How to Make Your Networking Event Popular and Recurring

Article from Freelance Switch by Thursday Bram

Once you’ve held one networking event, it’s going to be tempting to run another — to make your networking event a recurring affair that everyone in your industry or your area knows that they absolutely need to attend. But to make a networking event both popular and recurring, you’ll need to invest some effort into building something more than an average get-together.

You need to find what appeals to your audience, as well as ways to bring new people to your event. After all, what’s a chance to network if you already know every single person in the room?

Tutorial Assets

To complete the tutorial you will need the following assets:

The experience of running a one-off networking event.
A list of attendees from your previous event.

1. Collect Feedback from Your First Event
Step 1

Provided you’ve already ran a stand-alone networking event, you know the mechanics of finding a space and scheduling an event. You also have an invaluable resource: the opinions of the people who attended that first event. Follow up with those attendees and find out what worked, as well as what didn’t work, in their experience.

Did they enjoy the event overall?
What caused them to actually attend?
What would convince them to attend another event?

It may also make sense to collect some demographic information about previous attendees to make sure that you’re reaching your target demographic. You want to make sure that you’re bringing out the people who you want to meet and who are valuable to the group as a whole. Where possible, ask if you can rely on any of these past attendees to run future ideas past.

Step 2

Brainstorm a theme or a connection for your series of networking events. Whether you’re holding a series of mixers, inviting a different speaker to every meeting or otherwise creating an interesting topic for your fellow networkers to talk about, you need a consistent style and approach to your networking event. Standardizing the process will make running each event easier, as well as let your attendees know what to expect.

Step 3

Test your ideas for your future events. Even if you’re just sending out an email to a few people to check if they’d be interested in attending, having that level of information will help you to make sure you’re on the right path.

2. Plan Your Actual Events
Step 1

Once you have the idea for how you’ll handle your recurring events, you need to set up at least the first event in your series. It’s not necessarily a bad idea to plan several events at once, provided you’ll have the opportunity to tweak your plans as each event comes closer. That way, you can batch-process similar tasks together, like by choosing your locations all at once (or finding a space that will allow you to host the whole series in one spot).

In order to grow your networking event — and the network that goes with it — you need to regularly be bringing new people to events.

You’ll also benefit from advanced planning when you can tell the attendees for each event what to expect at the next — you can make sure that they’re looking forward to each opportunity to meet and to bring along appropriate connections.

Step 2

Create a marketing plan for each individual event. In order to grow your networking event — and the network that goes with it — you need to regularly be bringing new people to events. While it’s more work, you need to be actively planning how to put announcements of your group in front of new audiences for each individual networking event you plan. Can you tap into other people’s networks, invite related groups or convince speakers to bring along their established audiences?

Read entire article on Freelance Switch.