Hundreds of you were kind enough to answer our annual survey to help us improve and better understand who you are, what you like, and what you would prefer to tweak about Network Under 40. As you can imagine, as the Founder, it’s both exciting and painful to read feedback like this, but more than anything, it’s important that you know that we heard you…and that we’re doing something about it!
Here is an overview of the biggest takeaways and themes we saw come out of this survey across all of our cities:
You primarily come to our events to meet new people in your age group in a comfortable environment
We love to hear this because it’s precisely our mission to create monthly events to allow you to do this!
You love the variety of venues we offer and prefer certain areas of town
It’s our continued goal to bring events to fun and interesting in-town venues, many of which are new to the majority of our guests. We recognize that not all locations are ideal for all of you every month, which is why we move them around so hopefully the next one or the following will be convenient to you. Same goes for type of location: bar, museum, gallery, club, restaurant, historic site, etc: we keep these varied so that if you’re not interested in one whatsoever, we’ll have more coming that may be your style. Please also keep in mind that while we strive to keep the venues as an attraction, these simply serve as a backdrop for our core competency: helping you make friends and business connections in an unstuffy, unsalesy, and un-meat-market-y environment.
You’d love more opportunities to connect in smaller settings
With some of our events hitting 600 attendees, we recognize that that’s an intimidating or unenjoyable size for some people. Stay tuned because we’re working on some new opportunities for you to get and stay connected with one another in smaller groups (and during different time frames).
You want to be able to connect more easily before and after events
We’re working to be sure that our emails from our event directors go out to those who attend each event without getting stuck in your SPAM. This is important because they send out the opt-in list of contact info for event attendees in that email so you can keep the conversations flowing. Be on the lookout the day after an event you attend for this info!
More so, we are working to up our technology game to help you easily connect with one another around the events you’re attending.
You want help connecting at the events
While it’s easy and enjoyable for some people to show up to a room full of strangers (I’m one of them), we hear some of you saying that it’s intimidating and you’d like help connecting at events. Our first recommendation is to remember that everyone is at our events to meet people and they are grateful if you strike up a conversation.
That being said, we’re also working on some ways to help you connect more easily when in attendance. Keep an eye to our newsletters and social media for updates on what’s in store!
Thanks again to everyone who participated in our annual survey. We hope you see that we’re taking your feedback to heart and are working to ever-improve Network Under 40 to better serve you in making meaningful social and professional connections!
As promised, we’ve selected one winner from each city’s respondents who gets a year of free entry to their respective events! Congrats to Samantha Barton (Atlanta), Michelle DeChristopher (Baltimore), and Andrea Lowe (DC)!