Are you running a meetup or a workshop?

A few weeks ago I ran a pilot of a new event.

This event came about because of a blog post. I’m not sure how often blog posts are the catalysts for events, but that’s what happened here.

I knew I wanted this particular event to be fairly unstructured; more akin to a get-together or a salon as much as it was a workshop (I really like workshops, but I also really like salon-style events)

With this event, I had put some learning objectives in place, but it didn’t have a hard skills approach as most educational workshops do.

As I prepared to launch it into the wild, the event hosts tweaked the copy I’d put on my brief one-page website, and I didn’t really pay any mind to the headline including the word ‘workshop’. The copy looked good and definitely improved on my previous version. Page approved, let’s go and get some signups.

Fast forward to the start of the event, and I asked everyone what had compelled them to sign up.

Almost half said something about the event title. Which included the word ‘workshop’.

At the end of the two hour session I’d learned a lot; one of biggest learnings being that what I’d run was something pretty different to what I thought.