Reaching the broader community with NodeSchool

[louisnk]

Hello fellow organizers!

As part of the group helping to organize Seattle's NodeSchool, I am really curious how other places have gone about reaching people who aren't already "in the know"?

People who are already on meetup.com or looking at nodeschool.io are already on the right track. How have or would you reach people who are learning to code, already working with Node (or JS in general), or looking to learn JS, but don't know NodeSchool exists? Especially those who aren't just a bunch of white guys.

Is there something more successful than social media?

Thanks for your knowledge!

[finnp]

Thanks for opening this issue. I am still trying to get better with this. But some things that worked out in the past were:

• Reaching out to diversity-oriented communities in your town (in berlin we have Geekettes / RailsGirls)
• Printing announcements about events and hang them up at cafes and co-working spaces
• Ask your non-programming friends to come along and encourage participants to do the same

I also want to try to reach out to other communities and organisations in the future that are not related to coding.

[louisnk]

Thanks for the info @finnp !

I've been in contact with some of the diversity-oriented tech communities, but not regularly. I've thought about printing flyers, but had no idea where the best places to put them were. Cafes and co-working spaces are a great idea!

I hadn't thought about inviting my non-programming friends, because I always think they'll get bored, but I will start trying that :)

One thing that has probably been done before, but I would like to try, is more direct involvement with organizers of other events. So instead of just telling the organizers of a geek-girls group that we have an event soon and we'd love them to come, asking how can we work together to organize events?

Of course we all need to be free to do our own things, but if we worked together sometimes wouldn't it be easier for all of us?

Does anybody have experience working with other organizers to create collaborative events - getting multiple groups to all be "hosts"? Or even just starting an email chain to share ideas and contacts for sponsors and hosts?

[max-mapper]

I think the Study Group format that Mozilla Science is developing could be a potentially good next step for NodeSchool: https://github.com/mozillascience/studyGroup (I've helped them design this as an outside advisor, but I'm curious to see if it takes off).

I think universities are a good place to start. If we could figure out a way to form cohorts with a sense of purpose (e.g. they will complete X workshops in a 6 week period or they will learn enough to complete a web application challenge at the end) then it would help move NodeSchool from the one-off event format it is in now towards a more group oriented longer term educational community.

[hollomancer]

Do we have anything available in terms of marketing resources to support the individual events Nodeschool runs? I know that Google Adwords offers free grants for nonprofits, and maybe we could do some targeted location-based promotion on other media channels too.