Hi all,

I've been trying to figure out how to get a London, UK user group going, but Avid UK doesn't have any money to support one.

For those of you who are running user groups regularly, how are you paying for facilities, support, etc.?  Are different Avid regions supporting user groups based on their individual budget & desire to help, or are you finding sponsorship, or are members donating, or what?

Thanks for any ideas/suggestions.

Carl

We try to get the visiting vendors to pay for the food. When the event isn't sponsored by a vendor, we cover the cost. I know some other groups out here charge $5.00 a head to cover their costs.

We ask attendees to bring their own drink of choice.

And we use our own facility for the meeting place so there is no cost there other than cleanup..

Thanks Terry,

The main stumbling block at the moment is a venue.  I'm sure there's a suitable free facility someplace in London, but I haven't run across it yet, and it's a big city (haha).  If we could get a location, I think the rest would fall into place.

Carl

We looked for places at one point for larger gatherings. The local parks department had some community centers available, but no alcohol was allowed. (A stumbling block for an editors' lounge...)

You might try some local businesses that have larger rooms and would potentially benefit from the traffic. One group out here meets at the local (Avid & FCP) training institute. I've been tempted to use a local vendor a few times, but I don't want the sales approach to influence what Editors' Lounge is.

Just a couple ideas to try out...

We usually have annual sponsorship from local businesses (ie, RULE Inc just joined us as a new sponsor) At one time Avid and GenArts were sponsors of ours, but due to the economic climate we have been struggling to find new sponsors.

Our meetings are free to attend, but we do a raffle with items donated by our sponsors, that usually covers our food costs.  Sometimes the host will cover the food costs, which is nice.  

For venue, we float around to various places - usually a post-house or television station etc.  

www.bavug.org

I started a CorelDRAW! user's group in the early 90's. It became a very large group pretty quickly...(we eventually had hundreds of members and attendance at one event was around 300) -- it had the support of Corel Corp., who would send us stuff to giveaway as well as regular visits from their personnel for presentations. We sometimes had several "big wigs" from Ontario, their headquarters. And some of the leaders visited Corel headquarters and were given tours, etc., during their annual awards ceremony for the art contest, etc.

Initially, I had a local computer store manager whom I knew who allowed us use of their training facility. We also had meetings at a local business school that had classes on CorelDRAW!, which I later was asked to teach. We had meetings at other facilities around Atlanta as well...and if we couldn't find a place, we always could use the local library which provides very nice facilities for such purposes for free...but I had to bring our own laptop, projector and screen, etc.

We had annual dues for members...and the mailing list was provided by Corel Corp. They also provided direct mail postcards and graphics which I re-purposed for posters and presentation materials.

I found it relatively easy to find sponsors who would purchase ads in the newsletter that I designed and produced. Typical advertisers were "service bureaus" and printers who accepted CorelDRAW! files. Members were encouraged to submit articles, subject to approval. It was "relatively" easy to get vendors to provide stuff for demonstration at our meetings. For example, Wacom donated graphics tablets for demonstration and for raffle giveaways.

It was a lot of work though... whew.