Using MeetUp to Promote Virtual Events

MeetUp’s platform is a great way to build a new email list while promoting national B2C and B2B virtual events. This report will show you:

• Which categories work best
• Content strategies
• How to build a national network
• Costs involved
• How to harvest emails
• How to convert subscribers
• Pros and cons

Why Consider MeetUp

 While the platform is really aimed at discovery – it does not provide tools for live conferences – there are a few great reasons to keep MeetUp in mind:

• MeetUp is a master at discoverability.  We cannot over-state how powerful the platform is for promoting events. People with interests in your niche will find you.
• Unlike other social media, MeetUp has obtained permission for groups to use particpants emails. You can download emails from 60% of people who follow your group.
• Participants found are super-engaged. No one is lurking on MeetUp for its news feed. They were looking for events to attend and people to connect with.

Which categories work best 

MeetUp excels at promoting events with   “how to” educational element and a social and community element. 

This include  topics that are  B2C passion or  B2B topics for software developers, investors, and entrepreneurs who want to stay up-to-date and make professional connections.

You can test a virtual event in one large city to check interest, before scaling up. It’s as easy as having an editor introduce your mission and make introductions all around. People are there to meet each other.

B2C niche events

Any publication with virtual courses or webinars around a “how to” theme is already 70% there.  Examples include Sewing, Woodworking, Personal Finance, Arts, Writing, and Books – just about any B2C category where people want to both learn and meet others with similar interests.

B2B  virtual events 

The same advantages apply to national B2B virtual events – email data collection, engaged participants, and discovery.

From a cold start, Web3Collab, an experimental company we founded in 2021,  developed a paid subscriber list in six months by offering free classes and sharing sessions on blockchain technology for paying members. Non-members paid $150 per class.

The niche harvested 1500 emails from participants who joined the group, whether or not they attended, plus a small group of paid subscribers with no additional advertising. 80% of group members were entrepreneurs, technologists and business investors.

Here are some key take aways:

• The quality of attendees was higher than expected. Participants were likely to be high-level professionals, including CEOs and technologists who wanted to connect for business reasons, as well as neophytes lurking, hoping to learn more. Software developers, medical researchers, investors, and serial entrepreneurs all showed up and were also surprised to find each other there!
• Participants began leading meetings and forming private groups to work on projects.
• Web3Collab events found entrepreneurs from all over the world, although they did not host a group there. During the pandemic, when live events went virtual at scale, MeetUp did, too. MeetUp claims 60 million registered members across 330,000 groups in 193 countries and 10,000 cities worldwide.

B2B  categories that may do well include those in which discovery is essential, such as emerging sectors with a high demand from entrepreneurs and other businesses.

Think of red-hot categories such as AI and any cutting-edge software or type of financing.

General business categories include buying and selling businesses and pitch nights. Franchising, start-up funding, and other hot topics appeal to professionals looking into emerging sectors and making connections.

What kind of content to create

An easy way to get going is to find speakers on an educational topic for about 15 to 20 minutes, followed by a round-table of introductions. For groups under 20, ask participants to explain what they are interested in and what is their main career to get the conversations rolling.

Web3Collab’s virtual events always had some “project sharing element.”

Some of Web3Collab’s most successful events were entirely devoted to “Share your project,” where each attendee got three to five minutes to share.

Acquire feedback by using Google Poll at the end.

Later the company evolved courses that lasted two or three sessions, stored in a library available only to paid subscribers.

If your organization has the capacity to develop courses on a separate platform – even Slack, Coursera or Udemy  – that could be a profitable long term strategy.  Courses can be repeated once the original work is done, since people are moving in and out of the MeetUp universe. They can also be used to sell sponsors and subscriptions.

How to create a national network 

There are various ways to set up a national network of cities, which can be managed from the Pro Dashboard.

Adding a city is $35 a month, so selection is essential.

• Search for the cities with the most interest in the niche.
• Select the largest significant cities. The top ten U.S. cities have 65 million plus residents.
• Regional publishers can add the largest cities in their area or a drivable radius for live events.

Web3Collab combined cities with the highest interest in blockchain technology and top ten largest cities.

Some cities, including Portland, ME, and St. Petersburg, FL, were smaller but over-performed based on interest. When Blockchain-based companies crashed, Web3Collab honed the number of cities down to the four largest groups. It is considering offering sharing sessions in AI, where many of the innovators in their group headed after the crash.

How to acquire email data 

One of the main benefits of MeetUp is its ability to capture emails at scale.

When people join a group or register for an event, they have given the admin permission to contact them by email, not just inmail.

To capture emails from any meeting’s RSVPs, simply click on attendees and download. You can also download the entire email list from a national network dashboard.

Lists can be segmented. Web3Collab segmented them into “RSVPd” and “attended” and the number of times for each to identify the heaviest users.

Converting RSVPs to Paid Subscribers

There are a variety of tactics to convert subscribers. MeetUp allows you to use their platform for this, but you want to own your own list, so it is better to create a process that onboards them to your own website. Here are a few tactics that can be used separately or together:

* All events are free to subscribers and include a link to subscribe.

* The first time is free, and attendees must subscribe or pay.

* A  free introductory event, with a “members only” event announced at the  MeetUp.

*Email marketing to the warmest prospects with a list of benefits, including the most exciting upcoming events.

Pros and Cons of using MeetUp

Meetups work best for publications that already run events that fit Meetup users’ profiles: B2C local attendees and B2B events for entrepreneurs and software techies.

Starting from scratch is easy,  as Web3Collab’s experience shows, and a way to harvest a super-engaged email list. However, there are also difficulties to consider:

• Virtual events are labor intensive for publishers who do not already produce virtual events and courses. MeetUp is best used for incremental additions of subscribers and super-engaged users.
• Only a percentage of RSVPs show up.
• Publishers with events such as live podcasts also may need to alter them to provide a more participatory element.
• The conversational element that makes the event successful can make editing into a virtual course or other more formulaic material challenging. Consider using an AI video editor that can remove repetitions and summaries key points.
• Hosts who promise an inclusive experience must set rules and decide when to keep them.  Every so often an attendee takes over the conversation and must be dissuaded, while others must be coaxed into it.
• Building a national network can get expensive quickly—ten cities cost $350 a month – so have a plan that includes scaling back, such as exiting cities after exporting the email list with a message to members on how to find your group.  Once the discovery  aspect is complete, some group leaders have even moved their meetings to FB or YouTube live to avoid the high costs.
• Exiting a city Meetup is not instantaneous. It requires an email to support with a 24 to 48 delay, and they will try to keep you with a 50% off offer that turns out to be only for one month.
• Finally, people are starting to have Zoom  fatigue, so the bar for the value of virtual meetings is higher.