How to find a venue for a club to meet in

My friend Josh is moving to Boston soon (😭) and is looking for a venue to host a meetup group. He asked for advice, and this is what I sent him!

How do you find places?

In kind-of descending order of potential success:

• Affiliations I already had. This has been: oh, I currently or used to work at / go to school at an institution, so I can get a room. Or: my friend's partner works at a restaurant and she talked to the owner and he said he was cool with a bunch of folks stopping by one evening.
• Reaching out to others. This is like: I was mutuals with someone, I dropped them a cold DM. Or: knowing another organizer and asking them about the venue they use.
• Public spaces like libraries. Huge success in one city, did not work out in another.
• Cold-emailing places that have a history of hosting meetups. "Hey I see this club meets here, I'm starting this other club…"
• Cold-emailing places that are large enough. This is basically one of those "100 nos before a yes" situations, but it has worked out for me in the past!

What did you look for (positive or negative) in a place?

• Most places that are dedicated venue places are going to be obscenely expensive. It's probably worth still reaching out, but they're more pricing for organizations that can pay the big bucks. Still, sometimes you might get lucky if you're like "wait hold on we're a community organization and we have like five dollars" — they might have a steep discount, or be able to point you in the right direction.
• A history of hosting similar meetups is very good: that means you'll be on the same page, and that there will be fewer surprises on both sides.
• If they serve food and beverages, beware — if half the people who show up don't order anything, this can quickly sour your relationship with the place.
• Location is pretty important — lowering the barrier to entry if you want to convince people to come out after work can be a huge win.
• The harder it is to get into the building, the more time it's going to take day-of to field questions from people who are like "help I'm locked out"

Other general advice

• In my experience: people who run venues love cold emails. You kind of have to be gregarious to work in that industry, you know? So you're never bothering anyone by using a connection that they've put out into the world.
• Even if it doesn't work out now, it might work out in the future — just knowing what one venue offers could be really beneficial, because you might end up passing that information on to someone else in the future, etc.
• Don't panic :-)