Meeting Best Practices - Get the ball rolling...

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Meeting Best Practices - How can you make your meetings the best ever?

Share your best tips here. This is a living document meant to be added to by user group leaders to spread knowledge, so go ahead....hit the Edit Document button on the right and get started.

We have put together some thoughts and suggestions to aide you in making your first user group meeting a successful event.

The Longest Hour

First of all, avoid any long talks in the first meeting. Give the attendees a good introduction of what you are trying to accomplish with the user group. Briefly talk about LabVIEW's virtues and perhaps a little bit about National Instruments.  Remind everyone this is their meeting and they will get out of it whatever the put into it. Try to find speakers/presenters who can talk about higher level topics (e.g. LabVIEW can be used in these type of applications).

Introductions

After the short keynote or welcome, if you don't have more than 10/15 attendees then have everyone introduce themselves along with three tags describing a little bit about themselves (e.g. my name is Grant, I'm an Aerospace Engineer at Lockheed, and I work on juggling robots). It's always nice to have a name for a face and not a room full of nameless people. Nametags come in handy.

Swag

If you have some swag (T-Shirts, pens, stickers, books) to give out to your attendees, create a quiz about LabVIEW-related questions (e.g."what year was LabVIEW first made?"). There is a presentation in the User Group Resource Center with Certification questions. Make sure and add questions that you use to the presentation so it will continue to grow.

Always use swag to support the most active members of your community. You should save the larger items for organizers, speakers, active participants, and prizes, and be more liberal with the smaller items. Being a leader is about modesty not greed!

Networking/Socializing

Don't fill up the complete timeframe with presentations or sessions. More people are engaged when networking or doing something interactive (e.g. demos, code reviews) so let there be enough free time before/during/after the event when everyone can get to know each other, talk about cool stuff they build, etc.

Food/Drinks

Pizza, pizza, pizza. If it only happens on a quartery basis, I don't see a problem with ordering pizza for your user group meeting. Pizza is easy and who among us doesn't like a pizza pie??? However, there are other options out there and I strongly recommend researching what is available in your area. Mix it up a bit. 

Take Photos/Videos

Don't forget to document your event. Take photos, videos (or even better - live streaming) and tweet a lot about the meeting. Find yourself a good hashtag like #austinlug and print it to a big poster so everyone sees it and promote the use of it in all social networks, so you can find the results later. Also post everything back on your User Group Community page so that everyone looking for a user group can see how fun your group is. Pictures speak more than words.

Encourage your attendees to do the same. You are only one person, find someone to help you. Maybe one of your friends has a camera, ask to borrow it or better yet, invite the photographer to the meeting!