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Comment by Mountain_Skies | Hacker News Reader

Not a question but a suggestion: create tools that help organizers deal with no shows, especially chronic no shows. One of the meetups I used to attend planned for a 50% no show rate. Other organizers have stated they have similar no show rates.

I myself ended a meetup I had maintained for half a decade after one particular incident where an event was full two months in advance but then had a 90% no-show/last minute cancellation rate. This creates all kinds of problems for organizers and can impact the enjoyability of events for the attendees. Meetup offers little in the way of tools for tracking and dealing with this problem so you've got a chance to differentiate your service from them.

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Yeah, that's high on my list after talking with other organizers like yourself.

Currently I have plans to give organizers tools to track no-shows, as well as the ability to "check in" people.

Do you have specific ideas about what would have been most helpful to you as an organizer?

I largely solved this problem by charging $5 per RSVP on Meetup. I had to rent my venue, so nobody thought I was profiteering.

That said, a deposit would probably work even better. E.g. you put up something like a $10 deposit to RSVP, and are charged the full amount if you no-show, but only a nominal fee if you show up.

I'd think carefully about what that incentivises. Do you really want a bunch of people who don't really wanna be there turning up to get their $10 back?

The type of person who would do that would never put down the deposit in the first place unless they were interested in going and 100% certain of their availability.[1]

1. Source: I'm that type of person :-P

Depending on what kind of meet-up it is I would also be concerned about the "inverse" problem: People who would have turned up before due to guilt / moral issues / bad karma might now not show up because they believe the $10 is their "donation" for not showing up.

Similar to late pickup fees at daycares that sometimes increasing the amount of late pickups, as rich(er) parents view that monetary penalty as a price worth paying to avoid moral blame.

I think a community-wide karma/reputation system would be more powerful as suggested by someone in the comments here.

I ran a pretty advanced-level soccer meetup, so if people showed up to play and I didn't care what their motivation was. But anytime RSVPs didn't show up we had mismatched teams and incessant whining.

A scoring model would be nice. Each time an attendee shows up, they get points. The earlier they RSVP, the more points they get. If they cancel, the closer to the event, the more points they lose. If they're a no show, they lose lots of points. If you have attendees who have been good about showing up but something happens and they miss an event they RSVP'd for, their accumulated past points keep them from looking bad. For events that are scheduled far in advance, people with more points can RSVP before those with less points if the organizer desires. The organizer should be able to manually override points given or taken away to deal with exceptional circumstances.

You don't need to make the points visible to the attendees, just to the organizer or maybe make that an option. Since this involves people actually showing up, it's less likely anyone will try to game the points system like on Reddit. You might want to do meta points too so a user who is a chronic problem in various groups is shown as unreliable to organizers in new groups they join. That also goes the other way, making users who are good attendees in their groups look good starting off in any new groups they join. You'll need to experiment with the points for a while to get it right but I think this type of feedback is essential for both the organizers and attendees to weed out undesirable behaviors.

It's worth putting a fine point on what you want to happen. If you have 50% "no shows", there are two main options:

1. More accurate RSVP lists, but fewer total attendees. Putting up barriers to RSVP (ticket prices, deposits, shaming/consequences for no show). People will think more before clicking the button. And while your list will be more accurate, you will scare off people who otherwise might have come.

2. More total people, but inaccurate RSVP lists. By keeping the bar to RSVP low, you'll get people RSVPing that are on the fence. And some fraction of those people will show up. Your total numbers will be higher than the other option, but you'll have a ton of no-shows.

But there's no version where you get 100% of those RSVPers due to a change in app functionality.

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