by Stephen Mayeux

Growth Hacking Your City’s Campsite

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More than 500 cities now have Free Code Camp Campsites. Most of these are new, and still relatively inactive. This article will give you some tips for making your city’s Campsite an awesome place to meet new friends and code together.

A couple of weeks ago, I renounced being an ESL teacher and told my story of transitioning to a career in Full Stack Web Development. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and it was reassuring to meet other people in the same boat as me.

Ahoy, mateys!

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Free Code Camp Busan, November 2015

I attribute a lot of my success and rapid improvement to the other aspiring coders with whom I have surrounded myself. I primarily study alone using the content from the open-source community at Free Code Camp, and it is my fellow “campers” that have been the most supportive.

Even Quincy Larson — who started Free Code Camp — took the time out of his busy day to give props and supportive messages!

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Still has time to write personal messages. Very supportive community!

At Free Code Camp, you can chat with other learners on the various Gitter chat rooms, but it is strongly encouraged that you join or start a local campsite in your town or city. From there, you can meet other coders in real life in order to pair code and learn from each other. I am currently wrapping up my final teaching contract in Busan, South Korea, and when I found out that the nearest campsite was three hours away in Seoul, I knew that I had to start my own group.

Like most groups, FCC Busan started off really small and relied mostly on Facebook to get the word out. But only three months later, we have over 100 members on Facebook, and our meetups regularly have around 20 aspiring coders… and that number is getting bigger every time we meet!

And that brings us to the topic of this post. Here is a list of my growth hacking tricks and tips that will double or even triple the numbers of people who go to your meetups. So without further ado, let’s jump in.

Share a Compelling Reason

Simple Facebook announcements promoting your meetups are good enough to get started, but you should also dust off your marketing skills and explain (or better yet demonstrate) why learning to code is a valuable skill. The reasons to start learning are very obvious to people like you and me, but others have to be reminded of the opportunities and benefits of knowing a programming language.

For me, one of the most compelling reasons to pick up coding was starting a new career with a much bigger paycheck. I loved being a teacher for the last seven years, but I simply don’t have enough income to feel safe and secure anymore. Having a brighter future without having to decide between saving for retirement or paying the rent is a very compelling reason to learn coding!

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Share compelling reasons to start coding.

South Korea has a lot of young and over-educated millennials who worry about the future and just feel… stuck! The Koreans are facing a very competitive and bleak job market, much like their English-speaking counterparts who came to Korea to get jobs as teachers.

So my marketing angle to recruit more people is learning a programming language = better job = better future. And it works! Make a list of compelling reasons to learn coding, and find out which reasons resonate with the people in your community.

Figure Out Your Onboarding Process

If you have refined your Facebook posts and included a compelling message in the announcements, then more people will join your local group’s Facebook page. But how can you convince them to regularly go to the meetups and become JavaScript fanatics?

You have to make an excellent first impression by initiating your onboarding process.

For every new member who joins the FCC Busan group page on Facebook, I always write a personalized welcome message and tell them exactly what to do in order to get started. To make that even easier, I created a Google Slide presentation that explains what Free Code Camp is and also a screencast that goes over the FCC website and how to use it.

To see what that might look like, take a look at mine:

Welcome to the group, Mason! Why are you interested in coding? Whatever the reason is, I’m sure you’ll love it here!

To get started, I recommend that you create a free account at www.freecodecamp.com. This Google slide presentation will tell you the basics about our group.

And this video will go into more detail about using FCC:

freeCodeCampBusan() Welcome!
drive.google.com

Please let me know if you have any questions, and Happy Coding!

Hit the Streets

Think about how we used to organize clubs and meetups before the days of Facebook. People used to:

  • post flyers in coffee shops, universities, and libraries
  • use word of mouth and personally invite friends and acquaintances
  • have information booths at conventions, farmers markets, and other special events

These methods still work today, and they’re just as successful if not better than Facebook announcements. Busan has a lot of Facebook groups for expats, and it can be difficult to be heard from the crowd of the hundreds of other announcements that are posted daily. So try to hit the streets once in a while and never underestimate the value of real human connections that you make outside of Facebook.

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Alex is promoting FCC Busan at the Foreign Culture Market in Gwangon

Location, Location, Location

If you want campers to keep coming back to the meetups, then the location has to be stellar! FCC Busan struggled with this problem in its early days, but we have finally found our home at the Content Korea Lab, which is a government-funded organization that provides facilities and space for citizens and residents who want to produce digital and cultural products. It’s free for anyone to use (although private meeting rooms require a reservation), has WiFi, super cheap espresso shots (less than a dollar a shot), and the so-called Media Room has several bean-bag chairs!

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FCC Busan’s new home at the Korea Content Lab

The FCC campers were sold, and everyone instantly fell in love with the place. We have met there twice so far, and each time we had over 20 people in attendance, many of whom stay for the entire four hours.

Your local area may not have these facilities, but the location of your meetups is an important consideration. Coffee shops are fine if you’re only meeting in small groups for a couple of hours, but if you want to grow, you will need to find something more spacious and comfortable.

Please All, Please None

If you are one of Free Code Camp’s local leaders, then my hat’s off to you! It means you have taken your coding seriously, and you want to include as many people in your journey as possible.

Some of these people are going to give you comments and feedback about how you should run the meetups. Most of them mean well and think they’re helping out by giving you suggestions for future meetups. Open up your unbiased ears and listen to your fellow campers because they will have some very good ideas. But as you know, the old adage goes, “Please all, and you please none.”

I hope this advice makes your local Free Code Camp chapter bigger and bigger, but with growth comes growing pains. You won’t be able to make everybody happy, and sometimes a decision you’ve made will upset somebody quite a bit. The best you can do is cast a wide net and make as many people happy as possible.

Your Turn

Are you a local leader of an Free Code Camp campsite? Tell me where you’re from and how you run the meetups in the comments.