Tuesday Tip: User Group Meeting Best Practices

The Dynamics 365 & Power Platform User Groups are where members can come together to share knowledge, experiences, and best practices. User group leaders facilitate user group meetings, which provide an opportunity for members to collaborate on projects, plan events, discuss topics, and build professional relationships. Here are some best practices for running successful user group meetings.
 

What is a User Group Meeting?

User Group Meetings are typically 60-90 minutes and feature 1-2 speakers along with any standard business you attend to during your meetings. Speakers tend to be Microsoft employees, community members, sponsors, customers or MVPs in your technology realm. Many User Groups will plan out their speakers a few months or a whole year in advance based on when known larger events will be in the calendar and holidays.
 

Running the Event

Good planning will make running your event much easier. This includes communicating effectively with your attendees, your speakers, and support team.
 

Send a “know before you go” (aka KBYG)

Create a personalized document of what the end-to end attendee experience will be. Think of it from the attendee perspective: what should I expect, where do I go for info, where do I ask questions, how do I get help, how to do I provide feedback, etc. It should also include any links and resources they need to participate. 
 

Designate and prep your moderator

A moderator is an extra set of eyes, ears, and hands managing the event logistics and audience, so your speakers can focus on content. This can be you, but if you’re also presenting content, it’s nice to have someone else take this role so you can focus on your presentation. Moderators can welcome attendees, introduce the speakers, handling recordings, and facilitate the Q&A.
 

Prepare for a Q&A

A good best practice pre-event and pre-sessions is to decide how you want to handle and Q&A for your event. 

• You’ll often have silence because it's uncomfortable to be the one to speak up and ask the first question, so be patient and encouraging.

• Writing up some questions to prompt when a speaker asks "are there any questions" to help seed the conversation when there is silence from the audience is also a best practice. 

• Make sure all questions are repeated verbally so no one misses those important answers.
   

Wrapping up your event

It’s tempting to take a break as soon as your event concludes, because you’ll be ready for some rest. However, you’re not done quite yet. Post-event activities include gaining feedback from your attendees, speakers, sponsors, and volunteers as well as sharing content, and learning and analyzing the data from your meetings.
 

Send Thank You Notes 

Send thank you cards or emails as soon as possible to your speakers, sponsors, and any support volunteers that participated. Include event photos, event promo copies, press clipping, and demographics of the event. 
 

Ideas for Attendee Thank Yous:

• Thank you for attending

• How to access recordings and slides

• Social media stats and pictures

• Pre-registration for next event

• Link to on-going community engagement 

Ideas for Speakers, Sponsors, Moderators, and Volunteers Thank Yous:

• Post-event report

• Thank you for attending

• How to access recordings and slides

• Social media stats and pictures

• Speaker evaluation scores

• Link to on-going community engagement

How to access community user groups

Select the User groups menu from the top of any Dynamics 365 or Power Platform community page:

Learn more

For more details about User Groups, refer to the User Group experience guide.

Have questions? Check out the User Group FAQ guide.

Interested in starting a User Group? Refer to the User Group leader getting started guide.