Why and how to do an “Attends” or “Goes To” event for your community group

3 min readAug 26, 2018

Communities often demand a constant source of nurturing for healthy maintenance and growth.

Meet-up events are a great way to do this but organising such events can be exhausting and time consuming. Especially, the complex ones that need preparation and a hired venue — speaker events, presentations and discussion groups, for instance.

A great strategy for relieving stress on the organisers, while maintaining the momentum and growth of your community, is to organise “attends” or “goes to” events.

These events don’t need you to curate the core content because someone else has already done the hard work.

Think of all the benefits:

Low amount of effort to organise.
Grow your community by mixing as a group with other people that are like you.
Frequent events help in keeping the momentum up.
You could come across partners for future events. Such as other local groups who’d want to run “attends” events to bring their community to your events.
Reduce costs by getting group discounts, traveling together and avoiding the need to hire venue or equipment for your events.
You can encourage other groups to attend your events by officially attending their events. A great way to cross-pollinate.

1. Find relevant events

Your community probably has a lot of overlap with other communities and things going on in your local area — or even ones you can travel to.

a) Attend regional or national events

If your group is (officially or unofficially) part of a bigger network of groups (e.g. a club, society, social movement) there’s likely bigger events being held in your city or in another city that your group could “officially” attend together.

You can save on hotels and transfers by sharing stay, travel and booking expenses.

b) Attend talks, discussions or conferences by other groups

Often there are adjacent groups to yours that have similar overlapping interests and topics.

You can easily find them on sites like Meetup, Eventbrite or Facebook.

If you get in touch there’s often an opportunity to partner with them or arrange for a group discount.

c) Films, shows, festivals

These are often much bigger than your own group and require little other than sometimes booking ahead, picking a time and showing up.

You can find them on listing sites that have choices from local government, cinemas, venues or chambers of commerce

This works the best when you have a central meeting point. You can use it to meet with your group for food and drinks before or after the central event.

d) Take part as a team in a sporting event, volunteering or a fundraiser

Find them by searching online or asking your community about the ongoing campaigns that they are already involved with.

2. Confirm a core group of people who will be able to attend the event

Use existing channels to post the event details such as Facebook, Meetup or email, tailored for your community.

Make sure to mention that this would be an externally organised event. Provide the details for booking tickets, travelling logistics, significance of the event to your community, who is the community point of contact and where will all the members meet before the official start time.

3. Show up, find each other, and enjoy it!

The hard easy work is done, and all you need to do is have fun!

Later you can review the whole event. You could talk on how to improve the experience, and if such events could work out for your community in the future.

Examples

A quick Google search can show you how other groups are doing such kinds of events:

Now, over to you…

So, will you organise such an event? Why or why not? If you do already, how do you do it? Share your thoughts, questions and experiences in the comments.

Originally published at www.lukefreeman.com.au on August 26, 2018.