Re: [UG-ADMINS] How do you generate enthusiasm?

We've had a similar problem.  You post events and you don't have nearly as
many folks come as you'd expect or like to have.

Here's what I've found.  Titles are 90% of what matters.  If they're
getting an e-mail from meetup they'll glance at the title and make a
decision right away if they're interested in going or not.

The title has to convey that the topic is relevant for what they are
working on (specific problem or platform) and that they will leave the
meetup learning something that they can use.

Looking back at the last 20 meetups or so here are trends:

The worst for attendance are "social" meetups.  If someone doesn't think
they are going to come away learning something specific they'd much rather
stay home.  For a while we were alternating talks with social meetups and
one guy quit the group saying "I thought this group was about PHP, I guess
not"

Although better then social meetups (although not by much) are
"discussions".  People don't seem to want to come and discuss a topic.
They want to hear an expert tell them what they need to know.

The best attended meetups are keyword focused "Doctrine 2", "E-Commerce",
"SilverStripe 3".  This really is hit or miss though because some topics
don't land.  For us we didn't have a particularly large group for "Laravel"

In the middle you have topics that succeed based on the perceived value.

Successful:

I've been hacked! Now what?
Code Reviews: The "Secret" to Building Quality Software
Rapid Prototyping: Workflow

Less Successful:

Coding Styles, Tools, and Workflow
Lean and Agile (Yes, this is about code, not a fitness program)

Looking at those topics it's clear why some landed and others didn't.
People are afraid of being hacked so they need to know how to prevent it
and how to recover from it.  They want to build quality software and want
to know what the "secret" is.  This technique is called creating a
"knowledge gap" and is worth looking into.  Rapid prototyping because they
want to do what they already do quicker.

The ones that didn't land don't have a very strong hook.

Hope this helps.  It's something we're constantly working on.

Cheers,
Andrew