Any Alternative to Meetup.com for Local Groups?

I’m trying to organize a meetup in Korea, but I cannot find a good alternative to Meetup.com. I’ve stumbled upon a meetup page of Open Knowledge Canberra, and it seems it has recently created by @Starl3n maybe with the organizer subscription. I wonder if it’s OK to get sponsorship for the monthly fee, @Mor. Or, is there any good alternative?

Meetup removed the Meetup Everywhere service we used to use.

Right now we recommend people use http://attending.io/ for running meetup style events.

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I can maybe create it for you on my account and make you the organiser. Let
me just check limits and such… I should be able to transfer to a
different organiser at a later stage should you find a local supporter :slight_smile:

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@rufuspollock Thanks. It looks good. I’ll look into it. What do you think about sponsorship? Is it OK?

@Starl3n That sounds awesome! Thanks. :smile:

Rufus might have a better suggestion…
For a country wide meetup then meetup.com isn’t ideal. You are forced to pick a city and event times are always local to that city. And, meetups are surfaced based on location.

btw - we recently created graphics for the Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane local meetup groups here in Australia. I’m happy to share these in PSD. You’d just need to update the country logo as per OKFN branding assets that are in google drive. I can find the link to that somewhere too…

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had a quick look at attending.io - whether it is technically good and feature rich might be less important to someone starting up a group and trying to build a network. The benefit you’d lose is that organic group growth would be held back if there weren’t already lots of other people from your geography on the platform.

meetup.com will draw people to your meetup events from their existing users. You might consider using meetup.com for the first 12 months, grow your membership, then move to an entirely free platform later? Once you have enough members then word of mouth and other communication mediums would help you continue growing on another platform.

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@jgkim Do you already have a meetup.com account? If so then let me know your handle or profile URL so I can set you up as a co-organiser :slight_smile: And, what City would you like to pick for the meetup default location?

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@Starl3n Had a quick look at attending.io, and as you said, I guess it’s for creating event pages on a event-by-event basis, not building a network.

The URI of my meetup profile is: Login to Meetup | Meetup, and the default location will be Seoul, Korea.

If you share the PSD files with me, it would be great! :wink:

Thank you so much for your help.

Sorry @jgkim I’m already the organiser of CKAN, AWS and OKFN meetups in Canberra and apparently three is the limit. I can’t upgrade this without contacting support. I’ll try that, but I suspect it wont get a result…

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Hi @jgkim,

We do not offer financial support for meetup at the moment. I will recommend the following steps.
a. Ues http://attending.io/ for the event.
b. Promote it through Facebook and Twitter.
c. Open a group category for the Korean group here.

I think this should cover all bases. I saw many open data events on Facebook, so I think it can be good for some extant.

I hope it helps,
Mor

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Hi @Mor, I did not mean I was looking for some financial support from the Open Knowledge. What I want to be sure is whether it’s OK or not if I get local financial support from some companies or other organizations. Thanks for the reply.

Meetup which used to charge organizers about 10$-24$ a month; has now decided to charge even the users. Under their new testing payment structure, users will have to pay 2$ to RSVP for a free event and the organizer subscription for a month will also be 2$.

Meetup has given a choice to event organizers of covering the cost of event attendees if they do not want to charge them, which is only unfair. People have started looking for meetup alternatives and started ditching the app as well.

If you are looking for one too then AllEvents.in is the right choice for you. They allow you to create your free meetup events and do not charge your attendees unless you want to. They provide you a lot of similar perks as Meetup with a database of 6M event seekers and 250M published events every month.

You can use your already built fanbase on Meetup on AllEvents.in. Use Meetup to attract the audience and ask them to RSVP or register for your free meetup on AllEvents.in. This way you will be able to migrate your meetup community easily.

An all-new list of alternatives:

See also this discussion on Hacker News.

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