What do you measure?

One of the secrets, or habits, of highly successful people is to begin with end in mind. That, according to the author Stephen Covey, and his well-known book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

For your meetup, it just means knowing what your goal is. We didn't spell it out, but we mentioned general guiding principles like “having fun” or “focusing on people” in our last post about what a meetup group is. But, seriously, what does that mean?

It really helps if you somehow can break down your goal into a number - something you can quantify. For example, if you are doing a good job of focusing on the people, shouldn't your membership go up? Does that mean that you should have a growth target? You betcha!

Point is, beginning with the end in mind translates to knowing what to measure.

Metrics

Ah - good old metrics. Brings back bean counting days. Sorry - dozed off there thinking about accounting, but now I'm awake! Where were we? Okay, metrics.

While you can get more creative, the easiest starting point is to look at your group's Quality and Quantity. In online marketing terms, you can think of this is reach and engagement.

Quantity is the number of members in your group, and engagement could be a number of things, such as % of those members attending events, or satisfaction rating of an event.

Quantity

In our next post, we will dig deeper about what the drivers of growth are. Clearly, having a clear goal and communicating that to your community, helps, but there are definitely things you can do to grow your community - more on that in the next post.

Quality

By the way, meetup itself has post-event rating mechanism that shows number of stars. That's pretty cool and is a good high-level score. If you want something more in-depth about the quality, then you may want to consider a custom-form and survey the audience.

Add a hyperlink to the survey in your meetup event, and remind those attending to please take a minute to complete it.

You don't need anything fancy, and could use google forms. To get give you an example template - I stayed up late night, losing sleep - and built one for you. You are welcome!

Get your free form template here. (You can add or remove questions.)

Back to Goal

Now that you have these metrics in mind, you can do simple things like:

• We want to have X number of members by end of 2014.
• We aim to have Y as a target engagement in our community - which tells us we are doing a good job!

Dashboard

By the way, assuming you are the organizer or co-organizer of your meetup group, you will have a cool dashboard on the meetup.com itself. Just goto More navigation link from your group home page, and under it, select Stats. You can see how many members joined by week or in larger increments of time. You can even download a spreadsheet data that you can manipulate and analyze in greater depth.

Chart of members joining around March - productmanagementfasttrack.com

If you have massive amounts of data - any data - and want my help figuring it out, shoot me a note.

Thanks Meetup, for the great analytics tool!

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