Running successful DevRel events from my home office

Olivia: Hello everyone. My name is Olivia. I am a DevRel programme manager at Elastic. There we go. So today I'm going to be covering running successful events from my home office. So about a year ago we had some changes in our organisation and I no longer travelled to events, whether it was conferences or meetups. So with that I learned a lot of new challenges and how to problem solve. But regardless of who you are within your DevRel organisation, if you attend events, if you are like me and do 'em all from home, hopefully this talk will give you some best practises. So who this talk is for, you could be a programme manager like me. We're doing everything from home, a hundred percent remote or developer advocates. I know, I'm sure there's plenty of you in this room today. You're probably attending the events. A lot of you might even be planning events yourself.

So hopefully, regardless of where you are within DevRel, these tips and tricks help you with your own event strategies and ensuring your events are successful. So real quick, I'm going to be focusing my presentation on meetups specifically, but these tips can apply to a variety of different events that you have within your organisation, hackathons, conference, sponsorships, et cetera. For some background at Elastic, we have over 150 user groups globally. I personally cover a mayor events in the United States from meetups, conferences and so on. Within Elastic, our meetups are open to anyone and everyone interested in learning about our products. So we really want developers to come as they are. They're free events. Even if you don't know about Elastic, come to our meetups and we really have a very come as you are environment where we just want people to learn about our products, connect with the local community.

They're not lead generating events. So we get requests from sales often about, Hey, can I come to your event and basically poach people? No, that's always the answer is always no. And so I've also talked through kind of the approach of when you also are getting requests from sales teams to get involved in your meetups and how to go about it. But just real quick, these are just some pictures from meetups I've had in the past year from Boston to Chicago to Dallas and so forth. So step one in ensuring your event is successful is understand that the perfect event does not exist. So I'm very type when I got into this role and little things would pop up, little things would go wrong. I was the type of person who would get very frustrated. But just understanding and doing more events from large to small meetups, you'll understand that you can try to forecast anything and everything, but at the end of the day, something will likely go wrong and it's okay.

It is not the end of the world. So that's kind of step one. Just understand things happen. It is not the end of the world and hopefully as you do more and more events, as you refine your event strategy, you're able to learn and make plans moving forward. But step two is quality over quantity. This might take some trial and error. I know when in the states around 2023, we really put the gas pedal down on doing more in-person events, switching from virtual during COVID, it took some figuring out what's working well because a lot of our user groups in certain cities weren't the same as they were pre COVID. So the landscape has changed and it might take some time to actually figure out what works and what doesn't. So I have a few best practises and I'll go through each of these. Number one is determine what a successful event looks like.

Figure out metrics that work for your team. Identify which regions to prioritise, what type of event will it be in person. Virtual hybrid logistics. I could spend so much time on logistics for events, but I'll go through how to find venues, how to coordinate some of the finer details like food and drink and some of the resources I use. And then planning joint events with other groups. So companies, organisations, other tech user groups. It's power and numbers. I find the most success in my events when I am able to partner with other groups and then finally prepare to get scrappy. I think this is very common in DevRel. We're no stranger to getting crafty with the resources we have. So number one, determine what a successful event looks like. There's no cookie cutter success metrics when it comes to events within every single DevRel org.

Depending on the stage, how long you've had a team, a DevRel team specifically, it can depend, but I recommend taking some time and figuring out what your event success metrics look like to your team and then reevaluating. So a few examples I've include, maybe it's a certain number of attendees, maybe it's specific presentation content. So for example, my team, we recently implemented Meetup in a Box, and this is a great way to scale content from our company. So if there's specific company messages that you want to get out to your community, create a repurposable presentation deck. Our developer, Abacus, I have Jessica in the front row right here. Hey Jess. She's been great at helping scale our meetup in a box content, and this also allows people in your organisation who aren't in Dev because likely there's only a handful of you within the whole company to go to a meetup, present the content, add their own twist to the presentation.

