Poll: LUG Survey
Thank you to everyone who took part in the recent survey on Local User Groups. Of those who replied, 69% were not currently members of a LUG.
Of those, 37% said they would be, if there was one near them, a further 17% said that the LUG near them is not applicable to their industry/discipline.
Meetings
Nearly half of all LUGs meet monthly, and approximately 1/3 meet quarterly.
Topics cover software tips and tricks, new features demonstrations and CAD/BIM Management issues and more!
Resellers are the most frequent financial sponsors for Local User Groups, thank you for supporting your design community! Sometimes design companies are also sponsoring events, and it’s great that they can focus on the education and networking of resources needed to keep information flowing in our industry.
Group Resources
In most cases, a Board or Steering Committee is volunteering their time to organize the Local Users Group.
Architecture is a common industry focus for LUGs, with Civil/Surveying/GIS being the second most popular. It appears that groups mingle a couple disciplines together, at least.
When it comes to getting the word out, and having a virtual presence, websites and social media groups are seeing equal use. Not too many are using twitter or other individual social accounts to speak for their group. And an even smaller number are streaming their meetings, using UStream, Google Hangouts or similar.
Social media groups can provide a good forum for online discussion between meetings; whether hosted in the AUGI forums, Google+, Yahoo Groups, LinkedIn Groups or Facebook pages.
I was pretty excited, back when I worked with the Gateway Autodesk Users Group, when we streamed a meeting live and had attendees from three different states tuning in. The new St. Louis Revit Users Group has a youtube channel, where the presentations from our first meeting were prerecorded by a variety of presenters. What media could you try, to expand your reach? Have you had a remote speaker address your group to save on travel costs or sync schedules?
Suggestions
Shaun Bryant, currently the Director on the Board who is overseeing Local User Groups, helped me to formulate this survey, and has been given the list of comments provided by those who responded to the survey.
Many folks expressed the desire to have more people in your LUG get involved, and, I would suggest that you head to the LUG forum on AUGI to read advice from other LUG leaders or to ask for suggestions specific to your situation. Still others wished that the groups near them talked about their industry (sorry, some folks are tired of hearing about Architecture and Revit), this will be up to leaders on an individual level to maybe dedicate a meeting to other trades and other software, in order to keep people from different companies engaged and talking?
I know there is still continued desire for the previously provided NFR (not for resale) software that used to be given to Local User Groups for giveaways, but, unfortunately, that has not been something we have the power to bring back.
Please, check out the recently revamped User Group channel on AUGI. If your group is listed, or you know a group on the list is now defunct, please contact Shaun.Bryant@augi.com to help get that list sorted. Also, as a part of that development effort, members can update their AUGI profile to indicate membership in a specific group. Please update your profile, there could be additional development in this area for website features offered to User Groups. We’ll post more about this in the future.
Melanie Stone is a CAFM/ IWMS Specialist & System Administrator supporting and writing about ARCHIBUS, FMInteract, Tririga, Revit, AutoCAD, BricsCAD or similar. She served as an AUGI Director/Officer for over 6 years and is currently involved with the STLRUG. Melanie can be reached at mistressofthedorkness@gmail.com or found on Twitter as @MistresDorkness on YouTube or on her Mistress Of the Dorkness blog.
