Highlights from Meetup Organisers survey

This survey was created for Ethereum Meetup Organisers to discover their needs, lessons learned in order to help meetup organisers organise better meetups. The results of this survey showed a lot of interesting data.

Let’s look at the results from the survey, comments on the results are at the bottom of this article.

This survey was shared in dedicated Telegram groups and with randomly picked meetup organisers via private message.

Most used platform for posting events

1. meetup.com — 86%
2. Facebook — 31%
3. Eventbrite — 17%

A few individual responses with social media platforms like twitter and telegram or their own platform.

Most used social platform for meetup promotion

1. meetup.com — 79%
2. Community Twitter — 65%
3. Community Telegram Group — 51%
4. Facebook — 38%
5. Email list — 20%

A few individual responses with social media platforms like LinkedIn, WhatsApp groups and Discord.

Most popular topic of the meetups

1. Community learning Group — 51%
2. DeFi & Open Finance — 48 %
3. Educational meetup — Ethereum 101 for Beginners — 48%
4. Educational meetup — explaining new terms (ETH2.0, …) — 41%
5. Introducing new project — 31%

There was a smaller interest in solidity and smart contracts development, dev workshops, and also venture building.

The major problem when running community

1. Finding the right venue — location, with equipment for meetup
2. Low attendance — only a few core attendees, language barrier
3. Sustainability — along with problems of creating revenue model, not enough time for organising meetups from the organiser side
4. Creating an agenda for the meetup — struggles with creating entertaining agenda

There were a few responses that were mentioning problems like finding speakers, lack of trust towards the technology, continuity and lack of funding for the meetups.

Usual attendance at the meetups

Light Blue — 10.3% Red — 6.9%

Meetup organiser needs

Responses in this part are considered to be included in meetup kit and other sources that will be available for meetup organisers to help them organise better meetups.

What would make organizing meetups easier for you?

1. Content for meetups — shared decks — 51%
2. Learning sources — 51%
3. Speaker in my area — 48%
4. Remote speaker — 48%
5. Graphic designs for meetup banners — 41%
6. List of venues available for the meetup — 38%
7. Streaming platforms — 38%
8. Tools — 24%

There were a few responses about having shared community of organisers.

What information would you like to find in a meetup kit

Most of the answers were related to what’s included in the meetup kit like topic ideas, agenda, tools for organisers. The needs were mainly about missing materials for organisers and missing community of fellow organisers.

What would you like to know before organizing the Ethereum meetup? Or what advice would you like to give to your peer who’s organizing a meetup for the first time

Ethereum Meetup Organisers are just people and they have some advice that they would like to share. Responses were copy-pasted from the responses of the survey without editing.highlighting the key ones :)

• I would like to know what topics, resources and dynamics worked best in your meetups
• Advice I would like to give to new organizer is “Find members of various areas rather than a developer-oriented community” and “Find things that can cooperate with local governments”
• Get to know local champions of Ethereum and get their buy in early on. Have a process for organising that’s super simple (venue, equipment, agenda, etc). You’ll feel burnt out, so find like-mind co organisers to share the burden.
• Do a survey and discuss the next Meetup topic with participate
• Exchange & Questions between the audience and the Speaker should be encouraged as it’s very important & some time for informal gatherine / mingeling should be planed at the end of the event
• Need to understand as to what group of community they belong to so I could adjust my strategy of explaining things to them. Like discussion strategy are different between students, farmers, senior citizens, etc.
• Announcing your meetup well in advance (ideally 2–4 weeks) greatly increases the number of people that will show up. Also sending a reminder notification to everyone the day before the meetup helps.
• Finding speakers is hard, it should be a continuous process, not before the meetup
• Attendance drops when the markets are down.
• Once someone starts a meetup, they should keep their eyes open for the volunteers that help that person, those will need to take over in 6–12 months. The leaders of meetup get burnout, or hired by a project or change priorities, and someone needs to take over to continue the organization of the events.
• You’re not ETHGlobal, don’t worry if things don’t go 100% perfect. Don’t worry if the turnout is lower than expected, we’re all in love with tech that isn’t mainstream, so you wont get a huge crowd most likely.
• You can still hold a great meetup and not be an expert in everything & anything Ethereum. Reach out to venues and other places by cold-emailing them, oftentimes they’re happy to host a meetup free of charge.
• Don’t spend too much time and resources for the first meetup as you don’t know how many people to turn up. Start very casually (I used to recommend pub get together until COVID-19) kicks in
• Share the ethos of true community driven technologies and true decentralization. Follow your heart not the hype.
• Pick your co-organisers wisely, they’re key to your event success
• My advice would be to do something very specific that adds value to people.
• Have passion for what you’re doing and give it the best shot you could.
• Be aware about the typical show-off (30–40%)
• Try to QA presentations ahead of time to encourage high quality
• The workshops are very helpful to the speaker and the attendee, making it easier for people to learn.

What kind of support you need in order to organise a good meetup

Most of the answers were related to financial support for food and venues. A lot of answers were asking about promotion, sponsorship and community of fellow organisers.

Have you ever hosted a remote meetup or had a speaker that gave talk remotely?

The community of Ethereum organisers is widespread all around the world, organisers that filled out this survey are from all around the world — from South Korea to Europe, USA, Latin America to Australia.

Takeaways from survey:

• Community learning meetups are the most popular along with educational meetups for beginners and DeFi topics
• Facebook is very popular among meetup organisers as platform for posting events
• Meetup is the most popular platform for events
• There are not enough good venues for the meetups
• So many meetup groups are fighting for attendees whether there are not enough of no-core attendees or there’s language barrier or attendees don’t trust the technology

The most surprising fact was that the crowd doesn’t believe the technology and sometimes it’s hard to go simply into the weeds of the system. Low attendance of the meetup is because people think that Ethereum is a scam. Also it’s hard to do a meetup when you want to stay away from trading and how to make money topics. A lot of attendees are coming to the Ethereum meetups with a vision of making money and they don’t focus on technology.

Thanks everyone who filled out this survey, and for nice comments at the end of the survey! 😊

Stay tuned for the upcoming updates! ✨ Announcement coming soon 🔥