Starting your own lesbian or LGBT group

and getting an online presence

If you can't find a lesbian or LGBT group in your local area, or for your favourite hobby or sport, then why not start your own? As well as a "scene-type" group for meeting up in a gay bar or nightclub, there are many other possibilities to allow gay women to socialise and make new friends. A few ideas include a lesbian dining group meeting monthly in different restaurants, a hobby group such as a book club, film club, board games or museum trips, a sports club or a support group. Your group could be locally based, national, or include a bit of both, e.g. Cameraderie is a lesbian photography group that originated in Dundee area, and its activies include both local photography trips and online events (e.g. a themed monthly photo competition). This allows women to take part online from any part of the country, and the membership is now spreading throughout the whole of Scotland.

Once you've decided on what type of group you want and chosen a name, the next stage is attracting members to your group. Getting some friends involved is a good first step. However, after the initial enthusiasm, you may need a bit of perseverance to keep things going on the longer term. Even if you don't start off with large numbers, simply having yourself and a couple of friends committed to an activity once a month is enough to keep the group active while you seek out new members. When I lived in England for a few years, I used to run a lesbian dining group, which started with less than a handful of people at each monthly dinner. After only a few months of regular events and spreading the word via friends and the internet, we typically had around a dozen women at most dinners and an email list of over 100. I think the key to making it work was to make sure new people were made to feel welcome and accepted - if a new person turns up and is generally ignored by the rest of the group, it is almost certain they won't be back a second time. It's often easier for new people to feel welcomed and included in an activity situation, rather than just a pub or nightclub meet. Doing and talking about the activity gives an easy conversation option, and can eliminate awkwardness. If your meetings are pub based, you could do things like team-based pub quizzes and pool tournaments or meeting for dinner beforehand from time to time, to provide a focus for people who don’t know each other to interact.

Consistency can also help. Meeting at the same time every month lets people know what to expect, and they can plan ahead to allow them to attend. Using a single venue as a regular meeting place could be a good thing, as long as your members actually like the venue. You could have occasional meet-ups elsewhere as well, to add variety. If you combine a welcoming atmosphere and consistent meetings with good publicity, then your group is set for success, even if it initially takes some time to build up membership numbers. In some areas of Scotland, there are currently very few gay groups, but a budding new group can start simply by regularly connecting up with even just two or three other like-minded people, arranging some publicity and allowing time for growth. If preferred (especially in less liberal parts of the country), you can keep things more discrete by using a pseudonym and separate email address to filter new member enquiries, and only distributing details of meeting place and time to signed up members.

Publicity is a topic all of its own. If you happen to have website design skills, then you're off to a good start. But even if you’re not technically skilled, there are numerous free “site builders” that allow you to publish a website with no knowledge of computer code. One critical thing to decide is whether or not you want your own customised web address, known as a domain name (e.g. www.my-new-group.com). Not only does a customised domain name make your website look more professional, it also means that if you decide to change your website hosting company, you can take your domain name with you to the new host, and all the links to your site that other groups have set up will remain valid. It costs only around £5 to £10 a year for a domain name registration. Depending on your package, there may be monthly hosting fees to pay as well, but I’ve seen an increasing number of free hosting deals with a good range of features, where you have the option of using your own (paid for) domain name. Some packages allow you to run emails lists in addition to your website, for keeping members updated on events, although this is less likely on the free packages. If you don’t have access to email lists in your website package, you could use a system such as Yahoo Groups for email messages, or simply create a list in your own email address book, and use the “Bcc” mailing option (“blind carbon copy”) which hides email details from the other recipients, to keep everyone’s email address private.

If you don’t feel ready to tackle a domain name registration, then many website hosting companies will provide a web address for you, e.g. the Edinburgh Rubyfruits group uses Webs.com hosting, and has the domain name “rubyfruitsedinburgh.webs.com”. This sort of arrangement is usually completely free, but you may have to carry advertising on your website. Sometimes the "site builders" provided with this type of web hosting are not as intuitive to use as the hosting company suggests. They might be fine for a basic site, but if you want to do anything fancier, it may take some frustration and fiddling around to get something you're happy with. If you're finding it difficult to work with the "site builder", you can choose to set up the website with very little maintenance requirements, by including basic information and contact details, but using other means (e.g. an email list) for notifying members of upcoming events.