So a success metric for us was at the end of a quarter we look back and we say, Hey, how many meetups did we do with X, Y, and Z content? And we're gauging if that's good or bad. Partnering with a company with a lot of industry clout on a joint meetup, this is great. I'm sure there's every company here. You kind of have a target on very complimentative organisations that you think would be great for a joint event. If you can get in the door and make it a joint effort, it's a win-win. YouTube views, if it's a virtual event, maybe a success metric is how many views you got featuring external speakers. I always find that the best type of event is when we're featuring members from our community. Yes, they love to hear from internal illustrations as we call them, but the best events are when you're hearing from people in the community using your product in real time.

And then another win is, hey, even if I only had a meetup with 10 people, maybe we found someone that wants to present at the next event. So I always find a great success in that. And then a user group chapter. Let's say you're starting from scratch and success looks like building A, you had one to two events and your chapter grew by five to 10, 15%. I think that's success. Jess, when I talked to her about some success metrics, she mentioned like, Hey, if she's giving a presentation at a conference or at a meetup, maybe success to her, looks like afterwards I had really engaging conversations and I was inspired for additional content down the line. So again, it definitely depends. Take the time upfront, reevaluate what does success look like and that will help you gauge and plan your events. So prioritise your regions. Lemme take a drink. I have a lot of talk about here.

Okay, so this is so important because like I said, there's not a lot of team members within DevRel usually, so you want to be very careful with your time. I recommend prioritising your regions, figuring out which cities you want to plan events in. A lot of times this will be very similar with your own company strategy and where your community is based. Hopefully you have data around where the largest members of your community are and you're able to make those cities more of a priority. Take time, curate events in those cities. Figure out at the beginning of the year, Hey, I want to have X amount of meetups or events in my P one cities, P two, P three, and so on. That way you're setting realistic goals and you have something to measure. At the end of the year in 2023, we were doing a lot of trial and error.

We were figuring out, like I said previously, what's working and what's not. I was getting requests internally from sales team asking to do meetups in cities where we hadn't had an event in a long time. For example, Wisconsin, we have a very small user group there. I let them know, yes, I will plan something, but what I need from you is you guys are going to be boots on the ground. You're going to be the ones promoting it to the community, to your customers, to your prospects. I'll need your help. I'll help plan find the venue. We will have an internal speaker. If you can't find the customer interested in speaking, that's fine, but we'll really need your help. Long story short, I planned two meetups. We ended up cancelling the second one because the first one just had very bad attendance numbers, but at a few other scenarios similar in 2023 and going back to it, it kind of just we realised, okay, we'll have some data behind what's important to focus our efforts on, but we also can push back as needed.

So if you prioritise your region, and if you're like how it is in my company where you are getting requests internally for events and you can only do so much, take that data, show them, hey, this is a priority city and you don't have to say no, you can push back and compromise. For example, in the situation with Wisconsin, the account team was going on a roadshow with a customer. They were going to visit some customers locally. The customers weren't interested in hosting a meetup, but maybe a compromise is, hey, the solution architect's going to be there. They're going to be doing a presentation, let's record it and put it on the YouTube channel for later. Or let's take some time and find a joint, another organisation like a Java user group or a Python user group and do a joint event. So you don't have to completely say no, but use your prioritisation.

Use the work you've done with events previously to have leverage when having these conversations. To recap, because that was a lot of information, take time to prioritise your cities set goals for how many events you want to have each year and then compromise when needed. Like I said, you don't have to say no to having events, but you want to make sure that you have the community's best interest in mind and doing so put the work in ahead of time. Okay, so the type of event itself, I think I'm sure a lot of you feel the same way. After COVID, everyone had Zoom fatigue. No one wanted to sit on Zooms anymore. So we started doing more in-person events and at the end of the day, not every event's meant to be in person. I know for my team, we were doing a tonne of in-person events in 2023 at the beginning of this year, we took a step back and said, Hey, we need to implement more virtual events.

It's a great way to scale. Our community will want to consume content in different ways. So we've started to make an effort there, but ways to determine what type of event it should be. I think number one time of year summer is difficult to schedule events to begin with. Registration's low. I know my counterparts in Europe, they don't schedule anything in August because everyone's on holiday. So use that within your own event strategy. Also around the holidays itself, incorporate more virtual events. Then also region, like I was saying with the example from Wisconsin, maybe a compromise for an event that you don't think just based on data and pass events that you've witnessed in certain cities. Compromise and say, Hey, let's make this a virtual event. We will promote it to the Wisconsin community, but for the sake of success in that sense, let's make it virtual.

