A beginner's guide to creating a group on Geneva for you and your people.

Making friends is hard. Especially when you move to a new city or start a new job! Over the last year or so, we’ve seen so many group chats pop up in cities all over the world dedicated to meeting new people or around activities to do in your area. In this post, we’ll run through how to set up your very own group chat for IRL hang outs in your city on Geneva.

Create a group

First things first—you’ve got to make a new group on Geneva! If you’re new to Geneva, WELCOME 🥳 Geneva is a space for your people to talk, hang out, and plan.

Groups on Geneva can have different levels of privacy. Your group can be invite-only or open to the public. By setting your group to private, you’re not discoverable or searchable within the Discovery section of the app, and are invite-only via an invite link. Anyone who clicks on your group’s invite link can get to your ‘front door’, but they’ll have to request access to actually join and see any content within the group. This setting — combined with a Question Gate if you want to add one — will allow you to share your home’s invite link publicly on social channels, while still ensuring you have control over who actually comes in.

Add rooms and categories

Once you’ve made your group, you can add some rooms for different topics or uses. Every group is different, but for inspo, here are some rooms that we’ve seen work really well in existing homes…

• Intros 👋 - A chat room where new members of the group can introduce themselves
• Announcements 📣 - A forum room where you can share important updates. You can even make this room “read only” for most members if you need to keep things tidy
• General Chat 💬 - A chat room for everyday conversation and random stuff
• Recs ✅ - A chat room where people can share their fav spots in the city — from restaurants to thrift spots and beyond
• Meetups 🎉 - A chat room for planning irl hangouts, where everyone feels empowered to initiate a hang
• Events 🗓️ - A forum room for planned events with the group, with room for organized event details and comments
• Photo dump 📸 - A place to share photos from meetups or events
• Housing 🏡 - A chat room for finding houses or apartments (if this is a hot topic for your group, you could also make a dedicated forum room for people to find roommates!)
• Marketplace 💸 - A chat room where people can buy, sell, or trade all sorts of stuff
• Ideas & Suggestions 🗳️ - A chat room for people to share ideas on how to evolve or improve the group. This can be super useful if it’s an especially large and diverse group

You might also want to have some “Opt-In” rooms for specific interests and hobbies: things like Going Out, DIY, Concerts, Walking/Working Out Buddies, Cafe Hang Outs, or whatever else makes sense for your group! Making a room “Opt-In” means that not everyone in the home is automatically put into it, but anyone can find it by pressing the + Join more rooms button at the bottom of the rooms list. As your community grows, you might also consider adding “Opt-In” rooms for specific neighborhoods or age groups too!

One other tip: you can reorder the rooms in your home so the most important stuff is at the top and organize the rooms into categories so everything’s really easy to find.

As you’re setting things up, remember: nothing’s set in stone and you can always add or change things later — so have fun with it and make it your own!

Invite your people in

You know how when you have a party irl, your besties come over like an hour before it officially starts to help get set up or get ready? The same kind of thing works when starting an online community or big group chat.

Once you’ve made your home, consider sending personal invites to a few people and take a day or so to get things going. This could be your besties, your favorite online collaborators, your most engaged followers, or whoever brings the best vibes.

When it’s time to open the doors to the group, there are all sorts of ways to spread the word. One approach that we’ve seen work really well is adding your home invite link to your social bio(s) and creating a tiktok (and/or IG post, tweet, or whatever social channels you use most) explaining what the group is and how to join it. This one by Hayley Trejo in Nashville and this one by Sammy Pilkington in Dallas are both great inspo!

You can also submit your home to Discovery to be searchable in the app!

Host an IRL meetup

The best local groups we’ve seen on Geneva use online sharing and planning to facilitate fun offline meetups and hangouts. So once you’ve got a bunch of people in your home, suggest a plan for something to do together irl! What form this first takes will obviously depend on what the group likes to do, but happy hours, park hangs, hikes, and dinners are all great jumping off points.

One hot tip to help you plan: use polls to figure out the idea and/or date that works for the most people, then create an event invite to share the final details and gather RSVPs.

Keep the party going

Once things are up and running, it’s time to ride the wave! Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Get feedback 🗳️ - as much as you can, build your group with the members, not for them. Running quick polls, asking questions, delegating and checking in with folks individually are all great ways to do this. Hopefully people will be proactively sharing thoughts in a Suggestions-style room too!
• Turn members into leaders 🤝 - If people are hyped and involved, don’t be afraid of giving them more power in the group to moderate or lead! This could be anything from asking them to plan an event to moderating and making sure everyone feels safe and welcome.
• Encourage everyone to host events 🗓️ - the more the merrier! This way, it’s not all reliant on you to start the conversation.
• Be patient & stick with it 😇 - great communities always take a little bit of time to build so if it’s a little quiet at first, ask some questions, try some new rooms, and just be down to experiment!

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So that’s it!

If you have any questions or just want to chat about your group, feel free to join the Geneva “Homeowners Home”, DM us on tiktok and IG, or email [email protected]!