Organize events out

Local Resolutions Part 29 of 29

This is the last in a series of 29 ways to help your local community online in 2010. If you missed it, you may wish to read the introductory post.

In this post, I suggest that organizing events out is a great way to help strengthen your community while you’re online. This series has included recent posts about spreading the news, displaying a local-pride bumper sticker, and sharing the link love.

In this, the final post of this series, I’d like to bring things full circle from online to offline.

This series has dealt with improving your local (that is, geographically limited and physical) community through what you do online. I’m concluding with the suggestion that you complete the cycle by taking what’s online and pulling it back off-line again.

Meeting people face-to-face matters, as we all know. The beautiful thing about social media is that they make it easy to meet people online and then take it deeper by connecting with them in real life.

On Facebook, create an event and invite people to it. On Twitter, poll people’s interest and then create a Tweetup. Here in Lancaster we use the hashtag #lancup to make it easy to follow discussions about meetups organized through Twitter. In some cases, even more powerful is Meetup.com, which allows you to create and publicize regularly-scheduled gatherings structured around common interests like hobbies, careers, and books.

For bonus points, make your event a fundraiser. It’s not hard to find a cause that aligns with the interests and passions of the group of people attending your event, and since there’s no need to make a profit off the event, set the price so that there’s a margin that can benefit that cause.

And with that resolution for 2010, the series is wrapped up. Thank you for your participation and interest all throughout this month!