4 YOUR SECOND MEETING AND MOVING THINGS FORWARD
PLANNING EVENTS AND MEETINGS
At your second meeting you should discuss more seriously what you want the society to do over the coming months. For example, how many meetings should involve guest speakers and what subjects would you like them to talk about? Would members like to go on any trips to local observatories or museums – and, if so, who will organise the date and the transport? How often do your members want meetings to involve actual observing?
FINDING & HOSTING GUEST SPEAKERS
One thing is certain – you will need to book some guest speakers for your society meetings. You can’t do everything on your own, and members will expect to hear some interesting lectures and presentations for their membership fees. But how do you find them? If your local university has an astronomy department they might be able to provide a speaker or two. Look at the websites of other astronomy groups in your surrounding area and see who has spoken at their meetings, then email them inviting them to come and speak at yours – but be aware that many speakers will need travel expenses and/or a fee, which you will need to fund through your membership fees or through additional payments.
KNOW YOUR EQUIPMENT
It is very important that you have access to all the equipment needed for your meetings, such as a laptop, projector and screen, but it is just as important that there will always be someone at your meetings who knows how to use them. Also, when arranging visits by guest speakers check if they will want to use their own laptop with your projector or will just bring their talk on a USB stick to use with yours. Check in advance with your speaker that you have the right cables to connect their laptop to your projector – VGA or HDMI? It could be useful to have a VGA-HDMI adaptor to hand.
DON’T LEAVE BEGINNERS BEHIND
As your new society grows it will be easy to get carried away and forget why you started it – and why you got into astronomy – in the first place: your love of the night sky. It’s fine to focus some meetings on high-tech equipment, photographic processes and the latest discoveries in astrophysics, and your more advanced members will expect that, but many of your members will just want to know about amazing and beautiful things happening in the sky.
Don’t leave them behind. Make sure some meetings are targeted at your absolute beginners so they don’t feel undervalued.
KEEP YOUR PRESS CONTACTS UPDATED
As your society gets into its stride make sure you keep in touch with any contacts you made on the local newspapers and radio stations who helped you promote your new society back at the start; they’ll not only be interested to hear how things are going but will be glad to hear that they played some part in your new society’s successful launch. They might even be interested in doing a follow-up piece on your group. Don’t just send them details of events and activities your society organises; invite them to them. They might come and report on what happened – publicity you can’t buy!