To: CGE Leadership Team

RE: CGE Event Organizing

Normally CGE organizes one suburban and one Chicago event per month.

The process for organizing an event: As a group, we think of some interesting events and prioritize them for our schedule. Then, whomever organizes the event creates a draft with an exciting description for the meetup and publishes it upon my approval.

Here is the criteria for prioritizing events:
1. The event should be exciting for a lot of people! Remember, when we announce a meetup, we are sending an email to hundreds of our members. So it is absolutely essential that the event be appealing to reach a majority of members so they don't quickly lose interest in our group/events.
2. The event may contribute to publicity and enrollment of new members (ex. different Expos/Festivals/events involving media)
3. There must be a balance of both educational events and fun/social events.
4. There must be a balance between Chicago and suburban events.
5. Events that are free or low cost and that reach a majority of members will be given priority.
6. Outside events will have priority in the summer and inside events will have priority in the winter.

How do we will measure the success of an event?
1. By the event attendance. If an event has less than 20 RSVPs, it probably means that we did not promote it well enough or that it did not appeal to enough members.
2. By the event rating. Members are asked to rate all our events. We should strive to have 5 stars for all of our events.
3. By an increase in the typical number of new members who joined CGE right before and after the event. This means that we promoted CGE well!

The event organizers are completely responsible for promoting their own events. We don't have a budget to advertise our group/events so we should promote each of our events as much as possible. Therefore, you as CGE event organizers are expected to promote each meetup that you organize.
1. You should post an invitation (and link to the event) on the message boards of as many relevant meetup groups as you can (i.e. http://www.meetup.com..., http://www.meetup.com..., etc.).
2. You should also post an invitation and link on as many Facebook groups and pages as you can. You should at least post it on the CGE page (http://www.facebook.c.... There are many other local Green/Eco-related pages and groups on Facebook where we may want to promote.
3. Please be creative and find other ways to promote your event. (i.e. http://chicago.craigs... , announcement on Bulletin Board at http://manage.chicago..., etc.)

Promoting on Facebook and on other Meetup groups may seem like a lot but it actually only takes a few minutes after you do it once and then know what to do. If you have difficulty with promoting your event, please ask me or other organizers to help.

The bottom line is that the event organizers should do all they can to boost the RSVPs for each event as much as to fabulously execute the event itself. You can use 3 points above as your check off list.

Your feedback is valuable so please let me know if you have any questions, comments or concerns.

Thank you!
- Vadim

P.S. This message is sent to CGE Leadership Team and is also posted on our Message Board. There are two main reasons to post it on the Message Board:
1. To eliminate number of emails sent back and forth by the Leadership Team members. We can instead easily use the message board to address anything related to organizing CGE events in general.
2. To be transparent with our members about what we are doing and to involve those who are interested to share their input or possibly helping us.