Starting a Meetup group can help boost interest in your organization. For example, if someone visits the Meetup site and searches for volunteer opportunities in your area, they may find your group and directly contact you to express their interest.
You can also organize events for your current volunteers. The point of these events is to create ways for your volunteers to come together on a regular basis, and to recruit additional volunteers. For example, one strategy used by some mentoring groups is to create a “sports buddies” event. These events are good bonding sessions for mentors and mentees, but they can also draw the attention of new potential male mentors. Recruiting male mentors is a common challenge, but if a male goes to Meetup.com and searches “sports,” “mentoring,” or “youth,” he may find the group and become interested.
A person can request to join a group by providing his/her name and email address. Meetup.com offers privacy controls so that, if you set your group to “private,” viewers of the group page (who are not members) cannot see who your members are or when/where they are meeting. You can designate it so only members can access this information. This is important, for example, if you’re working with youth and would want to screen adults before they show up at an event.