And then finally, speaker location. Let's say you have a really awesome speaker from the community, but she's based in middle of nowhere Nebraska. You're not going to plan an event in the middle of nowhere when you know, okay, we probably don't have a large community there, so make it a virtual event, do the same, set up a event page and stream it to your YouTube channel or similar. So there's a lot of options there. And then I love virtual events because they're scalable. Your community can consume the content whenever, wherever, and it lives on. They're also so easy to plan compared to in-person events. Just comparing the two, I personally like virtual better, but they both have their benefits obviously. And then lastly, hybrid. I think hybrid events are great for your top priority cities. For example, San Francisco, New York is a top priority for my team, and we're making more of an effort to make those events hybrid regardless of the city.

Whenever we have meetups, we're usually getting asked like, Hey, is this event going to be recorded? So a personal goal of mine is to make that more of an option because it can be tricky just depending on the venue. And you want the quality to be good just based off the last presentation too. Okay, so determining in-person logistics, I could, I've just spent a lot of time here. It is difficult planning an in-person event. When you've never been to the city, you have no idea about the target locations. I know in the states, especially public transportation's not great. So if you plan a meetup or an event in Denver where I'm from, you're not going to find a happy medium where everyone's going to be happy and thrilled to have to drive across the metro. But with that being said, take time and ask your community.

Ask local team members if they a, have venue recommendations. I don't have much success here, but I always ask that first. And then secondly, Hey, what area of town should I target? Because you don't want to plan a meetup in somewhere that wouldn't be good for anyone. So take the time ahead of time. And then a few go-to resources that I find Meetup venues. For the most part, my team doesn't have a huge budget. We're not revenue generating, so we do have to keep budget in mind. And I've had plenty of free events, customer and community member offices, those are great. Always recommend if you can reaching out to your field team to see if any customers want to host, if they want to present. Same with your community, even if they're just like a open source user, they might be interested in hosting. And I know those events are usually our most popular when we're able to get in with a customer or community member recruiting offices, this is kind of a win-win, especially if it's a tech recruiting firm.

We've hosted a few meetups at different recruiting companies that just have large office spaces that they don't really use. This is great coding bootcamps. I know specifically in Denver, I work with a coding bootcamp downtown. They have a free space, which is awesome. And then search on meetup.com, figure out where similar user groups are meeting, see where the competitors are meeting and still their event space. But this is actually a really great option if you're just stuck on where to meet. I know a bunch of my colleagues, other programme managers on my team who cover different regions, they found great success here as well. And then peer spaces is kind of like the Airbnb of corporate. I only usually use this in dire situations when hey, we need to have a meetup around a specific conference. We're sponsoring the locations very, it has to be within a certain radius.

It can be a little pricey, but that's always a last resort. And then I recommend keeping a playbook of every venue that you've worked with that you'd hosted at or potentially could host at. I recently offloaded or transitioned East region to my colleague and I was able to provide this to her and she was able to hit the ground running and start planning meetups pretty quickly. And then best resources, food and drink coordinating. That can be hard when you're not going to be there. When I am going to an event in Denver, I can just pack up my car with Costco drinks and pick up some pizza on the way, but it adds an added layer of challenge when you're kind of just hoping for the best with what you deliver. So Instacart's great. Uber Eats is a little hit or miss, but also a good resource.

I use that often. It's great to pre-schedule, which I love. You can add delivery notes, et cetera. And then when a doubt dominoes, it's great if you're on a budget and there's pretty much everywhere, so you don't have to do it alone. I highly recommend planning your events with, like I said, another organisation, whether that's a company, a joint tech or an affinity group in the community, a partner or just a community member. These are great ways to not only scale your events, but you're reaching a larger audience and you don't have to do it alone. Like I said, there's more, which can be a bad thing, more cooks in the kitchen, but for the most part, you're working with another organisation who already has a venue. They already have people on site to help you with on the event day logistics, and it definitely makes life a little bit easier at the end of the day.

