Recommendations for User Group Organizers

[Elijah_K]

I want to share the list of recommendations we discussed at today's User Group Leaders Network meeting:

1. Establish a core leadership team or board who shares responsibility for the event
2. Create a dedicated page on the ni.com community
3. Establish a regular meeting cadence (quarterly is typical) and post tentative dates on group overview page.
4. Post meeting recordings and encourage area-specific discussion on the community site.
5. Structure the agendas to encourage network and free-form discussion outside of formal presentations.
6. Confirm date and location of future meetings roughly 8 weeks in advance
7. Reserve time at the end of every meeting to solicit future topics and presenters
8. Encourage in-person as much as possible. Use free food as added incentive
9. Use registration to estimate food and space requirement (Registration link is typically ‘owned’ by the organization sponsoring food.)
10. Work with NI 7-8 weeks in advance to start promotional activities. Note: go back to the same email thread every time to (re)launch the same promotional activities and coordinate logistics
11. Work with [other] partners and distributors to spread the word
12. NI has territory-based sellers (again). Get to know them and ensure they attend every meeting. They will help promote and spread the word.
13. Make sure attendees know that attendance is applied towards recertification. Turn in the registration ASAP.
14. Promote your local page on ni.com at the start and end of every meeting (have a QR code up while people are getting settled)
15. Post social promotions on LinkedIn and mention @NI (National Instruments) and/or @ELIJAH Kerry and we will re-share

[joerg.hampel]

Thanks for the summary, Eli, and also for the meeting.

Some feedback for you: After checking with our participants, the unanimous opinion is that picking months for the next few meetings (we're also aiming for a quarterly cadence) is ok, but nobody wants to set the specific date so far in advance. Finalising the date 8 to 6 weeks in advance seems a reasonable compromise.

I guess this means it would be great if you could make the NI events page work with meetings that only have the month set...