On Meetup, there’s no standard model for a successful community.

As your community grows, it can be difficult to schedule events and manage communication by yourself. Learn how to add members to your leadership team.

Creating a leadership team can help:

• Distribute the workload: Additional leaders allows you to delegate organizing responsibilities.
• Encourage collaboration: Having more leaders empowers them to learn leadership skills and builds trust in your community.
• Reward members: Assigning leadership roles is a great way to let a member know you love their passion and ideas.

You decide how many other leaders you need and what responsibilities they should take on.

Co-organizer:

Your co-organizer(s) are your second-in-command. They embody your group's mission entirely.

• If you want to put a co-organizer completely in charge of a local Meetup group, it’s important to establish a vetting process.
• All co-organizers have permission to contact the other members, and change your group's appearance and privacy settings.

Assistant organizer:

Much like Co-organizers, Assistant organizers represent your community.

• Ideal Assistant organizers collaborate with the rest of your leadership to plan events, maintain active communication, and encourage a friendly and warm community.
• Assistant organizers are able to contact all members, but they’re not able to change or manage your group's appearance, privacy settings, or finances.

Event organizer:

If you find someone that has great ideas for events and would be a thoughtful host, consider making them an Event organizer.

• Event organizers should be members that understand your group's vision and will only schedule events that align with it.
• Their permissions are limited to managing the calendar and contacting members online, but they need to be people you trust at IRL events too.

Identifying leaders

Some of your members may tell you they want to be on your leadership team right away. In some cases, you’ll have to ask potential leaders yourself.

Communicate the responsibilities you’d like for them to handle. Before selecting someone:

• Do they represent your group's values? Find members that start conversations.
• Do they contribute lots of ideas for events? Great leaders share actionable ideas and suggestions.
• Who are your consistent cheerleaders? Pick them.

Your event is on the calendar and people are coming! How do you get them to actually show up?

Communication is key: Let your people know you’re excited to spend time with them.

Build trust before you meet

• Post comments on the event's page. Ask questions: What brews are you looking forward to tasting? Has anyone hiked this trail before? Get the conversation going before you even see each other.

Send personal messages to new members and first-timers

• Let new members know there’s an event coming up.
• Tell first-timers you’ll be looking for them and make sure you’ll know how to find each other. If they know you’ll be there with the welcome wagon, they’ll be less likely to bail.

Get in touch with your attendees

• Contact everyone that said they’re coming. Remind them you’re looking forward to debating the merits of the cold brew vs. iced coffee or that your new boots are ready to be broken in.
• Balance your communications. Everyone has a full inbox — if you’re communicating too much, your most important messages will get lost (or your members may choose to not receive them at all). Keep it to one or two messages before an event.

Make time for everyone at your event

• If you get occupied running the show, ask your more outgoing members to help look out for newcomers.
• If you have a leadership team, this is a great time for them to step up and help show your community’s values.

Celebrate every Meetup event, no matter who turns up

• Share photos afterward to celebrate the cool things you did or the new stuff you learned.
• Ask for ideas for the next activity and have another event on the calendar for the newly-inspired to attend.

There is no big secret to improving your search rankings on the Meetup site or in search engines like Google. The best way to make your way to the top is by ensure your Meetup group's pages have interesting, relevant, and useful information about your group. Search algorithms base their results on things they think will be be the best and most useful match to someone searching a specific keyword.

Using your group’s Topics section will help both the search engines and people searching know just what you’re about. Tagging topics that are relevant to your group will increase the chances of interested members finding you.

You’ll find your topics on your group’s homepage, under the What we’re about section. Topics don’t have to be permanent. You can change the topics for your group at any time. Give your group some leverage by editing your Meetup group's topics.

The more specific information you provide in your topics, the easier it will be for people and search engines to find you.

We’ve thought of a few things you can do to make sure you're showing off what your Meetup group is most passionate about.

Include your location and create your group’s name based off of your main topic

We all like to be creative, but for search engine purposes, the ideal group name is super simple and reflects exactly what your group is about. We’ve come up with an easy formula to help get you started on ideas.

Create a short summary in the beginning of your group description

Think of it like telling a friend about something your really passionate about. Only summarize the most exciting and important parts.

When we say short, we mean around 100 characters: "We are romance novel enthusiasts who meet at a local coffee shop to discuss books and authors we love." That's it.

Keeping it short and sweet will help grab the attention of the user who finds you in a search, and they’ll understand what clicking on the link to your group will take them to. You don’t want anyone confused on their first impression of you.

Flesh out your group description with good and thoughtful details

The rest of your group description should include details about who should join the group, what members can expect, and what sorts of activities you do. Head on over for more inspiration of what makes a good group description.

You don’t have to tell your group’s whole life story to the world. Make sure you've got relevant information in there, but there's no need to go overboard. This can cause potential members who come across your group to feel overwhelmed. You’re group description is not carved in stone, and you can edit it at any time.

Bonus points: link to your group from other places around the web

One way search engines decide whether any particular site is useful is by checking to see if other sites on the internet are linking to it. Post a link to your group from your blog, or get other folks to post a link to your group from their sites.

Don't lose sleep over this step -- it's useful, but try not to go overboard. You don’t want people thinking the group to your link is spam.

Don’t try to cheat

There are people who try to game the system with things like lists of invisible keywords or repeating content. Don't be one of those people. Lists of keywords or garbled text are not helpful for potential members trying to figure out whether they'd like to join the group or not. Search engines want users to be happy when they click on the link to read more. They don’t want to see a user clicking, then hitting the back button because the link wasn’t relevant to what they were looking for.

Repetitive content, 'non-human language', and other things designed just to trick the search engines can get your group de-listed and removed from the search results entirely. That goes for search engines, as well as the search functions on the Meetup site. We want everyone in our community to play fair and by the rules.