For example, I have a user group in Pittsburgh. We only have 80 members there. We hadn't had an event since pre COVID and a local solution architect reached out to me asking to do event, and I was like, well, I've seen this before and a standalone event might not do so well here, so let's take some time on the backend. I asked him if he knew of any customers locally that would be interested in hosting. He couldn't find anything, so I took some time and I reached out to local tech user groups that would be a similar company, similar organisation for us to partner with. It would make sense they'd be interested in a talk that we had. And I ended up pitching the solution Architects talk. We did a joint meetup. I provided food and drink. They had a consistent user group that was meeting every month.

So it was an easy way to have success where it was the first meetup since pre COVID and there weren't two people showing up. We were able to tap into this other community and partner, which was awesome, and then prepare to get scrappy. I mean, DevRel, we usually have less resources in terms of budget and headcount, but your events don't need to suffer. In order to really scale your events, you will have to lean on community. You will have to ask for help. That's really the only way to get your name out there and have brand awareness and hopefully developers are adopting your product. But for example, this meetup right here, this was $0 and I provided some swag I think, but it was just a local developer user group in Dallas. We brought in one of our consulting architects. He did an intro to Elastic Talk and it was really great.

Step three, cross your T's and dot your i's. These are just some of my type A checklist items I do before an event that might be helpful. So identify your meetup point of contact. So this could either be I've had events where the speaker is also the host, the person who arrives early to grab the food and drink to greet attendees to let them in. But hopefully you have more people on site to kind of help you, especially if it's a larger event by identify who's going to be on site and make sure people understand their roles and responsibilities. Since swag, I have some swag here that I'm going to pass out. It's just stickers from back when I used to go on site to events. I have a little stock, so I brought some stickers for you guys, but send swag for everyone loves swag, so either send it to the venue, send it to an onsite point of contact.

This email could have been a meeting. I have a sign in my office that says the opposite, but for the sake of an event, people skim their emails, they're going to delete their emails, get everyone on a call, especially if it's a larger meetup where you have a lot of visibility. There's a lot of people involved. Schedule 15 minutes, I have a know before you go slide deck where I walk through everything from building access requirements, set up food and drink a run of show if needed. That way you're able to capture every one in one place and make sure they're on the same page. And then I also send an email afterwards, basically a recap with all that information Pro tip to go above and beyond and make sure people really can't miss the information. I send a calendar invite for the exact time of the meetup for anyone who's going to be involved in the event from this venue to your speaker, to the people helping out internally.

And make sure you outline everything from that know before you go. That way when they get on site and they're pulling up to the venue and maybe they're confused about something, instead of sourcing through their email, they can pop up in their calendar app and find exactly what they're looking for. And then for food and drink, I feel like I have the most issues with this just sitting in my office back home and it's a start of a meetup and I'm getting a call from Domino's and I'm like, I don't know where you are. I am 2000 miles away. Always recommend identifying someone on site to be a callback number. What are you going to do when someone's calling you and you don't even know what door they're at. In addition to that, just put as much information for delivery instructions as you can in your order. And sometimes it's hope for the best, but the more details the better. And then create a Slack day, a Slack channel if available or similar with your meetup team. That way you all can communicate before the event, after the event, during the event, and hopefully they send you some pictures. But with that, that's it. I hope that some of my best practises helped you guys, but yeah, questions.

Audience member 1:

So I think as a lot of us know, you sometimes have to have a lot of reoccurring events to build a community to help people build relationships and stuff like that. From doing a bunch of meetups all over the us, what have you found is, do you do reoccurring events? Are you doing 'em once or twice a year? How often has worked best for you guys?

