I realize that many of you are in regions that, on initial consideration, might not seem fertile ground for a user group.  You may feel that being located in a smaller metropolitan area or rural region is an insurmountable roadblock to getting a group started.  What’s the point of holding a first meeting if there’s no one else around?

Your first step is finding the 2 or 3 or 10 people you can connect with and agree to meet in person. We’ll get into the meat and potatoes of managing the group later; there’s no point talking about it until you’ve got enough interest to fill at least the seats around a kitchen table or bar booth. Finding people is, admittedly, hard.  Luckily, there are plenty of online resources to datamine for prospects.

I ask for forbearance from those of you for whom all of this is painfully obvious.  It’s not obvious to everybody, and this suite of blog posts is oriented to those at the beginner/intermediate stage of social networking (remember: user groups were perfecting social networking when Twitter’s founder was still in diapers).

FileMaker(!)

It would make sense to start here, wouldn’t it?  I would humbly suggest that if you’re serious about starting a user group, it would behoove you to contact your regional BAM (Business Account Manager).  BAMs are chiefly concerned with getting FileMaker into medium to large sized corporations – that’s their job – but they have a vested interest in seeding fertile ground with the FileMaker brand.  If you don’t know who your BAM is, find out.  Call FileMaker.

FMPug

fmpug.com is the defacto clearinghouse for most FileMaker User Groups around the world.  It’s really in your best interest to contact Andy or Heather at FMPug and ask them if they know of anybody in your region who’s approached them in the past about starting a group.  There may have been earlier attempts – and the initiators of those attempts should be your first prospects.

FileMaker specific prospect resources

Next let’s talk about the large, FileMaker oriented searchable directories and forums.  You’re going to want to search for folks in your city/county, neighboring areas, and so on.

The FileMaker Consultant Search Page – These are generally people who are fulltime FileMaker developers in one sense or another – either large businesses or sole proprietors.  If anybody’s going to be interested in FileMaker, these folks are it.

FMPug Business Directory – FMPug.com has its own member directory which is worth searching.  While most members belong to local chapters, there are also “Virtual Chapter” members – people in the FMPug community who, like you, are too far from a physical group.  Check to see if there are others in your area and start networking.

FindFileMakerDevelopers.com – Like the FileMaker Consultant Search page, but with a different set of search tools and more comprehensive profile information in the listing results.  The two sites don’t overlap 100%, so don’t forget to search both.

fmforums.com – If you haven’t joined this site, you should –  even if you aren’t trying to set up a group.  This is the oldest and largest online forum dedicated to FileMaker around, and is extremely active.  Post a solicitation to the Chit Chat forum thread.

filemakertoday.com – Ditto with FileMaker today – joining both forums has immeasurable value to you as developer irrespective of whether you get this user group thing off the ground.  Same deal: post your intentions, and solicit feedback.

Other online Directories

Okay, let’s say for the sake of argument that you’ve exhausted all of the above resources.  What next?

Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and FaceBook.

Google

Hm.  Can we just assume you know how to use this?  Please?  No?  Then try Google with training wheels.

LinkedIn

If you don’t yet have a profile on LinkedIn, set one up now (mine’s here).  It’s indispensable, and an excellent calling card to boot, if you’re looking for work.  For networking /research purposes, it’s a great tool.  There are quite a few uses you can make of it to search for user group prospects:

• Keyword searches
• People searches
• Question/Answer searches
• Group affiliations (and networking through them)

I’m not going to get into all of them, but will just throw up keyword searching as an example.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I’m trying to set up a group in Nebraska.

A simple keyword search for FileMaker

Searching for FileMaker…of course

yields 18000 results:

Not too shabby!

I can then filter by location – I see 1084 listings in Boston.  Well, that’s nice, but I’m all the way over here in NE. I can manually key in a search for Nebraska, and I now see:

10 is better than nothing

Lincoln, Nebraska: 10.  One of the core concepts of LinkedIn, by the way, is that you can only see the full profiles of those who are in your network (by being connected to someone who is somehow connected to you).  For me, only one of the contacts in Lincoln is connected to me.  He’s connected to me through 3 current FileMaker employees, though, so definitely someone I would want to consider contacting if I were starting a group in Nebraska.  If I were I an actual NE resident, I’d likely be connected to more than 1 of those 10.

