Take Your Group to 2.0: Make It Personal
One of the best things about being part of a Mac User Group is the sense of fellowship and camaraderie that comes with getting together with people of similar interest and enthusiasm. However, most groups get together only once a month for a few hours, new members join and group membership waxes and wanes. [...]
Take Your Group to 2.0: Stop Killing Trees
One of the most venerable traditions in the Mac User Group community is the production of a monthly newsletter. They range from a simple couple pages to magazine-style offerings that might rival many of the commercial entries in quality and content. And the time has come for the to evolve: If you’re still delivering [...]
Take Your Group to 2.0: Funding Your Group with Membership Dues
The most common way that Mac User Groups fund their existence is by charging dues. What is surprising is that so few MUG leaders have really thought about what they charge for a membership and why. A 2.0 User Group will not only have completed that analysis but will also regularly monitor the [...]
Take Your Group to 2.0: Recognize the Need to Fund Your Group
Every so often an age-old debate starts up on the Apple User Group Discussion List (AUGD) or whenever Mac User Group leaders get together: should Mac User Groups be free? At one time the idea of having a group that just got together and there was no need for funding was both appealing and [...]
Take Your Group to 2.0: Spring-Cleaning Your Web Site
Yesterday we told you about this year’s annual spring-cleaning of The MUG Center’s Surfboard, our analog list of Mac User Groups around the world, and how we learned a few things from visiting several hundred MUG sites in the span of just a few days. We want to share some of those with you, [...]
Take Your Group to 2.0: Evaluating Your Group’s Affiliations
Each year The MUG Center receives at least a couple dozen emails asking about signing up with the various Vendor Programs available to Mac User Groups, affiliations with some of the purported user group organizations out there and the many other offers that come to user group leaders. The questions are always the same: [...]
Take Your Group to 2.0: Easily Survey Your Group
A common challenge for any user group is delivering on the wants and needs of the membership. Sure, a group’s tone is often set by the leader(s). That can be a very good thing of the leader’s orientation is similar to that of the group members, but can limit or even damage the group [...]
Take Your Group to 2.0: The Do’s and Don’ts of iCal
Virtually every user group needs to communicate a common class of information to their members and to the world: their meeting and/or event schedule. For Mac User Groups, Apple’s iCal is the obvious choice to accomplish this goal, but it must be used with care or it can actually become an obstacle to getting [...]
Take Your Group to 2.0: Take Advantage of Apple Sales Web
Mac User Group leaders have many resources they can take advantage of to inform their members about the latest happenings in the Apple world, and several of them are provided by Apple itself. Among them is access to Apple Sales Web.
Apple gives the ambassadors of recognized Mac User Groups access to the secure part [...]
Take Your Group to 2.0: Look Beyond The Mac
Every Mac User Group (or at least the physical MUGs as opposed to the virtual groups) has the challenge of developing a meeting topic each month. They have to have a speaker to present it and do their best to be sure that it is relevant to a significant portion of their membership. With [...]
