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MUG Leader
If you are reading this, it's because you already are managing or you are planning to build a MongoDB community.
First thing and probably the only real rule in this world is the respect of the Code of Conduct which supersede anything else.
Your job is basically to facilitate and organise the MUGs. This mission can be summarized as a list of small sub-tasks:
- Find a venue,
- Find a food and beverages sponsor,
- Find speakers,
- Communicate with the MUG community.
Find a venue is usually not very complicated because a lot of companies are volunteering to host meetups in their showroom.
Most of the time, it's because they want get closer to the community and because they know that people willing to join a meetup in the evening are passionate. It's a positive marketing position which represent a minor investment for them.
Also it's a great way for them to meet people of course, get people to know their company and potentially hire new folks.
Usually when a company host your meetup, it's very common to let them talk about their company and business at the beginning for a few minutes. Sometimes, they are also willing to line up their own engineers to cover a few talks or demos and most of the time it is okay. There is really one thing that you have to be careful of: making sure the main topic of each talk is around MongoDB.
So some companies may contact you directly through the meetup messaging system and propose to host the meetup. If you don't have any proposition, you can ask to get some by sending a message to your community using the meetup message emailing system. Here is an example.
Hello everyone,
I will be in Sophia Antipolis on February 4th and I can take the opportunity to organize a MongoDB Meetup from 7pm to 10pm.
Would a company or school in the Sophia Antipolis area have a meeting or conference room available that can accommodate about 20 people that night?
I could come talk about MongoDB, the new stuff and everything we set up in the Cloud with MongoDB Atlas and MongoDB Stitch and in the end we will make a small networking buffet.
Contact: maxime@mongodb.com
I do not know how many of you will offer me a room. Sorry in advance but we can not go everywhere :-)!
Thank you all and I hope to see you on February 4th :-)!
Maxime.
About 50% of the time, the host will propose to organise the buffet because it doesn't cost them a lot and it's more simple for everyone because the food can already be on site in the fridge, etc.
If they don't, maybe another company will propose to sponsor the food and in that case, the same "rule" than for the host applies: they can talk for a few minutes at the beginning of the evening. Of course, make sure you thank all your sponsors properly at the end of the evening and make sure they get a round of applause :-).
Also, make sure to mention your sponsors in the MUG invitation and highlight their website for example.
If you do not have a buffet sponsor, don't worry too much because MongoDB will be your buffet sponsor. In that case, you need to contact Maxime Beugnet maxime@mongodb.com to get your food sponsoring request approved. You will need to collect all the receipts in order to get a refund.
Here is a basic idea of the budget:
nb_attendees * 12€ or $14.
So for a 30 people MUG, you would have a 360€ maximum budget for the food. To avoid ordering too big or too little food, the easiest solution is to order pizzas 15 minutes after the beginning of the event.
So here it's more complicated :-). Some good sources of speakers could be:
- Friends & co-workers,
- Your professional network (LinkedIn, etc),
- MongoDB employees,
- Developer Advocates,
- Solution Architects,
- Consulting engineers,
- Technical Support Engineers.
If you still can't find a speaker, just like for the venue, you can try to send a message using the meetup emailing system to your community and ask if someone has some MongoDB related content to share with the community.
You will be in charge of the communications with your MUG community. You will have to communicate for different reasons like when you are looking for a host, a sponsor or speakers. You will also be responsible for creating your events on the Meetup page. You can see an example here or here.
As a general rule of thumbs, you should always thank your host and sponsors and announce clearly what the people can expect during this evening and what they will learn about.
If you have some speakers, make sure to highlight them and maybe write a line or two about them so people will want to come and learn from them. Also, make sure you include all the details about the venue and how to find it (metro, parking options, building and floor number, etc).
Once our event is created, meetup.com will offer you to promote your event by sending an email to your community. To maximise the number of attendees, you will have to send at least 2 reminder emails.
- One about 3 days before the event. Maybe you can include the last new details in here about the venue and the room ("check in at the front desk then 2nd floor on the left").
- One 24 hours before the event to remind people that they can still join in if they want and remind people that they have to change their status if they can't make it.
With those 2 emails, you can expect that about 50% of your registered people will finally come in hopefully.