Now that you have a location for the group, you need to think of an online area for moms to meet plus a place to share information about your group and upcoming events. What we used that works well is Facebook. You can easily create a Facebook Group to share information with the other members. Facebook is a great (and free!) option for posting event information. I set our Facebook Group as a “closed” group meaning that people have to request to join the group and I’d have to approve them as members before they can see the wall, events, etc. A few reasons to set this as a closed group: (1) You’ll want to keep your Facebook wall free of advertising and spam. With a closed group, you can monitor who is a member and delete anyone that joins only to advertise their products. (2) You can post pictures of your events with only your members having access to view these. (3) You can monitor how many moms you have in the group and start a wait list after you’ve reached your member limit.
As new members join the group, send them a message through Facebook welcoming them to the group, directing them to the event posting page so that they can see what is coming up and can RSVP to the events. Be sure to direct them to the “group rules” document (which you can save in the documents section of your Facebook group).
The Event feature of Facebook is great for letting the members know what events are coming up and allowing them to RSVP if they will be attending or not.
The Facebook Wall is also great for allowing the moms to chat with the group, ask questions they may have, etc. Be sure not to allow a lot of advertising on the wall or you could find the wall filled with advertisements and spam which could be frustrating for some of the moms in your group.
If you are looking for an option other than Facebook, you could simply use your email to communicate with members of the group. You could use a free evite website (simply type in “free evite” into Google – there are a lot of options; one I’ve used in the past is www.evite.com). You could also create a group using www.meetup.com.
In the next section I’ll discuss how to recruit members.
This post is part of a series dedicated to Starting a Moms Group. To read the series from the beginning, please click here.
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