Olivia: Yeah, that's a good question. Definitely for me, it's depended on the community. I know in Dallas, we have a reoccurring meetup every third Tuesday of the month, and we have a smaller user group there. It's been hard to get external speakers, so a lot of times it has been internal. I just had one of our consulting architects run in office hours where people could come by from the community and get their questions asked. So I think to answer your question, consistency is good. When's possible. You don't want to just have an event just to say you did. So if you are able to build consistent events, that's awesome. In our priority one cities like San Francisco, we try to have an event every month and we try to switch it up from just our office there and getting involved with other companies. But yeah, consistency is good, but you don't want to do it just for the sake of it, if that makes sense.

Audience member 2:

Thank you for the talk. How should I start this? I used to talk about the idea of having meetups for meetup organisers. I love that, so that they could always get together and share ideas and stuff. Now, you had mentioned planning joint events with customers, partners, community members, et cetera. How do you feel about just even having joint meetups with other dev rails where you have overlapping ideas?

Olivia: I think that's a great idea. I think it would likely because I live in Denver, I don't know how many other Devra people are there, but I love that idea. We should do a virtual, Hey, let's get together. I have questions. I've been struggling with attendance, and even in some of our larger cities, we'll get a tonne of RSVPs, but the no-show rate is 60 to 70% sometimes. So I love that idea. We should collaborate more between DevRel and how to make our meetup successful.

Audience member 3:

I know that Elastic has a pretty cool champions programme. We got to listen to Uli, I believe talk about it a year and a half ago. Have you ever used some of your other community programmes to kind of slingshot things like this forward using your champions to host or providing your champions some sort of reward for hosting these?

Olivia: Yeah, it's been a little difficult. I've worked with uly on a few things, like using previous champions to try to get external speakers. I don't know if we need better prizes or something, but it is been challenging. Finding external speakers too is a big challenge for me. So if anyone has good ideas, let me know. But yes, we do use our community ambassadors programme. I'm trying to think of anything else off the top of my head, but something we could leverage more for sure.

Audience member 4:

Could you elaborate a little bit more on when you resort to a hybrid event, we have a virtual option, but this amount of people want to be in person, or the speaker is always in person and only attendees are virtual, just those kind of

Olivia: Things. Yeah, no, you bring up a few points there. We've had events where the speaker ended up not being able to be in person, so we've brought them in remotely, but we've had an in-person speaker as well. Then the virtual talks also recorded. So we've had that situation or we've had situations where, hey, in our San Francisco office, we have a pretty good capability of recording the way the area is set up. You can record Zoom presentations pretty easy and it's good production quality or good-ish. So we are trying to do that more, but we also want to be careful of steering away people from attending in person and saying, Hey, you can attend in person, but it's also going to be live streamed. We would prefer people to attend in person, record it, and then put it on our YouTube channel afterwards. But yeah, it's an area we definitely need to continue to grow in. There's a lot of benefits with hybrid and just making the content available afterwards. And it's great for the speakers. They can put it on their resume or their LinkedIn and it's good professional development for them as well.

Audience member 5:

Hi, I have a question. So you talked about organising all these events remote. So we actually have the opposite problem that all of our events are super large scale with at least 80 people attending. So how do you manage something like that if you are not on site? And let's say you're really short on staff in some of these cities, right? Yes. So how do you manage things like venue security, for example? So where you need at least two people to register the people, but then you also need a host and a moderator and everything.

Can you elaborate a little bit

Olivia: On that? No, that's a good question because we've run into a few similar scenarios with events that we've had in New York. We had one two weeks ago and there was like 400 RSVPs, and Jess was there. We had a few other people on site. But afterwards, it was definitely something where we had the conversation like, Hey, it's hard for our developer advocate to also manage everything when there's that many people in big cities, there's building requirements. You have to send the guest list, there's people getting lost or unsure of where to go. So we've had to, when we have these larger events and usually we know ahead of time, we're able to, and elastic's pretty big too. We are lucky where we have over 3000 employees now, and especially in the United States, I've been able to pull in regional marketing who's local, and we had to tell them, no leads. We'd love your help, but you can't have leads afterwards. But they've been great to help. But yeah, I wish we had more budget to send more people when necessary. That's always an easy way to, I think, improve onsite experience, but there's a lot that goes into it and you don't think about it, and you kind of just have to manage with what you have. Hi. Sorry. All right, well thank you so much for those great questions and thank you again.