Once your website is live, then ask as many as possible of the relevant LGBT listings sites to include a link. In addition to the Lesbian Scotland website, some examples are Scotsgay Magazine and the National LGBT Forum site.

Instead of a website, another option that is becoming very common is simply to set up a Facebook group. This can be a very successful approach, although you might be surprised at how many people are not on Facebook, and don’t want to join it, e.g. due to privacy concerns. A Facebook group can be one of three types – an open group, a closed group or a secret group. Open groups are public and allow anyone to join the group without approval. Closed groups allow anyone to request membership, but a group administrator needs to approve the request. Within a closed group, members postings are not visible to the general public, but the group itself is viewable, including the "about" page, which gives a list of all group members. This may be an issue for some people, who are not "out" about their sexuality, and it may discourage them from joining the group.

The third Facebook option is a secret group. A secret group is hidden to everyone except existing members. If you're not a group member and you try searching for the group or clicking on a link to the group, you'll be greeted with a blank page. Facebook won't even tell you whether the group exists or not. There is no way to tell who is a member of the secret group or to view any group activity, unless you're a member yourself. This is excellent for privacy, but very bad for attracting new members. A new member has to both be a Facebook friend of a member of the group, and be invited to join by that member. So, it's a double-whammy for potential new recruits - firstly, they won't even know the group exists, and secondly, even if someone tells them it exists, they need to be Facebook friends with the right people before they can receive an invite to join. One way to reduce this problem is to use a Facebook community page for advertising the group, while keeping the group itself secret. This approach is taken by Camp Girls UK, a group for gay women who enjoy camping trips. You message them via their Facebook community page, so that someone in their group can send you a friend request, which you need to accept before she is able to add you to the group. It's a workable way of achieving both privacy and publicity, and I'd recommend this approach if you want to solely use Facebook for your group’s internet presence.

As an alternative to a Facebook community page, Lesbian Scotland Website can set up a group information page for you, which provides some public information about your group and allows potential new members to fill in a simple web form asking to join the group or requesting more details. The completed form will be automatically forwarded to an email address of your choice, and you can respond as you wish. We've already done this for the Fife Inbetweeners, who have a secret Facebook group, but were previously invisible on the internet to anyone who was not already a member. If you're interested in this free-of-charge opportunity for an “information page” (intended for groups that don't already have a public Facebook page or website), then please use the ”contact us” form, and let us know more about your group. Although you could simply publish an email address on various listings websites to attract new members, this can attract a lot of spam, and the email address may eventually become unusable due to the genuine messages being lost in a sea of junk mail. By using a web form to collect enquiry details, this problem is largely avoided.

Yet another option, if you want to stay clear of Facebook, is Meetup.com. Meetup.com, if properly configured, is good for privacy and publicity because each Meetup group's homepage is visible to the public, but the members names and event details can be hidden from non-members of that group. Any member can post events, share photos and privately message other people within the group (as long as the group owner has enabled these settings). The group will be easily found by anyone who is already a member of other Meetup.com groups. An example of a group using Meetup.com is Glasgow Lesbian Scene, a lesbian social group running a wide variety of activities in Glasgow area. The downside of Meetup.com is the fairly high monthly fees, although for a large group, this can easily be covered by requesting a small annual sum from each member. Meetup.com provides a Paypal/Credit card facility to allow group members to pay a contribution online towards the running costs. Collecting donations or a small fee at group meetings is an alternative way of covering Meetup group costs.

In summary, there is no perfect answer to the issue of how best to set up a web presence for your group. It really depends on your technical skills, your views on privacy, how many people are involved, and whether cost is an issue for you. Each option has its own benefits and limitations. Whatever you choose, let us know about your new group, and we'll add a link to the Lesbian Scotland website, to help people find you.