This is a continuation of the discussion we started at the meeting last night about how we can grow the club. When the group was on Meetup I was seeing at least one new member a month joining the group. Most of those people actually came to a meeting. Some we never saw again but some stuck around. That allowed us to have a pretty decent amount of growth. At our peak before we dumped Meetup we could usually count on 12 or more attendees to the monthly meeting. Last night we had 5 people attend and the previous months were about the same.

It is a given fact that real life interferes with things such as club meetings so people will continue to drop out and move on to other things. If we want the club to continue then we will have to drive up the number of people at are showing up to the meetings.

My first question is about the website. How many hits are we getting and how many people register a month? Are we seeing good traffic but not many people registering and saying "Yeah this looks awesome and I want to go to a free meeting!"? How can we change that? Do we need a better explanation on the landing page?

Joe and Jay brought up the idea of teaching more formal classes during the meetings. I love the idea if it will bring people to the meeting. What does everyone think? How do we advertise this? Posters at ITT? Job fairs? Big banners on the web site?

It was also brought up that maybe inviting the other hackerspace to the meetings would help. I'd love that but I tend to remember that someone was trying to get them to come but nothing came of it. Was that Tim, maybe?

What do you guys think?

This is a really important topic and I would really like to hear some opinions.

I was just wondering if we advertised on the web site a formal training session along with informal so that people could look at what was going to be discussed and then decide if they wanted to attend. We have guys in the club that have expertise in a lot of areas that can go do this sort of thing
Also, Joe and I have attended another "hacker space group" and they might be interested in attending our meetings.

Jay

One other observation. When a new potential member show up at a meeting, we should ALL go over and welcome him or her and make them feel welcome. Nothing kills a potential member's enthusiasm faster than when he shows up at a meeting and no one talks to him or makes him feel welcome.

Jay

I agree 100% about welcoming new members. We should make everyone should make an attempt to walk over and say "Hi", especially in the first 30 minutes during the "informal" section.

I like the idea of the classes but I'm not sure we have enough exposure for it to bring in the new people. Where would it be advertised? How? Who is responsible for doing it? Does it need funding? What am I not thinking to ask?

These metrics about the website would be helpful to know as well:
How many new hits are we seeing and over what time frame?
-How many of those people register to the group?
-How many show up to a meeting?

How many people move past the landing page into somewhere else?
How many of our current members log in more than once a month?
- week?
- day?