How to Start Your Own Community Group

Why would you want to start your own community group?

As a business owner, it’s a great idea to start a community group for several reasons: networking, leadership, continued education, and community involvement.

For this post, let’s pretend you own a landscaping business. 🙂 Here’s how you might go about starting your own community group:

1. What is your mission (and name)?

   Write your groups mission statement. Traditionally, a mission statement is supposed to include what your doing and for who. For example, “Our mission is to become ambassadors of vegetable gardening for our community .” The Determine your group name.

2. What are your objectives?

   Determine what you want to achieve from this group. For example, “Our objective is to help people in our community start their own vegetable gardens.”

3. How you will achieve your objectives?

   What will you be doing in your meeting? For example: “We will achieve our objectives by learning about all the different types of vegetable gardening (containers, hanging, low-space, low-light, square-foot, etc.) and by hosting free community vegetable gardening workshops.” This means you may be watching videos, referencing books, and going to other workshops together to enhance you own skills. You may also be using you meetings to plan the regular workshops.

4. Where will you meet?

   You could meet in your local library’s conference room (call them to reserve it first!); at a local coffee shop; your house or someone’s from the group.

5. When will you meet?

   Regular, pre-determined meetings are always better than planning one meeting at a time. Something like “The third Thursday of every month at 6pm” works well.

6. Plan your first meeting.

   You need to have an agenda for your first meeting. Start with introductions – an ice breaker would be fun! Get to know each others strengths, experience and the reason they decided to come check out the group. Discuss other ways to achieve your objective. Make a list of your top three priorities to achieve in the next year. Then plan your next meeting.

7. Market your first meeting.

   If it’s mostly people know and you want to keep it smaller, just make sure your friends know when to be there. If you want your friends to spread the word, an email is a good way to go. You can also let the faculty at your local college (in the appropriate department) know about the group and ask if they would distribute fliers to their students (or just pass along the info in another way). Of course, ask the faculty to join as well. Another good source is on your local community online calendar. Finally, your local newspaper (in the appropriate section) is another great place to advertise. You can also consider using an online service such as http://www.meetup.com/ to market (and manage)  your group.

8. Follow-up from your meetings.

   Pass around a sign-in sheet for each meeting. If they are new members, make sure they include their email address. Send a “thank you” email after the first meeting, remind them of the next meeting (topic and time), and any tasks that were assigned at the first meeting (like, “I’ll bring snacks, you bring drinks, and you bring your lap top!”). Ask them to forward on the email to anyone else that they think would be interested. Two days before the next meeting, send another reminder email.
   You can probably see how networking, leadership, continued education, and community involvement can all be achieved for your professional development. If you’re not sure whether or not you want to do this, start with the first three steps. If you get excited… go for it!