| Wow, I'm very impressed with this first contribution to the AUGD. You guys are fast!
Mathieu Marano here of Final Cut Montreal, the Montreal Final Cut User Group. The group was created 7 years ago by Marc-Andre Ferguson, a Final Cut Certified trainer, who wanted to create a place where his students could exchange tips and advices. For the first year Final Cut MTL was only a forum. The next year he started to work on meetings and conferences. At the end of the second year he asked three of it's most active members to help him with the organization. That is when the FinalCut MTL CA was created, we them registered as a non-profit organization and open a bank account for the group.
Soon after we added a blog and a mailing list to the blog. It became very popular because at the time Final Cut MTL was the only French source of information on Final Cut Pro. With that, we started to work on more regular meeting schedule. We now have 8 meetings a month. Most of them gather from 60 to 100 members but our postNAB event welcomes 300 persons.
Our meeting are all available on iTunes a couple of weeks after the event. We now have more than 125 podcasts online on iTunes plus some tutorials on another feeds. Our members list is still growing after 2400 subscriptions. We often have speakers coming for various company (AJA, Matrox, G-Technology) who come to present their latest video/mac related products. We also have members who come to show us their projects.
We work with local our local Mac reseller to get MacPros and hardware for our meetings. Most of them are held in the studio of a film school who are more than please than we bring 80 potential students every meetings.
We used to charge 5$ at the door but since we usually have more people than we have chairs we just pushed than to 10$ a seat. It helps pay for the website hosting, for the lunch during the meeting setups, parking for the guest speakers et other day to day expenses.
For the first time this years we have a Platinum Sponsor. After 3 years of collaboration with AJA they offered some money to help us to work on bigger events. This helped us to get other sponsors. We also worked on a flyer presenting the user group that we handed out to potential sponsors when we went to the NAB Show in Las Vegas in April. (I could post a PDF if you want to use it as reference)
Final Cut MTL is also a member of fcpugnet.org, the network of the Final Cut user groups.
Well that's about it. I hope to meet you soon...somehow
Sorry for the bad English, I'm a French speaking Canadian in a French speaking user group. Mathieu Marano / Administrateur / Final Cut MTL |