Hi Brian,
Thank you for taking the time to chat with our team today, it was so nice to meet you. Welcome to your official position as a volunteer leader of the Seattle VMUG Community and to the VMUG Leader Community at large – we are excited you are on board and look forward to working with you!
That email actually came in back in October of 2018 and man, what a ride it’s been since! The on-boarding process will differ between communities but leaning on previous leaders is vital. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in person and webex with the former leaders and current steering committee. Here’s what it looked like for me to get spun up into the community and moving on events.
First month tasks:
- What can I do?
- What tools do I have?
- What does the community want?
- Who do I know? (this is probably the most important thing you can ask yourself)
- How do I begin?
For the first bullet, I have no idea what I can do! Let’s skip it.
2. Next up was to figure out what resources are available. OK, let’s get a hold of the social media accounts, i.e. Twitter, VMUG community, vBeers, Seattle@VMUG.com emails etc. Luckily for me, there was a Slack channel that the previous leaders and current steering committee members lurk in. A few password resets to old accounts and off we go! Time to make noise on the internet. Social media is vital for career growth and expanding your peer group. Get on it if you’re not!
3. What does the community want from VMUG Seattle? Can’t really answer that yet either, but I know people like beer. Let’s get them beer!
4. Who do I know? As a VAR, I’m well positioned already with a subset of vendors and contacts. I’m working on expanding that list all the time, so if you are or know a rep and are interested in sponsoring a VMUG event, hit me or the @SeattleVMUG twitter account up. As a VMUG leader, I’m completely agnostic to technology or labels.
5. We’ve already established beer is a great start, so I planned 2 vBeers events. The Seattle metro is stretched cluster with 3 solid communities. Seattle, Bellevue and Tacoma/Olympia are all decent user bases and since I live in the South Sound area I wanted to have multiple events for the seperate communities. I picked out a couple locations based on feedback from previous leaders and called to reserve a space at each location. @Cohesity came through with the sponsorship and we had a really good turn out at both events.
Where do we go from here? Well, the sky is the limit honestly. I got very lucky to have someone approach me at the first Seattle event who was interested in being a leader so at the beginning of the month we welcomed a new leader who’s on the Eastside. We could still use some help in the Seattle downtown metro if anyone is interested! We’re deep into planning our UserCon on February 19th, and I hope to have more information on that to publish in the future.
Thanks, and see you out there.