Jan-Feb 2024 Community Update

January and February thus far have been quite busy and jam packed with events and acivities.

Including:

• Committee Meeting in January - some details we can share.
• Games Night x2
• Bubu as usual
• A number of cinema nights in the works

The committee got together in January to discuss future plans for the group in 2024 and beyond.

Community Poll Results

One of the topics discussed was the results from our 2023 poll where we asked you the community what events you preferred. Below is a summary of the results.

This reinforces something we have been aware of for some time, that clubbing and party events, as popular as they may be, are not what the community are solely looking for.

Our community is made up of people from various different backgrounds and may be interested in making friends rather than making drinking buddies.

With this message received loud and clear, we do plan to try and run more Tour, Cinema and Escape room type events, while still maintaining our regular events such as Bubu and the occasional mid-month club night.

Monthly Coffee Meetups

Our monthly coffee meetups have been going down a treat - mostly. Unfortunately our last one was ruined by industrial action which then led to all the coffee shops in Belfast closing early. So this event became an impromptu night out to Maverick. Rest assured, we plan to keep running these coffee events and hopefully we won't have to deal with coffee shops kicking us out again.

The current plan is to run the coffee event on the third Thursday of each month. Keep an eye out on our events page or in discord for the next event.

Future Event Ideas

Here are some of the events we are considering running.

The above events are probably what we would refer to as business as usual type events. We do have plans in the works for some more extravagant events.

The Great British Bear Bash 2024

How does everyone feel about a trip to Manchester for the weekend?

Starting from 2nd of May, the event will run until the 6th of May. If we get enough interest from our members, we may run this as a formal event.

Attendees will be strictly responsible for their own travel and accommodation costs.

Social Media Streamlining

This is where I take a moment to geek out. For those who don't know. We have a presence on a number of social media platforms.

Managing these platforms and sharing event posts and content across all of them can be time consuming. So we have elected to use technology in the form of some bots and AI to power our social media posts.

So far this has been going well. If you see any social media posts that have obvious mistakes in them, feel free to get in touch, as sometimes the BOT does get it wrong.

Whatsapp Community

Not all of our members are familiar with platforms such as Facebook and Discord. If you find it difficult to use those platforms, feel free to get in touch with us and we can invite you to our Whatsapp chat group.

While our Whatsapp group is not connected directly to our event calendar, we will post about events there for visibility.

It is recommended however that discord or our website be used as the point of truth when it comes to our event roster.

2 Royal Avenue - Community Space

As you may have saw above, the committee met in the 2 Royal Avenue Community space. It was our first time using it and we found it quite a refreshing change of venue.

This could potentially be a future venue for hosting some events. We are open to receiving suggestions from the community for events that would be appropriate for this venue.

This could include dedicated D&D game days at the weekends for those who want to meet up more than once a month for games night or other sorts of events.

We look forward to hearing some suggestions from the community.