This is where it starts to get to be about networking.  Let’s say I contact this guy, tell him of my plans, and ask for referrals to other people who might be interested.  He is much more likely than I am to know people who may be interested in what I have planned.

The interesting thing about this – and where LinkedIn really expands on the pool of prospects – is that it’s keyword searching on profiles that have FileMaker listed anywhere – it’s not just the bigwig consultants, it’s power users, business owners, IT people, data entry folks…everybody who has had a stake in FileMaker somewhere in their careers.

Next up:

Twitter

I have to admit I’m a reluctant Twitterer.  It’s not because I don’t like the medium per se – it’s more that opening TweetDeck, for someone who can’t wash dishes and hold a conversation at the same time, is a rabbit hole of “multitasking” distractions that leave a gaping half hour blank void in my workday.  I launch, do my minimum bit, and exit as gracefully as I can, before any of the glittering feeds tempt me.

That said, I highly recommend exploring Twitter simply because it’s one of those rare places where you can toss a random 140 character question like: “I’m in Bangor ME, want to start a #FileMaker user group.  Interested?”  and get answers (and a half dozen spam follow requests) in five minutes.

Do it, even if you hate it.  Just remember you can always pack Twitter away, a rarely used tool.

And, of course, if you find you don’t hate it, you may discover that there is a thriving FileMaker community on Twitter. It’s real, and it’s worth exploring in itself.

Facebook

I’m one of those who keeps my life fairly compartmentalized.  My FileMaker life lives here on phillyfilemaker, and on LinkedIn, and FaceBook is where my personal and art life is more comprehensively represented.  I’ve found that it’s really different for everyone; it may be that FaceBook is the ideal platform for you for what we’re trying to do here.  It comes down to personality type and comfort levels. Anyway, where FaceBook shines – and why it may make sense for you to exploit it for this purpose – is that it’s the epitome of social networking.  You could set up a FaceBook page for “The Bloomington/Normal FileMaker User Group”; you could join FileMaker specific groups and post questions to their walls…there are myriad possibilities here.

Okay, time for a search / social networking break.

At this point I’ll make couple of random observations:

• Continually expanding your search should be your MO; be promiscuous in your efforts.
• Look for local community gate-keepers: you want that person who can act as the hub who will lead you to other prospects.
• This whole User Group search sounds a lot like job hunting, doesn’t it?  And it smells like sales and marketing too.  That’s not a mistake.  You’re selling your idea and trying to obtain buy-in.  The only real difference here is that your currency is mindshare rather than cash.
• The corollary to the previous bullet point is that you need to learn sales skills.  Don’t worry, it won’t hurt a bit.  And picking up the confidence to build a User Group has dividends in other areas of your professional life.

That’s it for now.  I know, all you Social Networking wonks are yawning by now anyway.  This blog post was not for you

In the next installment I’ll do my best to cover the tools and services you should try to add to your toolkit to start and manage your group.  I’ll cover:

• FMPug affiliation
• Mailing List management (Mailman (FMPug uses this), FileMaker, FMSpark, MailChimp, etc)
• Event listing services
• Blogs and websites

Some of this will be my version of “best practices”, some will simply be observations about what completely failed for us

I’ll open the floor here: anyone have any other ideas they’d like to add or comment on the topic of finding group members?  Or any other thoughts?

Group Coordinators: What did you do when you started your group?  What were your learning experiences?

- Colin

 

I started thinking about this series of posts (yep, this is #1 in a series) after a few conversations I had with people at this year’s FileMaker DevCon.  I’d strike up a conversation with someone at lunch or at the bar, we’d exchange stories and experiences…and inevitably the talk would shift to why people come to DevCon in the first place.

