Anyone do Meetup?

Post Reply New Topic

I’m a member of several groups (a writing group, a secular humanist group, a drum circle, a board gaming group, and a social group for LGBTQIA+ women over 40). I get to as many meetups as my schedule and number of spoons allow and generally enjoy them.

Last year, I started my own feminist Meetup, and it’s been a challenge to get more than about three or four people to events, even though I have almost 300 members. We do a monthly book discussion, and I’m adding a monthly salon (a discussion about a particular topic). We also do arts events and community service projects.

Organizers, how do you get people to a) sign up and b) show up?

I love Meetup, but it's very unpredictable and often people don't feel committed despite their status on Going, unless they already paid. You can see other group events and see what is successful. Movie meet-ups can be interesting, then after you can discuss it somewhere... or like go on a picknick if the weather is nice, potlucks can be fun...

I found a local Aspie group here in NYC through meetup that does social and cultural events and has a twice/month support group. Alot of the people also go to a different monthly support group where I go for CBT. It's not perfect, but at least it's a fairly nice group of people who are contacts I didn't have at the beginning of this year. My therapist thinks I should try other meetups, which I may soon. Haven't decided yet. Very cool that you started your own on feminism, Colonial!

I live in the SF Bay Area, and there are hundreds of meetups here. But few interest me. I've lived in Sacramento and had much better luck. I think it's because there were far fewer meetups in Sac.
If you check the members you will likely find that many people belong to several meetups with similar interests. I think they pick the "best" event among those meetups, and they obviously can only attend one event at a time. So your 300 members likely belong to competing groups.
When I look over events, say a week out, I tend to pass on ones that have only a few signed up. I'll check the past events and see if the group has attracted much attendance in the past, and what the comments were -- did people enjoy the event? I need a bit of a "sell job" here.
So I suggest attending a few "competing" meetups and see how they're handled, are they successful, who's there, etc. A meetup will succeed if it consistently delivers a quality experience, however that is defined by the group's purpose. Also, consider if your group's focus is too narrow. The population of candidate members may be quite small.

I attend Meetups from time to time. I actually went to one this afternoon. It is good to meet like minded people there aren't any Aspergers meetup groups in my city. I have been going for about 5 years now it gets me out of the house as well!

I like meetups, but have a hard time finding ones I’m interested in. I belong to an Aspie meetup which is cool. The thing is I usually want to talk about Aspie-related subjects like dealing with life but most people there want to talk of their special interests or mundane things.

Is your local Aspie meetup supposed to be a peer support group, or is it just a social group?

A peer support group should focus on Aspie-related subjects like dealing with life. A social group, not so much. Ideally, there would be a variety of social groups devoted to different categories of special interests.

See also my thoughts about the wide variety of different kinds of groups that a well-developed autistic community ought to have.

Admittedly it’s probably more of a social meetup instead of support meetup.

I know there is at least support meetup in this region but the times and places they meet are not convenient for me.

I will keep an eye out.

How many people attend the social meetup?

If it's at least a dozen people, perhaps you could suggest to the organizer that they consider spawning a peer support group as an additional activity? Or perhaps subgroups devoted to particular interests?

Perhaps you could volunteer to help out?

I started a meetup group for adults with autism about two months ago. The very first meeting is scheduled to happen later this week. I don't know if I did it right because I opted for starting a "private" group to better ensure the privacy of any members. By doing that though, most of the content of the page is blocked out to anyone who hasn't asked to join. Two people have joined which is lower than I'd have hoped.

no, a few hundred people is too much, i'm sure the nts will come pregrouped already
idk, it seems nts enjoy not knowing anything so they can talk about how they didn't know and how exciting it is to get to know (all over) in some act of stumbling over each other to impress the crowned heads



(completely of topic into the ubiquous topic, 'Elementary, my dear Watson')
i come to understand that your own experience doesn't mean anything to the mediocracy,
it's not what you see, it is what the words of consensusdom declare it is
(as if nts don't see or hear or smell, but nt is a broad label, that could be replaced by a better one, median talking heads? or something)
pheromones and the hivemind?
pruning too much ?? into the standard normal of median-connectability?



like a sim communication connection

then it all makes sense, feeeelings makes the highest status, but its not the feelings, dummie, its the declaration of pretend play feelz

That is indeed an awfully low number.

Because only a brief description of a Meetup group is available to the public if the group is private, I've put most of the information about my group on a separate website rather than on the Meetup site. The brief description on the Meetup site contains the URL of the relevant section of my website, so that people know where to go for more info. (See my sig.)

Since you've publicized your group by means other than just Meetup, hopefully at least a few other people will show up. I would suggest that, at the meeting, you encourage people to join the meetup group (and give them all a minute to do so right then and there, on their smartphones, if they so choose), and explain why you need them to RSVP for the next meeting if at all possible.

If hardly anyone shows up, then we'll need to come up with some sort of locally-focused online platform ASAP. Please PM me about this.

Also, it would be desirable if you could arrange your life in whatever way may be necessary so you can safely link to your Meetup group (and/or the accompanying website) in your sig here on Wrong Planet and in any other autism-related forums you frequent.

I will let you know how it goes, Mona. There seem to be some issues with the meetup.com filtering. When I would search for my group without logging in to my meetup account, as if I was someone just browsing, my group wouldn't come up at all when selecting my city. Even when I expanded to within 25 miles of my city...still nothing. It was only after I expanded the range to within 50 miles of my city did my group come up. I emailed meetup.com about that and they said change the zip code to a different one in the city. I did that and that didn't seem to help. Now nothing comes up even if I expand the search to within 100 miles.

I've been to a couple, here and there.

Getting a large meetup group always seemed to me to mostly either be a case of accumulating people over a long period of time, or already having a large group of acquaintances/friends/fans/social contacts who could be chivvied into turning up for something marginally more formal.

While there are obviously exceptions, in general aspies don't tend to come with a huge social circle, and if we are part of one (or several), it's rare that we have significant influence.

Then, too, there's the issue that people are attracted to meetups - particularly early ones, where the group isn't self-sustaining to any degree - by either having had a great time at a previous meetup of the same group, or having had good experiences with other people (particularly organizers) who are going. The best people to pull a crowd for a new meetup are those who have large and strong social circles, personal charisma, and a reputation for delivering fun events.

This isn't to say it's impossible for aspies to run such an event, group, or such. I've been involved in one or two. It's just that unless you happen to have those characteristics, it's going to be a lot of work getting people to agree to break out of their routines to attend, particularly if you don't already personally know them.

On Meetup.com, did you select topics for your group? If you have not done so already, you should select a big bunch of topics, many of which will be redundant.

For my group I selected all of the following: "Support Group", "Autism Support Group", "Adult Aspies", "Neurodiversity", "Autism", "For Adults On Autism Spectrum", "Asperger's Support Group", "Adults with Asperger's Syndrome", "ASD/Asperger Syndrome", "High-Functioning Autism", "Autism Spectrum Disorder", "Asperger Syndrome", "Autistic Adults", "Supporting social skills in aspergers adults".

I don't know if this will do anything for your specific problem.

Usually it’s about 4-5 people that attend, sometimes more. Lately it has fizzled out due to one person causing trouble and scaring everyone away in the last year. We haven’t recovered from the after-effects just yet.