What happened when we went live with events
Michael Apte
We had no plans for February events.
When we hit 400 members in launch week at the start of Feb, it became important to have something people could sign up for. Quickly. It's not a good experience to have people excited about something new with no tangible thing available to bring that interest to life.
Six days after launch we put the first casual coffee meet-ups online. We also provided a discount code to members who had already joined in those first few days. Each event had 20 tickets. The first sold out within 24 hours and the others were well on their way. We have since lifted the capacity of each meet-up to 30 tickets and the first one is back to full, with a wait list.
60 or so tickets to date won't fill a stadium but for a community that didn't exist a fortnight ago? Pretty good, very encouraging.
What next? A few things:
1. Other event formats. Quite a few people wrote to say they can't make the city in the morning and asking if we'd consider evening events. Yes, they are absolutely coming. Save the date - 28th April is going to be the first Sydney Marketing Community Monthly Meeting. Unless we bring something forward again...
2. There were some Industry Members checking on where to find the events. Apologies, the very first events were set up for Marketing Members and they were sent via 1:1 emails. We are still really trying things out so we had one for In-house, Freelance and Agency marketers, one for just In-house marketers (which is about 2/3 of members) and one for job seekers. For our next coffee meet-up I've included a couple of Industry Member tickets to see how that goes.
3. An events page and more events! We've just gone live with a page listing our current events. It links out to our Humanitix page. I added another coffee meet-up and will also try an event just for Freelancers to catch up.
Still very early thinking, we'll learn more from the first real world event next week (18th March).
