Articulate User Groups: Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices.

Hi Nicole,
Thanks for the shout out in the previous thread. Natalia Mueller and I have been leading a Storyline special interest group in St. Louis MO/IL bi-state area for most of 2014 and have had great results. The group is organized through the ATD St. Louis Chapter - after some awesome workshop events from Tom, Nicole, and team.

We had been looking to build a local Storyline support group for our Chapter members for some time. Everything came together and call it the ‘perfect storm’ if you will – we PR’d, and polled people for a few months to find the best times, days, and locations people thought they could attend. We held our first meeting on March 12, 2014 with amazing 40+ Storyline users attending and even a few more registering, but not able to make it.

The good news here for those of you who have said you would like to have a local group in your area is that you won’t necessarily need a perfect storm to get one started. I’m the Chapter President for the St. Louis ATD Chapter as well as an E-Learning Heroes Community Member. When attending the ATD Chapter leadership conference just two months ago, there were already several chapters in addition to St. Louis Chapter who had formed e-learning support groups and many others talking of starting them as they returned from the conference. There is a very good chance if you are near a city with an ATD Chapter, they may already have something in the works as a few of you have shared in the post prior to this one.

Speaking for my own chapter, it made great sense to build the special interest group. It fulfills our mission of serving our members, and helps in building our local e-learning community. The chapter systems and resources meant we didn’t need to start from scratch, and instead could just focus on having quality group meetings. Our meetings are free and open to any chapter member or guest who would like to attend. We’ve had several new members join the chapter as a result of our group, finding that in addition to providing for their special interest in Storyline, other chapter learning events also provided for their wider interests. On the Storyline side, the in person interactions at the local meetings complement the online support we’ve all grown to love through our E-Learning Heroes Community very nicely.

During our first meeting, we discussed how frequently to set the meetings and after some discussion, settled on bi-monthly (every two months). The rationale behind this was that many felt that monthly would be too frequent to routinely fit in their calendar, and quarterly meant that if they did miss a meeting it would be 6 months before they could get to another one. We’ve met bi-monthly ever since with our last meeting just a few weeks ago in November. The meetings are usually held on Weds or Thurs afternoon from 1p-4p.

Natalia, her company (RGA Reinsurance), and others from the RGA team have done an excellent job of hosting us throughout the year. Many many thanks go out to Natalia and the RGA team, ...although there was one exception when they weren't able to host. We needed to meet at another location in November - while they were moving to a new building. Many thanks to World Wide Technologies for volunteering to host our meeting that month.

Our typical meeting structure is made up of the segments listed below and we heavily encourage involvement from the group (usually an assortment, but not all on the list at each meeting):
- Meeting opening and new member introductions
- Program topics (one or multiple presenters, target 10-20 min each)
- Member Showcase, one or more members "showcasing" a project they may be particularly proud of
- Group eLearning Challenge project (often from the community), then share different approaches and solutions to the challenge
- Works in Progress, an open forum to ask advice or brainstorm with other members on current projects. It may be with a .story file open, or a discussion within the group where someone describes a problem they are trying to solve.
- Time for general tip sharing and Networking
- Other ideas as surfaced from the group

It’s a three hour meeting and it feels like it goes by pretty quickly. At the end of each meeting we distribute a two question survey for immediate feedback:
1) How would you rate and what comments do you have from today’s meeting? (time well spent, met your needs, topics were of interest)
2A) What topics are you interested in knowing more about at future meetings?
2B) What topics/projects would you be interested in presenting at future meetings?

So far we’ve gotten an overwhelming response in the feedback that it is has been time well spent, and we've also received many ideas for our future meetings.

It seems this has turned into a lengthy post. I would be happy to help with questions you may have, as I'm sure would Natalia.

If you are thinking about starting a group, I would strongly encourage you. It is a lot of work as David has said, but well worth the effort you'll put in. If you are near an ATD Chapter, and don't yet have a connection there, I would be happy to assist with an introduction. If you are not sure if you have one nearby, you can search chapter locations here: https://www.td.org/Members/Chapters/Chapter-Locator

Please feel free to reach out if you are wanting to start or in the process of starting a group and feel I can be of help.