Will you share your user group tips to help others?

[ShelleySessoms]

I have been contacted by a couple of folks lately who are interested in either starting a new local user group or keeping an existing user group afloat.

What tips can you share to help facilitate some early discussions, specifically around:

• Which email vendor do you use?
• Who hosts your website?
• How do you handle event registration and payment?

One UG in particular is in need of advice for handling the costs of these things without taking on the financial responsibility of having an account in a person's name rather than a business or legal LLC.

Any and all tips and suggestions are appreciated! 

[stephensloan]

Please send me your Email address and I'll send you some material that I wrote on this topic.

[ShelleySessoms]

Thank you @stephensloan. You can send it to shelley.sessoms@sas.com  

[Quentin]

@stephensloan if it's not private, I'd encourage you to post it here.  It's always helpful to see how different groups approach stuff.  Or if you don't want to post it but are okay with sharing via email, please send it to me too 😀. quentin.mcmullen@basug.org. 

[Quentin]

Hi Shelley,

BASUG uses Wix to host our website (https://www.wix.com/).  It's similar to square space, so you can use drag-and-drop to create a site. Even though in theory you can do it yourself, we hired a contractor to create the initial site (www.basug.org). One thing we like about Wix is that because it's designed to produce sites/shops for online businesses, it integrates everything we need:

• website itself 
• scheduled email blasts with announcements
• event listing / registration /tickets (https://www.basug.org/event-details/basug-september-meeting-in-person)
• archives of slides/papers from past events (https://www.basug.org/archives)
• archives of webinar recordings (https://www.basug.org/videos)

Since the site is built from widgets, you don't have the same freedom you would have if you were a web developer building a custom site.  But since we didn't have any web developers in our group, this has worked well. Because it's a GUI to make edits/updates, we have several members of our steering committee who are able to log in and update stuff.

Before we moved to wix, we had one company hosting our website, used mailchimp for emails, and eventbee for ticketing.  So we had to enter event data into all three.  And people who bought a ticket via eventbee were not automatically added to our email list in mail chimp.  Now that it's all integrated from one provider, life is easier.  But we're probably paying more $ than we would if we hacked it together ourselves.

For our webinars, we use a Zoom webinar account.  It's more expensive than the zoom meeting account, but has some extra features.  I think Zoom meeting account would probably be fine. I know lots of LUGs have partnerships with local universities or other institutions which give them free access to a zoom account.

BASUG is incorporated as a 501-c-3, so we're able to buy stuff.  Though even having that, we often end up with individual people buying stuff and then submitting receipts to our treasurer for reimbursement.

Look forward to hearing advice from other groups.

[yabwon]

Hi,

for PolSUG (Polish SAS U.G.) we have email on gmail(its free), for web page I bought hosting on home.pl (but looking for cheaper alternatives) and for online meetings we used zoom (the most basic plan), for live meetings we were using classrooms thanks to courtesy  Faculty of Mathematics and Information Sciences.

Bart

[Reeza]

Expensive solution but very painless - use meetup.com.

[nbrucken]

We're where BASUG was before they moved to an integrated solution.  Our website was designed by a professional (though some years ago- probably needs updating) and hosted on Weebly, which is free.  We use MailChimp for email blasts, which used to be free, but they changed their service plans, and our mailing list is now too large for their free plan, so we have to pay $25/month for it.  We use one of our board members' university Zoom account for our webinars and Qualtrics for our free webinar registrations, and RegFox for our annual 1-Day Conference registration, since we charge for that.

Thanks,

    Nancy

[ShelleySessoms]

Thank you all for the information...very helpful!

[vickijane1]

I see a lot of comments that indicate the user group is paying for stuff.  Are there any user groups like us (MinnSUG) that have no budget?  How are user groups handling the costs of various platforms (e.g., MailChimp, EventBrite, MeetUp, website development) if you are not denoted as a charitable organization like BASUG?  We have no budget, meaning no checking account or anything we can use to pay for the various activities of running a user group (e.g., sending e-mail invitations, obtaining registrations for events, developing a robust website).  Is anyone having sponsors pay?  How difficult is it to get a reliable sponsor?

[nbrucken]

Some of the tools that MSUG uses are free, or are provided by local organizations.  For example, there's no charge for hosting a basic website on Weebly, though you have to put up with some discrete advertising, and MailChimp is free provided your distribution list is below their threshold.  In addition, you may be able to get one of your members to agree to host webinars on their organization's Zoom or Teams account.  If you need people to pre-register for a meeting, you can use Google Forms if there's no charge for the event.  That may be enough to get you started.

Nancy