Reason number 1: for the community.  Hands down.  The clear pleasures and advantages of meeting other people who are engaged in the same practice as you – with whom you can share ideas, learn from and teach –  always trump session topics, what’s on the lunch menu, what kind of swag you can haul back, or how many banners you can affix to the bottom of your convention badge.  One of the things that’s sometimes lost when you do a hand count of how many people in the room have iPads is how many people in the room are there because of the other people.

I’m going to go on a tangent here for a moment to talk about human behavior, and will come back to those DevCon conversations a little later.

We’re advocates of Agile development methodologies here at IT Solutions.  One of the core statements of the Agile manifesto is: where possible, value individuals and interactions over processes and tools.  In the context of Agile development, that statement helps emphasize (and leverage) the fact that software is built by humans working together.

I happen to love that statement, though, because I believe it’s not just a statement about development workflow.

It’s an observation about what really motivates us as humans.  Our monkey brains are social.  Our emotional and social batteries are recharged by engaging with each other.  Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, IM, blogs, websites, email, Basecamp, and everything else that we use as proxies for social interaction offers us myriad opportunities to recharge those batteries, at recharge rates proportional to bandwidth.

By far, though, the highest, most optimized bandwidth available to us is face to face, in person contact.  You can live stream and tweet all you like, but I can guarantee I can communicate more in five minutes with you in person than I ever could online.

This is why DevCon matters.  We all know it; it’s why we go.  To be with our particular sub-tribe of humans, speaking our own language.

This is also…

Why User Groups Matter

All right, so maybe I’m biased, because I run a user group.  Feel free to bump the font size down a few notches in your mind.  I will say that more often than not, the conversations I had at DevCon would eventually shift to what kind of local resources were available for whoever I was speaking with.  Who was in their area?  Who could they network with?

And especially…was there a FileMaker Developer Group nearby?

At this point the conversation went one of three ways:

• There was one, and it was awesome
• There was one, kinda, but it was an hour away
• The nearest one was in the next state or country

With the second and third responses, the tone was either wistful or frustrated.  I’ve had a bunch of conversations like this in the past, and my reply has always been: “Start your own!  It’s easy!”

Which probably glosses over things pretty badly.  For one thing, starting anything is never easy.

There’s the risk involved with investing time and energy into something that has a good chance of never getting off the ground.

There’s the open question of whether or not anybody will be actually interested enough to come.

There’s the “qualifications” question that some people ask: “Why me?  Who’s going to come to a group that I start?  What, am I special or something?”

No, you’re not special.  But you can start a User Group anyway.

This post is an introduction to a series of posts I’m going to put out in the next few weeks providing some key concepts and advice on how to start a group and how to grow it.  I’ll be covering:

• Initial tools and frameworks for managing a group
• Finding group members, marketing the group and building a community
• Finding speakers and topics

I’ll get into FileMaker-specific concepts in places, but by and large this stuff applies to anyone looking to start a technical user group.

That’s to come.  For now, if you’re really interested in starting a FileMaker User/Developer Group in your area – or finding one – your first stop should be to www.fmpug.com.  I’ll be talking about FMPug as a marketing and organizational tool in a future post, so won’t go into detail here.  Just take a quick look now.

What qualifies me to give advice?

I’m not special either  But I have had some experience building communities.  We’ve done a lot of hard work over the years to build Philly FileMaker into a large, robust group, and have learned some lessons along the way about what works and what doesn’t.  We want to share that.  And when I take off my day job hat, I run an art gallery with my wife, Mount Airy Contemporary, which has been a community-building exercise in a very similar way.  And when I take off my gallerist hat, I’m an artist, and engaged with promotion and community-building around that as well.  And when all of those hats are safely stowed, and I’m back at work, I promote training opportunities for IT Solutions, as well as work as a full time FileMaker Consultant.

This stuff matters to me, in short.  And I want to talk about it.  I want to see the FileMaker community expanded and enriched through local efforts.  I want more of you folks out there starting groups today. This’ll be my little contribution to that effort.  Feel free to comment along the way.  If you’re a group coordinator, especially, and have your own advice to add, it would be most welcome.

