Meetup Disappointment
Before I was on Meetup.com I thought it was the secret to getting good turnouts at meetings. Attendance at KWLUG has been declining for years. In contrast, I saw all these meetups on meetup.com with hundreds of members and many many RSVPs. Meetup is expensive and I am cheap, however, so I did not seriously consider paying for a membership.
Now I am glad I didn't. Thanks to NetSquared branding, the NetSquared Kitchener-Waterloo group gets to use Meetup for free, and I am one of the organizers. Here have been my experiences:
There are tonnes of people who sign up as members for the group, and almost none attend. Once in a while somebody new will show up, but they tend not to stick around (which admittedly might be a sign that our meetup is not very good). Overall we have only 2-3 regulars who have come out of the meetup.com community, but there are over a hundred supposed members I have never met. Several of these people are not even in town. What good is joining the group if you have no intention of attending a meeting?
People engage in this irritating and mystifying pattern of RSVPing to events and then unRSVPing a day before the event will be held. I have no idea why people do this or what they get out of it, but it is frustrating.
Like other walled garden services, Meetup wants you to host all of your event planning data on their site, and you lose all that data if you move someplace else.
Like other internet companies, Meetup wants all the information it can get from you, and understandably some people don't want to bother signing up for an account. That can REDUCE your turnouts. For this reason we run a parallel infrastructure for meeting announcements and discussions that does not require a Meetup.com login.
To me it seems that the only way to run a successful meetup.com group is by doing exactly the same things you do when running a successful meetup group not on meetup.com. You do a lot of word of mouth networking, and you advertise outside the website, and you somehow build up a core group that is excited about your initiative. Since I have given up trying to improve KWLUG, it does not make sense for me to try and improve things via getting a meetup.com account. Maybe the site will work for you, but I have been disappointed.