A Letter to Tech Meetups
Please share this directly with your meetup members and organizers
Through some of the early conversations that have occurred while getting things moving with this conference, I was asked to provide a letter to be shared directly with meetup groups by organizers. Since we’re planning everything out in the open as the conference develops, I wanted to share directly here.
Meetup Organizers: Please feel free to either share this link directly and/or copy the letter below to distribute to your meetup members. Helping local meetups is a core mission of this conference.
Hello Meetup members!
I wanted to let you all know about the Carolina Code Conference happening in Greenville, SC on August 19, 2023! This year it is a single day, single track conference with networking activities afterwards. It's a "polyglot" conference not aimed at any single language or framework, so everybody in our upstate tech community should feel right at home.
Call for Speakers is open until May 25th to speakers of all experience levels and talk lengths. Read our official Call for Speakers announcement for more details at the conference site:
This conference, like many area meetup groups, has been on hold since it last happened in 2019 due to Covid. Momentum matters to meetup groups and when everything stops, it can be difficult to get moving again without some real effort. We are hoping to utilize the conference momentum to get things moving with our local meetup groups as well and we're open to ideas on exactly how to make that happen. The day of the conference, we plan to have a round table discussion during lunch around how best to facilitate meetup groups moving forward.
Meetups come in all shapes and sizes. Some are primarily online with huge attendance numbers while others operate in person during lunch or after work, with presentations a meal and some face to face connection. Virtually all of them had to shift online in 2020 and that move undermined the energy surrounding so many of these, causing some to shut down entirely.
When getting a meetup moving again, it requires some significant fortitude and a thick skin to deal with months where attendance is light. You have to keep pushing forward. Keep working to get the word out. Keep working to get some attendance number commitments. Keep working to let people know what they missed out on when they couldn't come before.
All that said, Carolina Code Conference wants to help. We want meetup organizers to contact us and let us know about what's going on with their meetup group.
Is it thriving and you want to spread the word to make it even better?
Is it dying? Are you trying to get it moving again?
Is it primarily online and you want to have it in person some but you aren't sure where to start?
Do you need help finding a place to meet?
Do you need sponsors to help pay for food?
Would you like us to tell people about your meetup on the same social channels we're setting up to promote the conference itself throughout the year?
Would you like to promote your meetup at the conference so attendees can come talk to you about your next meeting?
Use the #events channel on HackGreenville's Slack. Join the #meetuporganizers channel in there too. Talk to Jim about making sure your meetup is listed. Join the #carolinacodeconference channel to discuss things directly with us. Even if you’re not in the Greenville area, this is the Carolina Code Conference. If you have a tech meetup anywhere in the Carolinas, we’re game.
Talk to us! We want to help. We want ideas. We want to promote your efforts. We want to connect you with other people who are on the same mission.
Long term, we want this conference to become the annual sync up point for many meetup groups where you can...
Recommend great speakers from your meetups to be featured at the conference and cheer those speakers on from the crowd.
Talk about how to sprout new meetups and spread the word about others that people might not have known about.
Discuss what's working for your meetups so that other meetup organizers can learn and improve.
Subscribe to the conference email list to stay up to date on the latest developments and please help spread the word.
Thank you for staying involved,
Barry Jones
Carolina Code Conference