[SkateDC] Washington Area Roadskaters on meetup.com

[George Marinkovich]

We are now also available as a Meetup Group at:  http://www.meetup.com/Washington-Area-Roadskaters/

In addition to introducing the club to a vast new pool of potentially interested inline skaters, this site allows us to receive email reminders of scheduled skates, see who has said they are coming out to a particular skate, and a number of other interesting features.

Join the WAR Meetup Group.  It's free to join.

We have been discussing adding this marketing/publicity/communication tool to our club's arsenal for some time.  Rest assured none of the other avenues of communication are going away.  The www.skatedc.org website is still there and the calendar is as up-to-date as it's been in ages.  The skate email list will continue.  We haven't figured out all the ways Meetup.com can help spread the word about the club and its skates.  It's a work in progress.  But if you're interested, please check it out.

Thanks to Tina for setting up our site!

A little background on this effort.  For at least a couple years I have been sending emails to people who joined meetup.com and expressed an interest in inline skating.  It was sort of a cumbersome process and as I didn't monitor it regularly we probably missed some potential new skaters.  Plus there was always a little confusion/suspicion on their part on why they were being contacted through meetup.com, but WAR was not a Meetup Group.  I kept getting asked "but where are the meetups?"  Well, now there are meetups (basically our regularly scheduled weekly skates).  Now people who join meetup.com and indicate an interest in inline skating will automatically be made aware of our group.  Attracting new members to the skate club is something we are looking to do more of.  This is a relatively painless step in that direction.

Cheers,
George