a reason why Meetup
>    is cheaper in those countries than others (e.g. in Germany
>    the unlimited plan costs USD 4.99 per month).
>
>    Meetup is not willing to give us special rates or
>    simplified setups (other than their standard setups).
>    Even though there are plenty Python groups, the total
>    number is not large enough to get them interested.
>
>    We could save some money by using "master" accounts,
>    since each Meetup account can host up to three meetings.
>
>  * Eventbrite is good for RSVPs and check-ins, it also looks
>    more professional than Meetup, but doesn't have such a good
>    discovery story as Meetup.
>
>    Since Eventbrite is very much a Python company, we might
>    be able to talk them into a special deal.
>
>  * Other services mentioned/found:
>
>    * https://ti.to/ (free for free events, used by PyCon UK)
>    * https://nvite.com/ (free for free events)
>    * use Google rich snippets (structured meta data) to
>      have Google find events
>    * use the Python events calendar together with the map
>      mashup: https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEventsCalendar
>      + http://lmorillas.github.io/python_events/
>
> I also found an interesting thread on a Meetup forum:
>
>
> http://www.discussmeetup.com/forum/general-questions-how-tos-tips-tricks/i-want-to-close-my-group-what-are-good-free-alternative-platforms-to-meetup/
>
> and especially liked this story from the thread:
>
> """
> I walk into the family room, and my teenager is on the lap top.   I see
> the gmail chat window with
> 30 ‘friends’ at the left hand margin.  I ask “Have you ever been invited
> to a Google+ event?” “No”
> “Have you ever been invited to a Facebook event?” “Yes, once the principal
> gave out our wardrobe
> instructions for our homecoming game.”  “Do you use Facebook much?”
> “Hardly, ugly site, isn’t that
> for old people?” I prefer SnapChat and Instagram”  “Argggggg.  Just
> pics!”   “Have you ever heard of
> Meetup” “Not really Dad, is that the stuff you do on Tuesday nights?”
> """
> (taken from
>
> http://www.discussmeetup.com/forum/general-questions-how-tos-tips-tricks/i-want-to-close-my-group-what-are-good-free-alternative-platforms-to-meetup/msg4171/?PHPSESSID=8a885701384e741ec4dc394e49e3bae7#msg4171
> )
>
> Given such experience, it may well be that we "older" people
> only perceive Meetup as being the holy grail when it comes
> to organizing user group events, while the younger folks
> don't even get to see these events, unless they are also available
> on FB, G+, Instagram, etc. Perhaps something to consider.
>
> I guess in the short term, we're better off encouraging sharing
> Meetup accounts to lower costs and continue to look for
> alternatives.
>
> For a meeting I'm running with Charlie Clark in Düsseldorf
> (Python Meeting Düsseldorf), we've so far tried to stay away
> from Meetup and invested a lot of time into all the other
> channels you have to serve. For us, the marketing aspect
> would be the only reason to try it, since the organization
> is working just fine using plain old email.
>
> --
> Marc-Andre Lemburg
> Director
> Python Software Foundation
> http://www.python.org/psf/
> http://www.malemburg.com/
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