Organizational Meetup.com Account

[geobrando]

Currently, meetup.com allows a single organizer to pay dues and run up to three separate meetup groups. Once incorporation happens and financials are figured out, might be worth negotiating with meetup to create a Maptime account that could manage all chapter groups.

From this page:

If you'd like to build a larger community, or if you're currently managing more than 3 Meetup Group, we want to hear about it! Contact us directly for help.

[rhewitt22]

Awesome -- then we could use their API for the events widget for all chapters.

[bethschechter]

I would love to use their API! hello@ also received something from https://everyeventgives.com/. Looks like it could be cool, but who knows if it has an API

[almccon]

This also made me think about negotiating for a better tier of Slack account, so we can have unlimited scrollback buffers. Created #102 to track.

[geobrando]

Should we wait until the 501(c)(3) process is finished before approaching them?

@bethschechter mentioned at the summit sharing meetup dues as a stopgap solution for organizers struggling with meetup costs. Is there systematic way that we should coordinate this for the sake of fairness or should organizers feel free to just pair up with each other? Only difficulty I see with this is it could be difficult to reimburse the paying organizer.

[almccon]

I think we shouldn't be systematic. The only bit of awkwardness is that the paying member shows up as the first organizer of each meetup group, so you have to be fine with their smiling face on your meetup. Which is why it makes sense for me to also be the smiling face on MaptimeYVR, but it would be weird if it were a meetup in a city where I had absolutely no connection.

Regarding reimbursement, if you enable the "Chip in" button on each meetup, then Meetup will handle donations for you.

[geobrando]

OK. Maybe we can make an announcement on Slack or through the mailing list.

Only problem with using the Chip-in button is that contributions are not held by meetup but by WePay, a third-party service. There's a hefty 7.5% + $.50 fee tacked on by Meetup and WePay. This is deducted immediately and there's no way to apply the remaining to organizer dues. You have to request a bank transfer or a check. For this reason, I'm considering disabling our "Chip in" button. We had one donation and I learned this after being puzzled as to why the balance had dropped.

http://help.meetup.com/customer/portal/articles/1751862-are-there-fees-to-accept-contributions-

[almccon]

Ugh, I hadn't looked into the details of WePay. Also tracked in #96: we were talking about setting up an HQ WePay account. Maybe it's not worth the bother.

[geobrando]

If you're talking about HQ accepting donations outside of meetup, wepay only charges 2.9% + $0.30. Meetup tacks on its own fees. Might be worth it.

[lyzidiamond]

We might have an offer from a company to pay for the cost of an organizational Meetup account. This isn't yet confirmed, but it's looking promising.

Related, I would love for @bethschechter to write a ticket on here explaining the legal process, where we are now, and what's left to do. I know she just moved today, though, and probably needs a little bit of time to chill out. Will ping again after rest time. :smile:

[geografa]

Sorry for delay here folks. In chatting with Meetup.com on org account, it would cost less to just maintain chapters individually and seek funding on our own. They haven't figured out what this kind of pricing looks like and they're trying to roll out a beta/trial with us. Cost would be $20/chapter per month.

Hi Rafa, 

Great connecting with you the other day. 

I wanted to follow up to touch on a few of the points we covered during the call, and to reiterate what Meetup offers today / what’s in the pipeline. 

For folks on your end who may be less familiar with Meetup: Meetup is a community building platform that brings people together at the local level around shared interests. 

Businesses use Meetup to educate and inspire their communities, drive engagement, and build real relationships with members at the local level. 

Meetup Pro organizers are able to build branded networks of Meetups, and appoint local leadership teams to run things on the ground in each city. We currently have a handful of organizations who use Meetup to manage networks of between 50-300 Meetup Groups. You can see a few examples over here: 

Meetup.com/pro/mongodb
Meetup.com/pro/docker 

What Meetup can help you do today: 

1) Build a network of official, branded Meetup groups for your organization. 
2) Manage your Meetups from a central account, and add new cities as needed.
3) Give your Meetups an appearance that represents your organization, and that’s consistent across network. 
4) Showcase your Meetup presence with a responsive directory page, like this: Meetup.com/pro/docker. Members can use this page to search for Meetup Groups around the world, or in their neighborhood. 

4) Use our existing set of Organizer tools to manage Meetup activity.
*Appoint local leadership teams.
*Schedule events.
*Moderate group content and membership as you see fit.
*Communicate with members using on-site messaging, email, mailing lists, and message boards.

5) Use our API to integrate your Meetup presence with your own site, like this: https://developer.salesforce.com/dugs?title=page/Force.com_User_Groups

Features we’re building to help you better understand and communicate with your community, and drive engagement. (These tools will be rolled out incrementally over the next couple of months):

1) Data reporting and analytics - you will be able to tap into key metrics about your community and its growth over time. 
2) The ability to sort/identify members based on different behaviors and activity levels within your community, and put a face to each name. This tool could help you identify new local leaders, or a group of less active members you’d like to re-engage. 
3) The ability for members to opt-in to share their email addresses. 
4) Advanced communication tools, which will allow you to send targeted messaging to your community and local leaders. 

As I mentioned on the phone, we’re happy to offer a free 6-month trial of Meetup, so you can get started with a few pilot chapters. We’ll also give you access to additional Meetup Pro features as they are rolled out-- we want you to have the opportunity to test the tools and features that are most important to you.

After the trial, the cost depends upon the number of Meetup Groups in your network-- there are different pricing tiers based on the number of Meetup Group chapters you have. 

Based on the information you provided, the cost would break down to $20 per Meetup Group per month, but you would be billed for the maximum number of Meetup Groups in the different price tier. 

The first tier is 6-20 Meetups, followed by 21-50, and so on. 

If you’d like to move ahead with a free trial, just let me know! The first step will be to register a Meetup account to use as your ‘parent’ account if you haven’t already. 

I’ll be here to help you along the way, so please feel free to reach out directly with any questions or concerns!

Warmly, 

Laura 
Senior Partnerships Specialist 
Meetup HQ

This just doesn't feel cost effective and frankly more of a headache to manage. For now, Portland has a new unlimited account and we can add two more meetups if needed. Closing for now unless others want to continue exploring this option.

[geobrando]

Reopening this to continue the discussion.

So at $20/chapter/month this option is definitely more expensive than the current pricing of individual chapters paying their own way, which is $89.99/6mos for chapters with over 50 members ($14.99/month). From an organizational perspective, the additional benefits of a Pro account mentioned above might be worth considering the additional costs. In particular, we discussed before the need to collect metrics (#62). And I like the ability to easily add new chapters and centralized access to members.

On Slack, I believe, we talked about the possibility of Meetup organizers sharing their dues with up to 3 groups in their local area to bring down costs. But that sounds like a logistical nightmare to me and likely not possible for many chapters.

I'm wondering if we would be able to take advantage of their 6 month trial and then easily go back to separate accounts if we decide not to continue. Laura's email mentions "a few pilot chapters" which I take to mean we wouldn't be able to set it up as we wanted. Is that your impression @geografa?

A Pro account would of course mean chapter dues and more organized control of funds, which I know has been discussed before. That's a separate topic. But as Meetup costs are by far the largest expense this might make it easier as money would just have to flow from

organizers/sponsors/donors :arrow_forward: :arrow_forward: HQ (who would pay the Pro dues)

and not back to organizers to pay meetup costs.

Thoughts?

@lyzidiamond @bethschechter @camilleanne @almccon