Colin

Coordinator
Philadelphia FileMaker User Group

www.philllyfilemaker.org

 

Here’s how it works:

“Your locked in rate is based on the number of COMPLETED transactions. To avoid losing the current promotional rate” (ed: currently $50), “we urge you to complete this transaction sooner rather than later. Wait too long and it could be gone!

** YOU’RE LOCKED-IN FOR LIFE! ** Here’s where things get really exciting! By signing-up now, the promotional price is your rate for life! That’s right, providing your membership never lapses, the promotional price will be your annual FMPug renewal rate for life! Whether you’re a new member or a renewing member, you won’t pay a penny more. It’s just that simple.”

Go here:

https://www.fmpug.com/signup

Is it worth it?  You bet.  But if you need more than the product discounts, mailing lists and so on, here’s an extra perk:

The all new iPad!

Er…wait, I mean this:

I meant THIS iPad.

Yeah, that’s it.

FMPug will be giving away four iPads to FMPug members – two at the FileMaker Developer Convention in August, and two to FMPug members who couldn’t attend DevCon.  I hear there’s some kind of FileMaker GO thingy that runs on iPads now too.

 

In order to take advantage of benefits associated with either of these affiliations, you must have attended a meeting in the past 3 months.  I’d also like to remind folks that FMPug membership is the hands-down best resource for FileMaker-specific member benefits and discounts – and I recommend joining today.

PeachPit User Group Affiliation

Through our Peachpit User Group membership, we receive monthly additions to a PFUG lending library.  If there is a Peachpit title you’d like us to acquire, let us know.  There’s not much to speak of yet in the Library, as we only started this program two months ago.

You can check out any of these titles at a user group meeting, and return it by the next meeting.

Currently available:

Paperless: Real-World Solutions with Adobe Technology (J.P. Terry)

Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work (Hoekman & Spool)

The permalink to the Lending Library is here:

http://www.phillyfilemaker.org/index.php/members/lending-library/

And a link can always be found in the right sidebar of this blog; look for the yellow Peachpit logo.

Apple User Group Affiliation

The Apple User Group program offers us a number of benefits, but the most immediately germane is the discount program.  Discount offers on many products are available here:

http://appleusergroupresources.com/?cat=12

Note that you’ll need to contact me directly to get the discount code for a particular item.

Colin

colin.keefe@itsolutions-inc.com

 

http://12days.fmpug.com/

http://www.fmpug.com/

Now’s a pretty good time to support what FMPug does for the developer/user group community at large and for our own local group.

For the Philly FileMaker group, FMPug provides:

• Meeting Announcement Listings and management
• Meeting RSVP services
• Mailing List Management
• Product discounts for FMPug members
• Pawfolio pages with work samples for FMPug members
• and a percentage of every FMPug member’s annual fee goes directly to support PhillyFileMaker.

In a more general sense, FMPug provides a sense of community and cohesion to the dozens of user groups scattered around the world.  It provides us opportunities to share with each other and learn from each other outside of conventions and conferences.  I know I’ve cribbed many ideas for user group sessions from looking into the Schedule to see what other people are up to, and have often learned about new techniques in the pipeline before they make it into a DevCon presentation just by poking around the FMPug site.  It’s also an excellent way to get your feet wet before jumping into your first FileMaker DevCon.  Andy Gaunt is a great resource and asset to the community.

Why join now?  Well, the “12 Days of Giveaways” event is a big one – tons of free products from your favorite FM vendors means you stand a very very good chance of winning something – which would more than cover the cost of an annual FMPug membership (if the discounts weren’t already enough).

So head on over to FMPug and join or renew today!

- Colin

 

http://www.ppug.net/

I mention it because this is fresh off Macworld, and they may discuss things of interest to FileMaker folks – you may even get some first hand reflections from visiting the FMI booth.

I’m going to drop by, and hope you will too.

Colin