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The Meetup Checklist

Nathan Gaberel6 min read

Three months ago, we organized our first meetup in London: the React Native London meetup.
Fourty React Native developers showed up at our office to discuss the use of Redux alongside React Native and a whole lot of other things.

Since then we have organized two other such meetups.

Overall, I think it’s been a great success: we hit the guest limits pretty quickly each time and the attendees seem to like it.

We plan on having such meetups every month, so if React and mobile development are your thing, come and join us!

The following is our recipe to organize a meetup from scratch and get started.
It describes the way we organized ours and might not correspond to what other people do or recommend.
But it worked out for us, so we might as well share it!

This article is built as a checklist to help you organize your meetup.
It’s quite comprehensive and maybe a bit obvious at times, but it’s what a checklist should be like, right?

In this article I’m kind of assuming you’re targeting a developers audience but feel free to adapt this checklist to your needs!

Alright, let’s start.

Choose a cool topic

Some advice for a successful meetup:

That’s it for this part. </CaptainObvious>

Build an organisation team

Organising a meetup requires a lot of not-forgetting-stuff and making-sure-stuff-is-ready.
Doing so in a team allows you to remind and challenge each other, which is always for the best.

I found a 3 people team to be quite effective but you’ll be fine as long as you have a handful of people willing to help.

Get public

Time to create your page on meetup.com. Head to the meetup creation page and fill the form.

Prepare your first meetup

Talks

This is a bit of a developer-centric section. Maybe your meetup isn’t about people giving talks in front of the audience, in which case the question you should try to answer in this section would be “what will members be doing when they show up?“.
Anyway, back to our developer meetup.

Hopefully you already know someone willing to give one (or someone you can coerce into giving one). If that isn’t the case the simplest solution is to give one yourself.

Set a date and a place

The sooner it happens the better! No need to overthink it, you should be able to go through this checklist in a matter of days, a couple weeks at most.

For the venue, your company’s office is the first solution that comes to mind. It may not be an option for everyone so you can also explore alternative options such as co-working spaces, office space companies, etc.

You should always expect less people than the number of “Yes” RSVP in meetup.com (although it depends on the audience/success of the meetup), but don’t put the limit at 60 if you can host 30 or you’ll have problems!

Spread the word

Time to reach out to everyone in your area and fill your first meetup!

Prepare

The day of the meetup

If you do not have enough talks for the duration of your meetup, now is the time to use one of our favourite learning/leadership format at Theodo: the Open Space.
It is a great way to get people talking on the subjects they’re interested in.

Last but not least, probably the most important part of the meetup:

Follow-up

Good job, you’ve reached the end of the checklist, that means you should be ready to host your own meetup!
Tell us how it was and let us know your suggestions to improve this checklist.

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