Good News/Bad News

Brrism was launched in August 2009 at the Pervasive Media Studio and we’ve since met every month, apart from December when we took a much needed break for mince pies. The PM Studio is a really nice venue in the centre of town, with wifi and overhead projector and is a nice size – it can comfortably hold 30 people but any more than that and it gets a little cramped.

Engineering the Brrism meetings so we hit that magic 30 figure has been a never ending struggle and the EventBrite event booking service has been a big help. Over the months I’ve hit on the strategy of releasing 40 places with the expectation that people will cancel at the last minute. I’ve also taken to releasing the tickets in two batches of 20, the first of which I publicise via Twitter, the second via email.

Over the months, Brrism has gained a reputation as a being a well organised, informative and fun event, and hitting the “magic 30” is no longer about drumming up demand but more about controlling numbers. For example, last week the 20 twitter-publicised tickets went in the space of 10 hours and the 20 email tickets in the space of 2. After the tickets go, I still get emails from people asking to be put on the wait list. (But, due to the fact that I oversubscribe the event, there isn't a wait list.)

So, in the immortal words of Roy Scheider "we're gonna need a bigger boat".

So that's the good news. The bad news is that the Pervasive Media Studio are getting busier and I’ve just been told that, irrespective of the size of the boat, we need to find another one. So, sad as it sounds, we’re hunting for another venue.

This is what we need:

• A regular venue (Brrism needs a permanent home)
• Capacity - about 40-50
• Location - city centre preferred
• Facilities - Wi-fi and overhead projector.
• Price - free or close to free
• Other - OK with food/drink being consumed on the premises

Does anyone have any suggestions? Please comment on this blog or message Brrism on twitter.

Given that we’re looking for free/close to free its worth pointing out what the venue could get out of this:

• Attract a new audience - a group of bright, technically literate people will walk through the doors of your venue each month
• To get to sponsor Bristol's burgeoning social media community for little cost
• To be able to put social media onto your organisation’s agenda
• To be able to engineer knowledge transfer between your organisation and Bristol’s social media specialists.

Given that you’ll be assured of a guaranteed place at the monthly meetings you might prefer to look on it as a debenture…

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Update: Thursday 13th May

Thanks to everyone whose helped with getting the message out there about our need to find a new venue. I've got a couple of leads, one of which being Spike Island which I am following up on tomorrow and I'll keep you posted on progress. Some of you have asked about the upcoming Brrism meeting and I'm happy to say that that's going to be at the PMStudio as normal. We've also got a few dates already booked with the PMStudio so we won't be needing to move for a month or two.

Retweeting thanks to:

jodereza, Blokesbags, Diggerbitdeeper, SarahEBale, SevernStudios, jaywilliamsPR, CoWorkingWest, montagecomms, PRBristolblog, bristolbuddies, Fulcrum_CR, EmApocalyptic, niteglow, atkirby, dpoyser, indycube, andrewtf, jamesainsworth, MarketingDonut,