Look for Dark Matter, or Focus on the Light?

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Matt Lombard is revisiting the age-old question of how to find "disconnected users".  It’s great that Matt is asking the question again, but I suspect he already knew what the answers would be.  Matt brought up the same question last July in a private User Group Leader forum.  The comments then and now (paraphrased below) are strikingly similar:

Then
"I think there are some that will not reach out no matter what you put in front of them."
Now
"Another thing to think about with the other 90% is that some of them don’t want to be found."

Then
"Even though we hosted a SolidWorks User Group meeting here at <company>, I could not get a couple of our engineers to attend."
Now
"I’ve tried to get to people by forwarding helpful resources. Out of those couple dozens times, I don’t think anybody actually went to the blog or forum and starting looking for the info themselves."

I don’t know if there’s a perfect answer to the question. I do know that we need to keep trying. There are thousands of passionate SolidWorks users out there that will continue to spread the word, hundreds of user group leaders that strive to reach out to new members, and SolidWorks bloggers that will keep writing and sharing thier insight and knowledge for the benefit of all.  It might take time, but we’ll eventually reach everyone that wants to be reached.

The figures and percentages that Matt cites make things look pretty bleak, but if we take a look at what’s happened in the SolidWorks Community over the years, it paints a pretty good picture.

There are 139 SolidWorks User Groups worldwide.  That’s up from 66 just 4-1/2 years ago, an astonishing growth rate in my opinion.  SWUGN is on track to once again break overall attendance figures for the 5th year in a row.

Devon Sowell recently posted about the 50,000th member of the SolidWorks Discussion forums.  That was on June 30th of this year.  Since then, the number of registered members has grown to 51,273 – a rate of nearly 40 new registrants per day.

You’ll find 17 SolidWorks user blogs listed on the SWUGN website (and probably many more that aren’t listed).  That’s up from 0 just a couple of years ago.  I still get a lot of blank stares at user group meetings when I ask who’s reading the blogs, but the number of positive responses is growing.

Should we continue to search for the "Dark Matter?"  Absolutely!  But let’s not forget about those SolidWorks users that are already enjoying the benefit of belonging to user groups, discussion forums, or reading and learning from the bloggers.  We didn’t really need to find these types of people, they would have found us. 

Let’s keep making them glad they did.

Richard Doyle

Richard Doyle

My official title is Senior User Advocacy & SolidWorks User Groups - but most people just call me "The User Group Guy". I've been a SolidWorks user since 1997, and was one of the founding members of the SWUGN Committee. Since starting the Central Texas SolidWorks User Group in 1999, my career path has led me to DS SolidWorks and a dream job supporting the SolidWorks User Group Network worldwide.
Richard Doyle

@https://twitter.com/swugn

Richard Doyle