Monthly User Group Meetings- Where to start?

Hi Maureen!

I love this question; I know that so many of us have worked through it, both in the Before-Times and in our New COVID Normal.

Since I started at one of our sublicensees in February 2015, our "Tulsatura" community has done monthly meetings (and they were doing so for a few years before I started using Tessitura as well). The meetings typically happened on a rigid schedule--third Wednesday of the month, 3-5 PM--and for a long time were always at the same meeting room on-site with one of our sublicensees. Each of these meetings had an agenda set out in advance, typically beginning with a "10 Minute Tessitura" quick share and then going into either presentations from the consortium staff about new/changed functionality or presentations from the staff at sublicensee organizations. While the majority of the meetings would follow this format, we always had a big TLCC takeaway as our August meeting (where those who attended the conference presented on their points of interest) and a local Roadmap session for our September meeting (especially in the days where the Roadmap was a bit more formalized in each organization having votes, so this was an opportunity to put together a voting bloc if it made sense).

I moved to the Consortium Manager role officially in August 2017, and our "Tulsatura" meetings kept to the same basic format but we've tried some experimentation (some successes, some less so) in the past four years. We have tried holding the meeting at different organizations so that it isn't the same location every time for folks who have to travel far to attend at that site. We have tried switching up the week of the month, day of the week, and time of the day to make the meeting more accessible than it was when there was a strict day of the month that the meeting would occur (we've used Doodle to try to gather this feedback, and it's generally successful). We also had one year where each meeting month was dedicated to a specific topic/department, so in advance, people knew that July was the Development month, and October was the Finance month.

When COVID hit, we immediately switched to full virtual and shortened the monthly meeting duration from two hours to one (knowing that nobody wants to sit on GoToMeeting/Zoom for two hours). We've still been keeping up this approach to the meetings today, and in this time we've largely changed to an approach where the shorter meeting length means we can put together a shorter agenda to cover. In the early months, I feel like a fair amount of what we covered in this meeting was giving advice about the change to work-from-home (since our team has worked remotely for the history of our consortium, but many of our sublicensees were moving to remote work for the first time ever). While Tessitura was spinning up regular COVID-related functionality updates, we would dedicate much of our meeting time to covering that functionality and encouraging organizations to use it where it made sense to do so. More recently, we've gotten back to some normalcy in topics (for example, our August gathering was virtual TLCC2021 takeaways, and our September meeting was a new approach to our local Roadmap using Trello as a management tool).

I know that's a whole lot of preamble and history that you didn't necessarily ask for, but I hope it's helpful in providing some additional context.

I find that I'm never a good resource about how to get the monthly meetings started up because I didn't have to tackle that. When I first joined Tulsa Ballet, it was honestly an expectation that, since I was coming on to learn Tessitura and become the organization's power user, I would attend the monthly consortium community meetings. I am incredibly thankful and indebted to my managers and colleagues from that time for emphasizing the importance of the monthly meetings and my attendance at them. I know I would not be where I am today without that experience. Thus, I suppose my biggest takeaway here to share is that establishing people who will support and evangelize attendance at these meetings is a key way to make sure that people attend.

In terms of scheduling and formatting, I think it can be helpful to mix up expectations. I like knowing each year that August will be TLCC takeaways and September will cover something on the local Roadmap. When TLCC is in person, we'll often also use the July meeting to come together and help each attendee review the conference schedule and decide what meetings are of the greatest interest to them, as well as share insights from past attendees to help maximize engagement and limit burnout during that week. We'll also typically forego a December meeting to host a holiday party instead, though we haven't been able to do so since 2019. That leaves about eight meetings each year to plan for, and between ongoing functionality updates and topics we establish through regular use of Tessitura, it becomes easier to plan for.

I will say that, in the year where we established that certain meetings would focus on certain departments, that seemed to suppress attendance even though we had pitched it as an opportunity to break down silos and learn more about the people working in the departments across the entire organization. In theory, that's a noble goal, but in practice I feel like people still felt that a month's topic wasn't "for them" and chose not to attend for that reason. If you're just starting the meetings and trying to grow regular attendance, I think it's probably a better plan to have topics that can apply for all versus opting for specialization right out of the gate.

I know this is a whole lot for a Tuesday morning, but I hope that it is helpful. I'm sure we'll have other folks from this community weighing in here as well, and I definitely think it could be a topic for one of our meetings this month in our Lean Coffee Table format: https://community.tessituranetwork.com/topical_groups/consortium-leaders-tug/c/67#pifragment-1001105185=1

Thank you,

Brian

Hi Maureen,

We're trying a few different things in the Perth Tessitura Consortium, the main one being a monthly Strategic Operations Committee meeting that we run via MS Teams and with the help of a shared Trello board. This meeting is really aimed at getting an overview of any projects going on in the consortium that require time and work by our Systems Manager and allocating his time (or accessing support from Tessitura) in an equitable and collaborative way. We try and get as many key users from all organisations involved in this meeting.   

This has also lead to some offshoot working groups specifically dealing with one topic - e.g. access, or data management, which are really project based and will disband once these projects are completed.

Apart from that, we tried separate quarterly meetings of various functional areas, e.g. marketing, development, education etc, ,but these have struggled a bit, mainly because I (or anyone else) haven't been able to dedicate enough time to these to keep them running.

Plus, we also try and organise Tessitura Perth User Group meetings at least a few times a year (this includes Tess users that are not in our consortium), which are generally good but also take time and effort to organise with the organising committee members all having limited time to offer. 

I hope this helps.

cheers

Nancy 

Hi Maureen, 

Our consortium has 4 sub licensees and we meet on a quarterly basis generally at the same time on a 3rd Wednesday. 

We sent out an anonymous survey a few months ago to those who are a part of our "Tessitura Advisory Committee" and those who regularly did not attend did not find our scheduling convenient, so we recently started sending out the invite/appt. a month or more in advance to get it on member calendars.  I find that we have the same members attending our quarterly meetings, most of which are power users.  Most organizations have at least one ticketing person attend, but I have found development and marketing staff generally do not attend, which is something I would like to see change. In the new year, I am planning for us to have a topic focused/training meeting every other month that is user driven based on member feedback. I think meeting once a quarter is not often enough and every month would be too much. I think polling your users for a regular day/time, perhaps using Doodle as Brian recommends is a good place to start.

Best,

Curtis 

Thanks everyone for your feedback. Very helpful and things to ponder. I think definitely a consistent schedule based on doodle poll is a start. We'll see what happens! I'm sure I'll have something to report on an upcoming leadership meeting.