High Peak Liberal Democrats

Here are my ten top tips to make an AGM (or indeed pretty much any local party meeting or event) a success. Individually, each of them are pretty straight-forward but the collective impact can make a huge different to how well a local party does at communicating and involving people.

1. Invite a guest speaker: you don't have to be a large local party with a big name speaker; some of the best AGM speeches I've heard have been at very small local parties, hearing from a near-by Liberal Democrat council group leader.
2. Don't just invite current members: for the formal business, it is important to know who is a paid-up current member, but if you've got a speaker then it makes sense to invite a wider group of people - including lapsed members and helpers who have never joined the party. Why exclude them from an interesting talk?
3. Invite those from neighbouring areas you work with: inviting people from neighbouring local parties or councillors from elsewhere in the same council area to an AGM is a good way of helping smooth and improve local links.
4. Have a decent sign-in sheet: a group of people in a room is a prime opportunity to make sure the local party has their full contact details - phone, email and mobile. So why pass up on it by not asking?
5. Make sure new people are welcomed: obvious, but not always done. One method that works well for many local parties is to have one person volunteer to make sure they personally talk to every new person who turns up and to introduce them to others.
6. Work on the opening speech: the first few minutes can really set the tone - welcoming and interesting or boring and lapsing into jargon? It's not the most important speech in the calendar by any means, but some opening remarks at AGMs I've seen really could have done with 30 minutes of extra thought and preparation the day before.
7. Put effort into publicising the AGM's existence: you're not forced only to advertise the AGM through one posted mailing that simply lists the agenda items. Too many AGM mailings fail to answer the question, "why might this event be of interest to me?" Yes, the mailing has to include the formal business information, but it doesn't have to be presented in a boring, dry manner. And don't forget the scope for using email, Facebook, Flock Together and other online tools to publicise and to provide last minute reminders.
8. Publicise future events: if you've got a group of people into a room once, now's the time to let them know when else they may wish to congregate in future.
9. Given people some campaigning to go away with: whether it's leaflets, petition sheets or other forms of campaigning, don't forget that we're not just a debating society.
10. Follow-up afterwards: email in particular means it now is very easy to let people have follow-up information after an AGM. You don't need to wait a year until people can see the notes of what was decided, the text of the speech of your guest speaker or whatever.

Got any other top tips? Do share them in the comments thread.