Promoting your campaign on Meetup
Meetup.com (also called Meetup) is an online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world. Meetup allows members to find and join groups unified by a common interest, such as politics, books, games, movies, health, pets, careers or hobbies. Users enter their ZIP code (or their city outside the United States) and the topic they want to meet about, and the website helps them arrange a place and time to meet.
Although there is a fee to organize a Meetup Group, it is free to create an account, browse the site, and message people directly.
You can search by topic, by geographic region, or by both.
If you search by topic while logged in, it will only generate results near your city. However you may wish to message Meetup Organizers from many cities if your campaign is open to everyone. To do this, you can browse topics by category instead of searching by keyword. Scan the categories that might be relevant to your campaign (they are often broader terms than the typical keywords you might search for, ex: “green” groups may appear within the Politics & Activism larger category, and then under the Progressive Concerns, Social Movements, or Consumer sub-categories.
On any Meetup Group page, you view the Organizer of that Meetup on the left-hand column. Below the main organizer you’ll see the assistant organizers. You may choose to message just the main organizer or all the assistant organizers as well. In your message, you might ask them to…
- Join your campaign
- Announce your campaign at their next Meetup
- Write an announcement on the Meetup page to let the members know about the campaign
If none of the organizers you message get back to you, you may consider contacting the non-organizer individual members of the Meetup Groups that are particularly perfect for your campaign.
