The GreenMellen team started hosting free monthly meetups back in 2012. These meetups met in person in various places around our hometown of Marietta, Ga. The topics ranged from WordPress, technology, digital marketing, and anything in between.
We celebrated 10 years of hosting these meetups in 2022. In that time, we’d held more than 160 different gatherings, which were attended by over 5,500 different people. These attendees are marketers, freelancers, other agencies, nonprofit leaders, and small business owners.
However, something changed about our format along the way. In 2020, we shifted these meetups to virtual—we’ll let you guess why. The positive impact of this change was being able to open the gathering up to people outside of Atlanta and cut down on the logistics of planning.
As we enter 2023, we’re changing things up again with our meetups. No matter if you’ve never been to one before or have attended several, here’s what you can expect from our new-look marketing meetups moving forward.
What’s Changing
Quarterly
We’ve held 12 monthly meetups each year since they started in 2012. For the first time, we’ve decided to shift these to quarterly meetings. That allows us more time to plan, produce, and promote a next-level event experience.
There will be fewer meetups, but it’s our commitment to make each one of them even better.
In-Person
We’re returning to in-person gatherings for the meetups again starting in 2023! We want to keep everyone safe and healthy, but we believe that can still happen. Our virtual events were excellent, but it’s hard to recreate the same environment as IRL.
If you’re in the Atlanta area, we hope that you’ll consider checking out one of the events.
Limited Attendance
One of the downsides to an in-person event is the physical limitations of our space. However, we sincerely believe it’s worth the tradeoff. For the foreseeable future, we’ll be hosting the marketing meetups at our new office space at Fireworks Coworking in Marietta
Paid
Our marketing meetups have normally been free to attendees. We’ve occasionally taken on event sponsors in the past to help offset some of the costs for venue and food. But we made the decision to charge a nominal fee in the future for a few reasons:
- It helps ensure that people show up. When you pay money to attend something, you’re more invested and often get more value out of the event.
- Because of the limited space, we want to ensure that only the people who are serious about coming claim a spot.
- We’re going to provide lunch and beverages, which costs money. We’re also thinking about other ways to provide added value and justify this (small) expense.
What’s Not Changing
Who It’s For
As before, our marketing meetups are for some specific types of people:
- Professional marketers
- Freelancers
- Agency folks
- Nonprofit leaders
- Small business owners
These are the people who we started these meetups for and that’s who we’ll continue to serve with the events in the future. We know what it’s like to be in these roles and (hopefully) understand what they need.
Now, you don’t necessarily need to fit into one (or all) of these categories to attend. There’s certainly something to learn for anyone. However, these are the people who will get the most value out of the meetups. Because that’s who it’s designed for.
Quality
We pride ourselves on the level of quality at each of our meetups—and that’s not going to change. If anything, the quality can only get better with these changes. We carefully pick the topics, ideas, and speakers for our previous meetups. With fewer topics to choose from, we’ll only focus on the best ones that we think deliver the most value.
To help maintain our quality, we always welcome feedback from attendees and the rest of our community. Feel free to reach out if you have any thoughts or suggestions on how we can improve.
Our Commitment to Education
Education is at the heart of GreenMellen’s core values. We always want to improve internally and we strive to share what we learn with others. This pushes us to stay educated and pass this knowledge along to those around us. That’s an integral part of our brand and culture.
This is also the essence of why we do these meetups in the first place. Even if we shift up the format, it doesn’t change the purpose of why we do it. At GreenMellen, our mission is to “build a brighter web” and that involves helping other businesses to have a better online presence.
Preview of 2023 Meetups
While we’re still planning out the details for our events, here are a few of the dates and topics to keep in mind. We can’t wait to see you at a marketing meetup soon!
- March 2023: Building Your Online Presence
- May 2023: Social Media for Small Businesses
- August 2023: Storytelling Workshop
- November 2023: Navigating Online Reputation Management
