Community Feedback on Organizing Events

During this trying time when communities around the world are quarantined during the COVID-19 pandemic, most in-person events have been delayed or cancelled, user groups have moved into the digital realm, and everybody seems to be hosting a webinar on one topic or another. But hosting a web meeting and sharing a link via your social channels does not mean your event will be successful.

This difficult time will pass, and even now, many organizing committees are optimistically preparing their plans for events in the second half of 2020 and into 2021. Additionally, people have been sharing the tools and techniques that have helped to make their online events successful — and we thought we’d tap into these best practices for this month’s #CollabTalk tweetjam topic.

For our next community discussion, we’ll talk about what works and what doesn’t work for organizing community events, including user group activities and online webinars, in-person workshops, and even multi-day regional events. Our panel of experts have organized them all!

Join us for this #CollabTalk TweetJam on Thursday, April 30th at 9am Pacific / 12pm Eastern as we convene to share our “Best Practices for Organizing Community Events.”  Participate in the discussion with other members of the community as we share ideas, discuss pain points, and agree-to-disagree on the tools, methodologies, and KPIs that drive our businesses.

You can join the community discussion using Twitter and the #CollabTalk hashtag or your favorite Twitter platform. You do not need to be an “expert” to participate in the online conversation, and can ask questions, comment on the questions posed, or just “lurk” in the background. These online discussions are open to anyone — you do not have to be on the panel to participate.

This month’s tweetjam and our amazing stats are once again being sponsored by our friends at tyGraph.

If you have never participated in one of these tweetjams, it’s pretty simple: anyone can jump in and share their thoughts, or just lurk in the wings and absorb the wisdom of the crowd. Either way, it’ll be a TON of content to consume in a single hour. You can follow the live session using the Twitter UI of your choice (Twitter.com, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, whatever). How it works is that I’ll post a series of questions every few minutes, and people will respond to Q1, Q2, Q3 and so forth with A1, A2, A3, always including the #CollabTalk hashtag with their answers. Feel free to reply as often (or as little) as you’d like, ask your own follow up questions, share relevant links, re-tweet others, and engage with the audience.

The questions we will discuss during the session include:

1. What are your go-to tools for organizing community events?
2. What are 3 things an organizer can do to raise awareness of their community event?
3. Any tips for selecting content and/or speakers for community events?
4. What is your PR and communications strategy with community events?
5. What is the role of sponsors in your community events?
6. If you’ve conducted a community event post-mortem, what were your key takeaways?
7. Following your community event, what steps do you take to keep the community connected?

As always, there will be side-questions, side-conversations, and wise-cracking throughout. This is open to the public, so please join in the discussion! The dialog is always thought-provoking and fun.

Participating on this panel (so far):

• Seth Juarez (@sethjuarez), cloud developer advocate and host of Channel 9 at Microsoft
• Mark Jones (@markqjones), founder of Collaboris and Collab365.community
• Rie Irish (@IrishSQL), senior program manager, data engineering & MVP community support at Microsoft
• Carrie Page (@cepage23), sr. manager field and corporate events at CloudHealth by VMware
• David Drever (@DavidMDrever), SharePoint MVP and SharePoint services lead at Solvera Solutions
• Mark Rackley (@mrackley), Office 365 MVP, SharePoint Hillbilly, Partner at PAIT Group
• John White (@diverdown1964), SharePoint MVP and cto at UnlimitedViz and tyGraph
• Erica Toelle (@ericatoelle), Office Apps & Services MVP and Microsoft Compliance consultant
• Hal Hostetler (@TVWizard), Microsoft MVP and senior field engineer and social media coordinator for Roland, Schorr & Tower
• Ed Senez (@edsenez), president at UnlimitedViz and TyGraph
• Sharon Weaver (@sharoneweaver), consultant, trainer and ceo of Smarter Consulting
• Mike Maadarani (@mikemaadarani), Office Apps & Services MVP, cloud solution architect at MCM Consulting
• Nick Brattoli (@Byrdttoli), Microsoft MVP, founder and lead consultant at Byrdttoli Enterprise Consulting
• Russ Basiura (@SharePointPhily), Microsoft Teams evangelist, organizer of Modern Workplace Summit, architect and modern workplace expert at Accel365
• Julie Yack (@coloradojules), Business Applications MVP, trainer, author and coo at Colorado Technology Consultants and 365.training
• Kurt Kragh Sørensen (@KurtKragh),  intranet consultant and owner of IntraTeam.com
• Tobiasz Koprowski (@KoprowskiT), Data Platform MVP, founder and consultant at Shadowland Consulting
• Sarah Gilbert (@singingtech), Community Manager for @MSTCommunity for  Microsoft 365 Public Sector
• Steve Jones (@way0utwest), Data Platform MVP, editor at SQLServerCentral.com and advocate for Redgate Software
• Wes Preston (@idubbs), SharePoint MVP, evangelist,  and owner at TrecStone
• Daniel Glenn (@danielglenn), Microsoft MVP, Office 365 & SharePoint practice lead at InfoWorks, Inc.
• Eli Robillard (@erobillard), SharePoint MVP, musician, fly-fisher, collaboration technology guy
• Jim Love (@jimmywim), software engineer and SharePoint practice lead at Intelligent Decisioning Ltd.
• Mike Gilronan (@mikegil), business architect at Sympraxis Consulting
• and your host, Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet), Microsoft MVP & RD, founder & ceo of CollabTalk LLC

If you would like to be included on one of these panels, please drop me a line via email, LinkedIn, or Twitter. And thank you again to tyGraph for your support of these CollabTalk tweetjams! And finally, if you are interested in being a sponsor of a future tweetjam, please contact me. Our next tweetjam will be held on Thursday, April 30th.