Hey gang! I recently brought up the topic of local user groups here in the community (Are You Interested in Local Articulate User Groups?) and the response was pretty loud and clear: You like the idea! A few community members suggested starting a separate forum thread just for people who are participating in these user groups, and since we aim to please, here it is! If you're part of a Storyline user group (or interested in starting your own), this is your place to exchange ideas, experiences, tips, and best practices on what has worked, and hasn't worked, for your user group. Have at it! =)

Thanks for creating this! I would love to start a Chicago user group. Let me know if anyone has interest. I have started a couple of user groups before. A few things I realized from my previous experiences: Enjoy yourself. It can be a lot of work but enjoy yourself. It is a lot of work! But it is constant learning and you meet a lot more of the community. There are lots of places that are happy to provide free space for user groups to meet. Call around. Depending on how often you want a user group to meet, plan a number of meetings out before having your first meeting. This includes having networking, presentations, food, challenges, discussions, panels, whatever it might be, ready to go. Don't do it alone. The point of a group is to be a group and if there are people you can find that want to help, then by all means! Often you meet more people who want to play apart in the first number of meetings. Come up with ways to involve people. User groups sometimes get caught in hour long presentations. Mix it up with these, networking, local talent showcases, challenges like the ELH Challenge (https://community.articulate.com/hubs/e-learning-challenges). Freebies (yeah... they can bring people in and they are fun). I am not sure if Articulate has a program for this, sometimes they do. Does anyone know? If not, sometimes you can find other local companies dealing with eLearning who can invest some money for food, give-aways, etc. Have a website. A clear place for your group to look up info, see notes and wrap-ups, etc. Does Articulate have community sites for user groups? Enjoy yourself. I am probably missing a bunch but that was off the top of my head.

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.

The North Texas Articulate User Group (or NTAUG, based in Dallas) held its first meeting October 22 with approx 20 people in attendance. We pretty much did a get to know each other, discuss the direction of the group and layout a game plan kind of meeting. Our Dallas ATD chapter's Technology SIG group held a meeting on using Storyline, so I attended and announced the new group starting up to gather contact information for those interested in joining. I then sent out an informational survey to figure out the time that future members prefer to meet, find out where they are located in the DFW metroplex, and topics they'd like to see presented. Coincidentally, Tom and David were in town in early October for one of their 2-day workshops and I also made an announcement there. Natalia and Victoria (in Austin leading CTAUG) provided me with excellent advice for getting started! We opted for meeting quarterly with meetings scheduled for February 4, May 6, August 5, November 4 from 5:00-7:00pm. One of the members volunteered to cover Templates/Custom Color Scheme for the February meeting and we'll do a Challenge Showcase (to start us off, I picked 5 of David's earlier challenges) and General Q&A. We have a list of topics from the survey and the group elected to choose the next meeting topic at each meeting so that our topics are relevant to the group needs. Our biggest challenge at the moment is the area in which we live. It is tough to choose a meeting location that is convenient for everyone since the Metroplex is so large. For now, we're going to contain ourselves to the North Dallas/Addison/Plano area. There has also been talk of hosting a virtual meeting. I'd be happy to discuss the NTAUG futher, feel free to shoot me an email at ntexaug at gmail.

Hi everyone, Apologies for the late post but we had our AUG in Sydney a few weeks ago and we were very happy with the way it went. We had just over 30 people come along and myself and my colleagues Ruth and Ben talked about master slides, colour & font themes, button sets, true/false variables, motion paths and sliders. We even had David Anderson Skype in which was really cool. We were hoping that we might have had a few volunteers offer to present but in reality people seem to prefer to come along and watch at first. We've had three expressions of interest from people for the next one. We also filmed the presentations and put some highlights together. We also learned a few lessons about film making for the next one. Here's a link to the highlights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z84ET_-QRHQ&feature=youtu.be The entire clip is about 32 minutes long so to make it easier to jump to different sections, here’s when each starts: Matt: 0.39, Ruth: 6.59, David: 19.24, Ben: 20.09 I'd just like to thank Nicole for sending me her user group checklist and to those who've contributed to this thread, your advice was most helpful! We've got more meetups planned - in Newcastle of May 28 and Melbourne on July 29. Will let you know how it goes :-) Cheers, Matt

Greg - Thank you, thank you, thank you!! For taking the time to write this very helpful and detailed post about your experience with the ST-Louis User Group. You've shared a lot of very valuable tips and information, and it's so kind of you to offer yourself up to answering questions or helping out others who might be interested in starting their own groups. Thanks again.

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

LeAnnDrake
Community Member
8 years ago
Anyone know if any of these groups are still active? I'd love to attend one in North or Central Texas.
- KimberlyVallier
  Community Member
  8 years ago
  North Texas has one (Dallas)! We actually just had our meeting last night in Irving. Email me at ntexaug at gmail and I'll add you to the list!
MaryLorenz1
Community Member
8 years ago
The Central Texas CTAUG is not active anymore but we do have a google group where we post helpful resources for the group.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/ctaug-articulate
- OwenHolt
  Super Hero
  8 years ago
  Mary, I've never been able to post in that group. :-(
ChrisWilliams-f
Community Member
8 years ago
I'm interested in starting a group in South Florida (Ft. Lauderdale area). If anyone is interested, please let me know. I'm hopeful to have our first meeting this August (2017).

https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/looking-for-articulate-users-in-south-florida

You can also email me at: cwilliams@goldcoastschools.com
JayYearley
Community Member
8 years ago
For the Chicagoans, I wanted to pass along the link to the Articulate User Group Meetup, which was formed recently (though no events scheduled quite yet).

https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/Articulate-User-Meetup-Chicago
RachelPastrich-
Community Member
8 years ago
Is there an Articulate User Group in New York City or Jersey City?
KatieDelgado-72
Community Member
8 years ago
I have created the "eLearning Developers of Olympia" group. We have 43 members and meet once a month in Olympia, Washington. We are all Articulate users. Here's a link to our LinkedIn group page... https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13503628

Can our group get added to your list of groups? Thanks!
DianaMyers
Community Member
8 years ago
Just a reminder, the St. Louis, MO Storyline groupis still going strong. We meet every other month and our next meeting is Sept 7. If you're interested, please register at http://atdstl.org/event-2454552. Contact me if you have any questions!
JadraHymer
Community Member
8 years ago
Is there a group in the greater Salt Lake City, UT area
JamesHogg-339c2
Community Member
3 years ago
Hi, I have colleagues in India and Poland. If anyone knows of user groups in those locations I would appreciate hearing about them.