Group Website

Your group needs a website. Spring for a URL. They're only $8.95 at GoDaddy.

You should probably build that website in Joomla since, after all, you're a Joomla user group. There's plenty of other alternatives like Ning, or Wordpress.com, or plain old static pages. But you could also use SimplWeb, which is, in fact, a Joomla installation, if you have trouble installing Joomla on your own.

On this website, put up your next meeting date, time, and location. Provide a link where people can sign up to get a reminder in their inbox about the next meeting. We use Google Groups for this.  Send the reminder a week ahead of time. This is not so far that people have no clue what they're doing next week, but far enough in advance that if they need to reschedule something, they can.

Does your site need to be beautiful and professional and fabulous and wonderful, and do you need to build the whole thing yourself? Nope. Why not turn the user group website into a user group activity?  Get your members to help build the site, write content, do upgrades, etc. Reward helpers with free books!

Membership recruitment may seem daunting. And it is. Here's some hints to help.

1. Get that link at community.joomla.org. It makes you look all official.
2. Get your Google Group started (or whatever other email mechanism you're going to use) so you can collect email addresses as you get them.
3. Go to your local college/university and find the PHP/MySQL instructor(s). Find the CMS instructor(s). Find the web design instructor(s). Give them a flyer with your URL on it, and encourage them to tell their students about the meeting. Encourage these instructors to come too. Some instructors wind up giving students extra credit for coming to user group meetings.
4. Find other web-related user groups. Adobe user groups are great options. Announce your group and encourage them to come.
5. Do talks about Joomla at some of these other tangentally related user groups. Example: give a Joomla overview, and talk about how there's Dreamweaver extensions available for writing Joomla templates, for an Adobe user group.
6. Reward members with free books, chocolate, a round of applause -- whatever! -- for recruiting new members.
7. At some point, people will tell their friends, bring a friend, and your membership will grow.

If it seems like you're not getting a lot of people to your meetings, find out why by asking the membership. Bad meeting time/place? Bad format/flavor? What do they want? Which leads into....

Get Members Involved

Your user group should be all about the membership -- not all about you. It's not a cult of personality. It's about Joomla and all of the people who make Joomla go.

So, ask people to participate, and give them ways to do that:

•  Ask people to speak on topics of their expertise that are of interest to the group: HTML/CSS, PHP/MySQL, Joomla configuration, specific extensions and their use, site organization, project management, etc.
• Ask people to bring snacks to the meeting.
• Ask someone else to lead the meeting.
• Ask someone to research an extension and report back what they find.
• Ask members to help build the group's website.

Members who feel like this is THEIR group will contribute. As manager, your job is to be a gentle leader. Let the group determine their own direction as to where they want to go and what they want to do. You will have much happier members when they feel they have some control over what happens.

A Typical Joomla User Group New England Meeting

Joomla User Group New England meets the 3rd Wednesday of each month from 5:30-7 PM at the Marlboro College Graduate Center in Brattleboro, VT. There is no fee to attend, as the Grad Center donates the meeting space to us. (And, of course, the majority of attendees are Grad Center alums and students, so it is a reciprocal relationship.)

The meeting starts PROMPTLY at 5:30. The meeting leader welcomes everyone, and everyone does an introduction highlighting their skillset (CSS, site organization, project management, content writing, extension development, etc).

Happy Joomla Stories: Members are encouraged to share recent site launches, cool extensions they've found, things they've got working, etc.

Sad Joomla Stories: Members share problems they're having with sites in development, and we try to solve them as a group. We help identify extensions to solve certain problems,  provide links to sites with descriptions of solutions, etc. Sometimes we solve the problem, and sometimes we just give starting places -- but it works great!

Speaker:  Someone from the membership talks for 30-45 min about a topic of interest pertaining to Joomla.  Most of these have been about extensions, recent Joomla conferences, problems presented and solved, etc. Some of these have been tied into the UG website. For example, we had someone talk about Community Builder and what it could do for a site one month, and someone install it and implement it on the UG site in the next month.

Snacks:  One member brings the Healthy Snack (cheese and crackers, veggies and dip, something like that), while another member brings an Unhealthy Snack (frequently cookies or other treats). These are available at the meeting and are passed around.

Wrap up: At the end of the meeting, we pick someone to lead next month's meeting, a speaker, and two people to bring snacks.We do giveaways of books and whatnot. And we end by 7 PM -- on time as much as we can, though occasionally we go over 5-10 min.

Dinner. Frequently some of the members will go out to dinner afterwards and chat some more. It's not officially part of the meeting.

Summary

Get your members involved, and not only will you never worry about attendance at meetings, you'll have less to do and everyone will have more fun. Share the leadership! Learn new things! I always learn something new at our UG meetings.

Good luck with your UG!

This article was originally posted on Joomla4Web.

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