Hello,
Here at the Philadelphia Regional Arts Consortium there is definitely a desire to start having monthly user group meetings. And I think there are some of you out there in other consortia that do this and I'm wondering what you have found to be the best way to get started?
What works best in terms of scheduling and formatting the sessions? Is one month dedicated to a Ticketing group vs Development group? Or do you find that perhaps planning only by topics is best and then anyone interested can attend, regardless of the user group they belong to.
Any thoughts of wisdom would be so appreciated.
-Maureen Cotellese
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