Yesterday, I hosted a successful Friday board game night at City-State Public House in DC and realized I need to change the way I advertise events.

The event was advertised on Meetup and City-State’s website. I was concerned about attendance at the event because there were no RSVPs on Meetup besides mine. After arriving at City State, I sat down with my games, and thought I would go home after a while if nobody else showed up. At the time, I thought one other person showing up would be a success.

To my pleasant surprise, 10 other people showed up. One person said they found out about the event through City State’s website. Two of their friends also came, which suggested word of mouth helped advertise the event. Other people either saw the event on Meetup and didn’t RSVP or heard about the event somewhere else.

I also spoke with 2 people who were part of the Meetup group I hosted the event through, and they were not aware of the game night I was hosting.

Despite the success of the event, attendance did not reflect the level of interest people had in playing board games. A group that used to host Friday game nights at City-State had more than 20 people show up. I also used to host Friday game nights at another location for around 50 people.

Attendance and people’s awareness of the event showed me evidence of the following patterns.

• People often find out about events through word of mouth
• Meetup has become far less useful for promoting events compared to 4 years ago.

Here are lessons I learned about promoting events I host in the future.

• There is a lot of information on the Internet, which makes information about an event hard to notice. If an event is noticeable, that also means it is more likely to attract unwanted bot traffic
• It is useful to advertise events on a website for a specific location, because there is less extraneous information. Also, some people want to go to an event because of the location due to some combination of convenience, the overall vibe, and the possibility of seeing people they know.
• Although advertising events online is useful , offline advertising is better. Online event advertising can come across as impersonal, assuming there are no distractions from other information. Focusing on impersonal promotion goes against the way I want my events to be run. For example, if I hosted a board game night for 60 people where everyone played games in silence and said absolutely nothing during the event, I would see that event as unsuccessful. While board games are the main focus of my events, I don’t want people seeing my events purely as board game optimization opportunities. I want people to make casual conversation.