RFC: Grow ZATech

[sixhobbits]

We have a decent and steady stream of signups, but a lot of people who could benefit from ZATech still don't know that it exists. We could do any or all of the following to help grow the community

• Create channels for SA's bigger universities and bootcamps and ask representatives from those to advertise to their students
• Create some more subpages on zatech.co.za that would rank better when people search for things like 'south africa tech community' etc
• Hold some in-person events or meetups where we tell people about ZATech
• Do some online hackathons, courses, mentoring events, etc - maybe with prize money, that current members would share with potential new members

What else? Any input on the above ideas?

[JohnRoux]

Just to clarify, is this specifically to increase the amount of Daily/Monthly signups, or is it also about retention of our userbase?

Currently we only have around 6% of our membership being active (weekly)

It might be worth looking at splitting this one into two parts: Growth & Retention.

I think both are worth putting energy into, but if we continue to have growth without putting efforts into our retention of those users, I fear we might not end up actually growing the active membership

Just to touch on your suggestions for growth, I think some better SEO would do some good work.
I think ZATech is already quite known in most of the meetup type groups, but universities and bootcamps are a good target point

[sixhobbits]

good point - most likely we'll end up making a bunch of smaller issues in relevant places once we've gotten input and decided what to do (ZATech site, ZATech code of conduct, etc) so most retention stuff can probably be covered under #1 for now, but maybe 'retain users' or something broader would have been a clearer name for that issue.

[dylanbr]

Invites

I feel that the current invite system causes friction on new signups. Not everyone is going to jump through hoops from a website to email and then to Slack, giving away a certain amount of private information along the way. I have had a few people I've suggested join, and they just felt it was too much effort.

I do understand why this was implemented, but maybe there is some other, better way of approaching this? Preferably fully automated so nobody is waiting around to get in.

Eg. Existing users can request invite codes somehow, but are then responsible for those using them? No idea if this can be tracked / automated / etc.

Introductions

We see people saying hello on #introductions all the time, and then seemingly never hear from them again. In some cases it's evident that they just don't know how to use Slack, and I've seen some cases where they'll try to continue chatting in #introductions.

A link to a video, even if it's not specific to Zatech, would be helpful here to ensure that users are able to take the next step of joining the larger community. This should cover finding channels to join, threads, etc.

I don't know what the current onboarding process looks like, so excuse me here if there is already something like this in place, and people are just ignoring it 😅

[sixhobbits]

Totally agree with the second point - there is a video on the home page that I think covers some of that, but I haven't watched it tbh because I hate all video and it probably needs a refresh. It's not currently shared again after people join.

First point - definitely a tradeoff, but I think having a bit of 'stick' here is a net positive tbh - I know some people want to be fully anonymous, but it makes it too hard to decide who would be a valuable member, and would make it easy for the few people we ban to just rejoin under a different anonymous persona.

[sixhobbits]

Another thing I'd like to do is make a formal distinction between "ZATech" (the brand/org) and "ZATech Slack" (the slack group for that organization).

At the moment people think of ZATech as being a Slack group, which makes it trickier to have e.g. sponsorships, in person events, meetups, and other stuff outside of Slack.

Maybe a subtle and not important distinction but figured it is worth dumping here for now.

[sixhobbits]

Not much progress on this one. We created some university channels, but they aren't very active. None of the channels we reached out to were interested in holding in-person meetups.