As we are approaching 2022, it’s time to review 2021, see what we have accomplished, what worked well and what could be improved.
Despite 2021 being out of an ordinary year for tech community as a whole with many community events being forced to adapt to a new norm of running remote meeting, it’s being really great for us so far. Part of the reason was our prior experience with running virtual community meetings. LA Data Platform User Group almost exclusively went virtual at the beginning of 2019 (see Fig #1) as we couldn’t secure a venue and got very comfortable with it.
While that might not be true for other cities, states, countries, Los Angeles is known for a very bad commute (I-405 is considered to be the worst in the nation). The city is very poorly planned and very spread-out making commuting from home to work and back a very unpleasant experience. Commuting to and from tech events for attendees, speakers, and volunteers is even less pleasant. Add to that difficulty with finding a somewhat central and affordable location to host your tech event with somewhat easy parking, and you are virtually having nothing to choose from.
Prior to going all virtual, we had a very low registrations (see Fig #2) and attendance numbers (between 5-15 people).
Compare that to running a virtual event and suddenly there are plenty of options: more attendees can attend, more speakers can present, no time/money wasted in commuting and parking. Needless to mention it, virtual event cost is close to zero as there is no need to buy food and beverages.
Accomplishments and what worked really well
If prior to going all virtual we have struggled to run monthly meetings due to speaker shortage and venue availability while watching the number of attendees shrinking, this all changed, and we have fully embraced virtual meetings. In 2021, we got running remote meetings down to a science. Within just few weeks in December 2020, we booked an entire 2021 leaving room for just marketing the upcoming meetings. No longer need to worry about if meeting is going to happen or not, just focus on promoting the meeting and increasing registration and attendance.
The other part of science of running remote meetings is communication. When you are running in-person meetings, you have plenty of natural opportunities to interact and communicate with attendees. Virtual setup makes is harder. We were essentially forced to learn new tricks. We started to heavily overcommunicate using email newsletter and social media to compensate on missing an in-person interaction. Prior to 2021, we were usually sending few emails a month and used social media sporadically. In 2021, we excelled at using Moosend.com (freemium email marketing platform) and buffer.com (freemium social media scheduler) to create a constant flow of communication between monthly meetings.
Our attendance grew to a steady 20-50 remote attendees (see Fig #3). Our members now instinctively looking forward to an interesting data topic every 3rd Wednesday @ 7PM PST of every month. Attendees also know that all sessions are getting recorded and with speaker’s approval will make it to YouTube.com (we also recently added Rumble.com).
Due to a PASS sunset (a community organization that provided us with a free web site hosting) that happened In January 2021, we received a free access to Meetup via Azure Data Tech Group (funded by Microsoft). We now have a presence on Meetup and quickly approaching 200 member’s mark.
We have added a new member to our team to help out with digital marketing – Maria Lopez. Maria has helped us to transform a very chaotic digital marketing effort into a very streamlined, well-oiled marketing plan. We now have a well-planned and scheduled communication cadence, one single place to maintain all our digital touchpoints via linktree.com (see Fig #4), a growing YouTube channel, as well as a Spring Store for fans to buy merch.
To spark some interest in 2021 from existing and new members, we have introduced a t-shirt raffle. We are raffling a custom LA Data Platform User Group t-shirt (see Fig #5) every monthly meeting and making some members happier. Although, we didn’t notice any significant increase in attendance yet, we think it’s worth the try.
To double down on our successful 2021 effort of planning ahead, we have booked an entire 2022 (and even some 2023) monthly meetings (see Fig #6) in advance. That allow us to focus on communication and promotion.
What could be improved?
We need to schedule at least few in-person meetings, we need a social get together. While virtual meetings are much easy to arrange and run, it’s missing a human touch and it’s missing much needed networking opportunities.
Multiple site streaming is another item on the list to consider. Currently, our remote meeting can be only attended via MS Teams. If we use something like StreamYard.com or ReStream.io, we can get more exposure (and hopefully more attendance) from social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, and LinkedIn.
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