The First Meeting
- Arrive early and be prepared to introduce yourself, your ideas and your aims. Don't forget to stress the potential for promoting cycling.
- Make sure that everyone knows who everyone else is.
- Have a (flexible) agenda ready. You don't want to put off potential supporters by dithering, but give everyone time to discuss the items.
- Present your objectives to the group, and be prepared for debate. Try to get agreement on the group's name, aims and a structure.
- Don't be offended if everyone prefers someone else's ideas.
- Try to involve as well as organise. Give everyone a chance to speak, and try to make sure everyone feels able to contribute.
- Hand out post-it notes so that people can jot down ideas for further thought and stick them on a board for everyone to think about.
- Put feelers out to find out what days times would suit the majority for future meetings, weekday, evenings or weekend, mornings?
- Take names, phone numbers and email addresses.
- Keep minutes, and email them round the group afterwards.
- Don't worry about low turnout - you can't make everyone aware of the group immediately. At this stage you should be aiming for active, committed members - less active members can be gathered later.