Long ago I started a Wiki page asking people to help promote the group and help grow it. It garnered one response. Perhaps the timing now is better than it was then. Here's my recollection to what I came up with. After the call on Monday maybe this Wiki page can be edited and ideas added and people add their names to some items?
MARKETING:
Post announcement in Craigslist
Submit free announcement to NuVo [and any other local rag]
Create simple one page flier with meeting details and submit as PDF to here for the group
Print the PDF and hang it at the $tarbuck$, Borders, Panera's, Barnes & Noble, etc that are along the way that you take in your daily life. [if we all did this we've have some pretty good coverage!
Tweet about the meetups
Blog about the meetup
Where appropriate notify people at work or in your building
Ask BEN of the PHP meetup to broadcast a note to his group
Ask other groups to pass the newz along. [Refresh Indy, indy Alt.net, indy-hackers, etc]
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Comments
Ramblings
I wonder if increasing the size of the group through marketing is really helping the group?
I feel like we have all these resources available to the group, but are we using them?
One way to increase the group may be to have solid group meetings. What do I mean by solid? Not having the same presentations over and over. Bringing in guest speakers (How hard would this be?) Doing a combination of meals and meet ups. Figuring out ways to combine hackfests with this.
Looking into actually contributing back to the community (bug fixing, documentation, code). Maybe creating bug days that we combine with other DUG's to look at bugs and create fixes (this could be done remotely).
Having more interactive group meetings....a person droning on and on about code gets boring. Sure people want to get more technical with drupal, but we need to keep things simple for new users.
Drupal has a substantial learning curve, we as a group need to figure out how to lower it. Maybe showing how to create simple dashboards....or simple things like that.
Freelancer
Twitter sdudenhofer
seth@osjournal.net
Dual Effort
Seth,
It's a dual effort. We have just started really marketing the group. It's pointless to try and grow our group if we don't tell anyone about the group :)
You have some great ideas:
This is a great idea. In our phone call last Monday we talked about having a day where we create a website for charities. This is another idea for a group type of session that actually does something rather then talking about it.
I agree, I'm going to have some round table discussions. As far as the newbies stuff, Aaron is putting together a learning series.
Neil Hastings
http://twitter.com/indytechcook