Learning Lessons from Meetup

Learning Lessons from Meetup
by Luke Setzer

The challenging undertaking of creating, sustaining and growing a global Objectivist club network demands the use of best practices gleaned from a wide range of sources. Meetup® has risen as the most outstanding recent upstart in the discipline of rapid growth of live, networked clubs. Only when it sprang sudden, unexpected, unaffordable monthly costs onto its members did it experience an overnight loss of support. While it remains in business, its popularity as a widespread tool for organizations has largely evaporated. A careful study of its merits and drawbacks offers valuable lessons for the Webmaster who wants to build a dedicated Internet site for a global Objectivist club network.

Why People Loved Meetup at First Sight

The developers of Meetup had a simple yet powerful vision: Create a Web site with a common user interface to empower people of any common interest in a geographical area to meet monthly at a designated day and time. Initially, a set of interests ranging from chess to mystery novels formed the core of these interests, and the Webmasters assigned these interests fixed days and times each month. As the concept grew in popularity, Meetup added more interests, and eventually the Webmasters made the software flexible enough to allow volunteer Organizers to schedule their own days and times for local events.

Perhaps the most notable successes of the company came from the political arena. Both the liberal Howard Dean campaign and the conservative Townhall.com Web site used Meetup to bring many thousands of interested parties together in local gatherings around the United States. Participants across the cultural spectrum sang praises of Meetup.

What made Meetup appeal to so many? Obviously, common passions served as primary emotive force behind its initial success. Whether people named those passions as "chess" or "Howard Dean" or "Ayn Rand" remains secondary. The affordable power of Meetup to allow those who shared such passions to meet each other for mutual support and activism certainly fueled the fires of the early Meetup success.

How People Learned To Hate Meetup

Of course, people have a passion for their own cash flow as well as for their Meetup interests. The company management evidently counted on the Meetup passions of their customers to outweigh their passions for their cash flow. In retrospect, they overestimated the intensity of the customer Meetup passions against the customer cash flow passions.

The company initially relied on the sale of advertising space to support its business. Later, it charged a reasonable $36 per year to Organizers for perks not available to others such as flyers, etc. Finally, though, it announced that it would impose a $19 per month per group charge to continue its services. Many Organizers felt justifiably outraged at this sudden and steep price hike. Townhall.com publicly announced that it had become "Fed Up with Meetup" and would move its organizing center to another site. A perusal of Meetup today reveals that most former members have abandoned the site altogether. However, enough paying groups remain to keep Meetup humming for now.

Learning from Meetup for a Global Objectivist Club Network

The overall structure of the Meetup site has a predictable hierarchy. At the root of it all comes the main Meetup site at

http://www.meetup.com

A given interest such as "Ayn Rand" derives a corresponding global Web address of

http://aynrand.meetup.com

with its own overview and global message board.

Finally, at the local level, a subdirectory dedicated to a specific city has its own assigned number. For example, Merritt Island, Florida has the subdirectory

http://aynrand.meetup.com/12/

The defining Web features of such a given local Meetup interest group include:

1. A common user interface that anyone can readily master
2. A Welcome and About page to overview the unique features of that particular Meetup
3. An Events calendar to schedule live meetings
4. A Members list to allow members to introduce themselves
5. A Photos folder to post event photographs for fun and history
6. A Message Board to communicate to all members of that Meetup
7. A Polls tool to poll members about key questions regarding their Meetup
8. A Promote tool to allow the Organizer to create flyers, etc.
9. An Invite Friends tool to allow the Organizer to invite others to join his Meetup
10. A dues collection method via PayPal® to reimburse the Organizer for his costs to maintain the local Meetup costs

Currently, the Rebirth of Reason™ (RoR) site has some of these features. A standalone site associated with RoR could employ much of its existing software in service to these popular features. It could even emulate the "look and feel" of Meetup as far as copyright laws allow.

If and when the current RoR Clubs break into their own unified standalone site, a useful Web address format might be

http://www.clubnetworkname.com/

for the root directory with

http://stateorcountryname.clubnetworkname.com/

for the network at the state, province or national level and

http://stateorcountryname.clubnetworkname.com/cityname/

at the city level.

This format might accommodate the best features of Meetup but without the overwhelming costs. It would allow for an orderly yet rapid expansion of a global Objectivist club network. It would maintain a common user interface for all members yet give local coordinators the flexibility to tailor their part of the site to their own unique circumstances.

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