Our First CUG: How did it go?

[#1]

What made us decide to start a CUG?

We are a Cyber Security company and there are a number of questions asked daily about the best ways to use the various Atlassian products we have purchased. When attending Atlassian local user groups, we need to be careful about how much internal information we share in a public venue.

When the opportunity arrived to create our own Company User Group (CUG), this felt like the perfect fit! It has given us a space for people to ask for help and share thoughts & ideas freely. And, this can all be done with a reduced worry about sharing internal only information.

What did we do to prepare?

Unfortunately, being our first event we didn’t really know what we were doing. We decided our first event would simply be to introduce the new CUG space (in Confluence) and to have an open Q&A roundtable. We communicated this in Slack a couple of times thinking that it would get more visibility than email.

How did the event go?

Overall, I feel like the event was a miss. We had very few people that showed up to the virtual event. However, we had a number of people that forgot when it was happening and were interested in watching the recording. The small group who attended the event, did allow for a great roundtable discussion, where everyone had an opportunity to speak which likely would have been more challenging in a larger group.

What would we improve on for the next one?

• We need to get a little more aggressive in our “marketing“. We are planning to do this by sending out an calendar invite to a distribution list making it clear the second event is optional so that people don’t feel they “have“ to attend, but they have a calendar invite that will remind them right before the next event starts.
• Secondly, we are going to leverage having an Atlassian speaker. We think that this might be more incentive to encourage people to attend.

I hope this information might be helpful as you start planning your own next event.

[Chris Shernaman]

Hi @Jimmy Seddon congratulations to you and @Bharat Kalia on hosting your first Company User Group meeting!  It's fantastic to see your team at Arctic Wolf creating a space where everyone can discuss and explore the various Atlassian products. I completely understand the challenge of sharing sensitive information in a public setting, especially in the cyber security space, so it's great that you've found a solution with the CUGs.

It's perfectly normal for the first event to feel a bit rocky, but it sounds like you made the best of the situation with the open roundtable. Sometimes, smaller groups can lead to deeper discussions and connections, so it’s great to hear that everyone had a chance to share their thoughts. Plus with the addition of creating your internal CUG space, you'll be able to share any takeaways or recordings with your users who may have missed the meeting.

Your ideas for improvement sound spot on! Sending out calendar invites is a great way to keep everyone in the loop, and having an Atlassian speaker could definitely add some extra excitement and value to the next event.

Thank you for sharing your experiences and insights!